Research

“Distributional Semantics, Holism, and the Instability of Meaning.” With Nat Hansen, Jumbly Grindrod. Forthcoming in Communicating with AI: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press.

“The Eclectic Reader.” With James English. Journal of Cultural Analytics. August 2025.

“Counting on the Norton Anthology of American Literature.” With Erik Fredner. PMLA. January 2024.

“A Quantitative History of Ordinary Language Philosophy.” With Nat Hansen. Synthese. 15 June 2023.

“The Affordances of Mere Length: Computational Approaches to Short Story Analysis.” With Mark Algee-Hewitt, Anna Mukamal. The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story. Eds. Michael Collins and Gavin Jones. 2023.

“Linguistic Fingerprints on Translation’s Lens.” With Quinn Dombrowski, Yuliya Ilchuk. The Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. 2021.

“Prospects and Affordances for Ellison Studies in Digital Humanities/Digital Humanities in Ellison Studies.” Chapter in Ralph Ellison in Context. Ed. Paul Devlin. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Representing Race and Ethnicity in American Fiction: 1789-1964.” With Mark Algee-Hewitt, Hannah Walser. Cultural Analytics. December 2020.

“A Corpus Study of “Know”: On the Verification of Philosophers’ Frequency Claims about Language.” With Nat Hansen, Kathryn Francis. Episteme. 02 July 2019. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-27.

“Popularity/Prestige.” Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab. October 2018. Here's a link to a PDF.

“Review of The Digital Black Atlantic, eds. Roopika Risam, Kelly Baker Josephs.” African American Review. Volume 57, Number 1, Spring 2024.

“Genre Juggernaut: Measuring “Romance”.” With Angelina Eimannsberger, James English, May Hathaway, & Ashna Yakoob. Public Books. November 2023.

“Review of Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction by Richard Jean So.” African American Review. Volume 56, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 2023.

“The Work of the Audiobook”. With Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath. Los Angeles Review of Books. May 16, 2023.

“The Rise of Must-Read TV: How Your Netflix Habit is Changing Contemporary Fiction.” With Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath. The Atlantic. 16 July 2021.

“On Not Already Knowing. A Review of Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change.” Criticism. Vol. 63, No. 4. Fall 2021.

“Who Cares About Literary Prizes?” With Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath. Public Books. 03 Sept 2019.

“Review of Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music by John Lowney.” African American Review. Vol. 51, No 4. Winter 2018.

Book project

I'm working on a book tentatively titled Genres of Everything. It starts with the paradox of genre: Genre is very difficult to define with analytic precision (We struggle to answer questions like: how many are there? what are they? are there any consistent criteria for sorting things into one genre or another?), yet people seem to have no trouble at all using genre in their everyday lives. I use data about readers and network graph analysis to argue that genre will inevitably emerge from any sufficiently active artistic situation. I then dig into one of our most fascinating generic distinctions, fiction vs. nonfiction, and argue that the difference is one of degree rather than kind. Finally, I look at other kinds of entities that operate sort of like genre, especially sociopolitical categories like race and gender, the metaphysics of which are vexing: Though constructed, they exert a ton of real-world force. I think my model of genre gives us a nice way to think about the ontology of categories that are constructed and could be otherwise, yet still have to be reckoned with as "real" in important ways.

Collaborative research

I'm always working on collaborative DH projects, so this isn't exhaustive. But here are a few highlights.

Reader studies With James English and a lot of undergraduates and grad students (the exact group composition changes over time), I'm exploring how users of Goodreads, The StoryGraph, and other sites navigate genre, literary fiction, review writing, and other components of contemporary literary practice.

Anthologies With Erik Fredner and other collaborators, I've been building a database of authors and works included in literary anthologies, like the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Popular music With Stewart Varner and others. We've been exploring data from Pitchfork and Rate Your Music to try and understand the landscape of popular music genre over the past fifty years or so.