About

I'm a Digital Humanities (DH) researcher focusing on literary studies. My position is Associate Director of Digital Research in the Humanities in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. On the digital side, I specialize in text mining, data visualization, and network graph analysis. As a literary scholar, I focus on American literature, especially from modernism to the present. I also work on the intersection of literature and philosophy, especially language philosophy. Lately, I've been working a lot on critical humanist approaches to artificial intelligence.

A lot of my research fits into these areas:

• Genre, especially literary genres. I ask questions like, what exactly is a genre? How does our current genre system work? How do genres interact with other components of literary production and experience? (E.g., see this paper, which builds a genre system from Goodreads user tags, or this one about the internal complexity of romance as a genre.)
• Literary canons. Which works and authors are canonical? How did the canon get to be the way that it is? What are some different ways of measuring canonicity in different contexts? (See this piece about what gets included in an important American literature anthology, this one about literary prizes, or this one (link opens a PDF) about how popularity and prestige affect canonicity.)
• Word meaning. How can data about the frequency and distribution of words in various corpora help us understand the meanings of particular expressions? How does it affect our understanding of meaning in a more general sense? (See this piece about how people use the word "know", this one about distributional semantics and holistic models of word meaning, or this one about translation and literary style.)
• The contemporary literary field. What configurations of genre and prestige define contemporary literary practice? How have new forms of media and communication interacted with literary experiences and forms? (See this paper about TV adaptations of novels, or this one on audiobooks.)

You can find my work in publications like PMLA, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, The Atlantic, Synthese, Public Books, and various edited volumes (see the "Research" tab for more info). I received my PhD in English from Stanford University in 2017.