Q: You are widely recognized as one of the foremost Twain scholars in the field, and the trajectory of your career is indelibly entangled with Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular. While this expertise is clear in the simultaneous precision and capaciousness of the references...

Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable? Ayesha Hardison addresses these questions through her work on digitizing and making accessible the history of Black writing.

The Rise of Silas Lapham is a somewhat underexamined work among scholars of collecting and thing theory. The story’s aspirational emphasis makes for a highly effective exploration of material subjectivity and class politics, and the things in Lapham’s life reveal an emerging consumer economy within the Gilded Age. These textual elements signify the cultural labor of constructing an upper-class affect, likewise inviting readers to consider their own curatorial habits.

Last year I wrote a "best of 2009" post for Arcade.  This year I want to do something different.  I want to share someone else's list.  Part of it, anyway.