In a conversation with our editor, Alix Keener reflects on her career in academic libraries and the digital humanities, and how digital tools are reshaping the landscape of scholarly communication.

In a conversation with our editor, Professor Mark Algee-Hewitt reflects on his career in the digital humanities, the future of the field, and its role at the university.

I have been thinking of this essay as a road map to the ideas and practices of public humanities, a map that would help answer the title question, "why public humanities?" This essay will look at some beginning points for public humanities; work through definitions; talk about the stakes for faculty and students–and the universities and communities in which they work–and consider whether public humanities could be transformative rather than simply translational. No matter how you map public humanities, discussions of collaboration and social justice need to be at the center.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, during December 1941, around 700 Japanese Americans were enrolled at the University of California, and at least thirty were at Stanford University.[1] Within weeks, Japanese American faculty and students at the University of California, Berkeley, and nearby Stanford...

What are the historical and existing efforts for employing digital technologies to explore or generate prosody? From the perspectives of information science and textual analysis, Setsuko Yokoyama works with literary scholars and archivists to facilitate critical dialogues on literary artifacts. One of her research aims is to highlight how digital technologies have informed the epistemologies of prosody. In this essay, she uses Hartman’s Scansion Machine to begin sharing her digital prosody projects and prosody-related visualization methodologies.

Scansion, for generations of American students, has been the dominant method of studying prosody in poetry. How and why did this happen? What if scansion had never become dominant? What alternative methods for understanding poetic prosody have been passed over?

It is not a coincidence that distant reading does not deal well with gender, sexuality, or race. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we arrive potentially at a form of distant reading that is much more inclusive.

Henning Mankell's detective is always uneasy around those alien characters (the typographical kind).

I want to begin with the premise that literature is the data of literary studies. The OED tells us that the term “data,” from classical Latin, refers to “an item of information” and to “related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis or calculation.” “Data” is the plural of “datum,” deriving from the Latin “dare,” which means to give.” Hence, “datum” and “data” refer not only to information but also (and more generally) to “something given or granted; something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning.”

I want to begin by arguing that the current state of affairs with respect to “data” and “literature,” itself a mirror of the entire structure that organizes the cultural relationship between the digital humanities and literary criticism, is bad for proponents on both sides. I mean in the most general possible way, but here I want to focus especially on the antagonism between data-based analysis of literary texts, which has been called “distant reading,” and the more historically traditional reading practice of focusing on small units of meaning, which we call, pretty loosely, “close reading.”