A Wandering Hyphen, The Reader and the Work

Variants, 2021

Canon/Archive straddles the border between the standard interpretive literary criticism that has been in place since World War II and a new naturalist literary study in which literary texts and phenomena are treated as phenomena of the natural world, like language, without prejudice. This naturalist investigation takes the careful analytic description of texts, considered as strings of word forms, as its starting point. Canon/Archive exemplifies a so-called computational criticism in which computers are tools used for analyzing texts, often taken as a corpus of 10s, 100s, or 1000s of texts. Naturalist investigation also includes a computational approach in which computation is seen as the process linking word forms to semantic structures, expression to meaning. I examine two chapters from Canon/Archive, showing how that work can be supplemented by this other approach in which computation is a model for a mental process

Sydney Studies in English, 2010

Variants, 2013

In 2006, as I prepared to begin my doctorate, I met with my supervisor-to-be to discuss prospective research topics. It became clear during the meeting that he already had a project in mind: I would produce a critical edition of the Armenianlanguage Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, and it would be a digital critical edition. Some time later, at the celebration that followed my viva examination, my supervisor cheerfully admitted that he had not had the least idea what a "digital critical edition" might be when he had set me on the path to making one. He simply trusted that I, as a software engineer turned humanist, would figure something out along the way. The fact that I now write this suggests that I did produce something that was accepted by my supervisor and examiners as a digital critical edition. So where is it? What does it look like? And if, as recently as that, a lone doctoral student had to work out for herself what a digital critical edition should be, does it not go some way toward explaining why there are so few of them about?

Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century …

The American Archivist

Scholars who do their research in literary manuscripts appreciate the professionally managed archival research collection and the archivist's role as a mediator between collectors and researchers. The author, a literary editor, discusses how the issues of copyright, restrictions on access, arrangement, description, reference policies, and copying are viewed by literary researchers and calls for collaboration between scholars and archivists to make information about collections more accessible.

“Canon, Corpus, Archive: Selection and Valuation from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Humanities,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.2 (2020): 53–68.

New German Critique, 2020

The Modern Language Review, 2007

In the last decade, he has explored hypertext as a viable "new" scholarly apparatus, primarily using the Rossetti Hypermedia Archive as the foundation for facilitating a collaborative scholarly community. The resulting Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) has already begun the work of amassing hypertextual projects and creating a peer-review system. With The Scholar's Art, McGann returns to conversations begun in The Romantic Ideology and The Poetics of Sensibility, but these conversations also incorporate his theories on reorganizing scholarly models very similar to the hyperspace community proposed with NINES. The title suggests that this work will be another lamentation on the corporatization of Humanities education. Instead, this series of chapters, loosely grouped under thematic section titles, sets off on a self-proclaimed dramatic monologue specifically aimed at scholars-with no apologies for excluding the "passive consumers of Survivor, Grand Theft Auto or Left Behind" (xi). McGann uses poetry to highlight that literary scholarship is not self-important but is intrinsically really important. As with much recent writing about the revision of Humanities, McGann ministers that to break free of the stereotypes against scholarship and poetic language, we must engage at a distance as well as disengage with the rhetoric that we have created. The scholar, for Jerome McGann, is an artist-not an observer of art, but a participant in the continual creation of knowledge. Using his foundational work on Romantic poetry and textual studies, McGann encourages us to cease the defense of poetry as the language of an elite and to recuperate it as part of a scholarly artistry: Every scholar's art ceases with the presumption of knowledge, when method itself has become an archaeology of knowledge. For the