Experimenting with Emerson
This talk will explore the findings of Maurice and Brad's chapter in the forthcoming Oxford volume, New Approaches to Emerson, in which they apply various digital methodologies to Emerson’s complicated corpus. These include several novel findings about Emerson's intellectual influences and geographic commitments that both advance and refute traditional readings of Emerson and his works.
Additionally, the talk will explore this research's unique circumstances of production. The project was completed entirely remotely during the pandemic as a collaboration between a subject specialist and a technical worker with some subject knowledge. Maurice and Brad will discuss the difficulties, opportunities, and lessons learned from this research model that is likely to become more and more common as the field of digital humanities progresses and remote work continues.
The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request from Office Management Intern, Daniela Perez (perezd20 [at] stanford.edu (perezd20[at]stanford[dot]edu)).
About the Presenters:
Maurice Lee is Professor of English at Boston University, where his work focuses on nineteenth-century American literature. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 (Cambridge, 2005), Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century America Literature (Oxford, 2012), and Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (Princeton, 2019). Professor Lee has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, 2009) and received awards from the Melville Society, Poe Studies Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries, as well as fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University.
Brad Rittenhouse is a Research Data Facilitator at Stanford University's Research Computing Center. He has recent or upcoming chapters/articles on "Revolutionary Discourse in English" (Cornell UP), "The Life of a Digital Humanities Lab" (Routledge), and "Structures of Interaction for Creating Dramatic Agency in Epistemic Narratives" (Entertainment Computing). He recently completed an NEH-ODH Fellowship working on Archiviz, an Omeka plug-in that creates knowledge graph interfaces for text collections and is interested in technical collaboration on interesting projects/problems.