I was honored to give the keynote address at Carleton College's 10th Annual Day of DH, a one-day event that draws together digital humanities professionals from the broader Minneapolis/St. Paul region. The full text of my talk is below, or you can just view the slides. Thank you to Austin and the rest of the… Continue reading Living with the Pharmakon
Category: Talks
Five Theses on E-Lit Scenes
At the 2025 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Toronto I participated on a panel devoted to If/Then, a computational poetics group/workshop/collective/community that has been meeting monthly over Zoom since Fall 2020. Carly Schnitzler and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, the organizers of If/Then were on the panel, as well as three members of If/Then's Community Advisory Board—Kathy Wu,… Continue reading Five Theses on E-Lit Scenes
The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models
In February 2024 I delivered the keynote address at the DHU8 symposium, the eighth annual digital humanities conference sponsored by seven of Utah's largest universities. Now, well over a year later, I am finally sharing a lightly edited version of my talk. There's a simple reason for the long delay: in my talk I preview… Continue reading The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models
AI Dungeon and Creativity
In early January I joined a group of AI researchers from Microsoft and my fellow humanist Kathleen Fitzpatrick to talk at the Modern Language Association convention about the implications of artificial intelligence. Our panel was called Being Human, Seeming Human. Each participant came to this question of "seeming human" from a different angle. My own focus… Continue reading AI Dungeon and Creativity
Your Mistake was a Vital Connection
Oblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities
This summer I attended the first annual Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Hamilton College. It was an inspiring conference, highlighting the importance of collaborative faculty/student digital work at small liberal arts colleges. My own school, Davidson College, had a team at ILiADS (Professor Suzanne Churchill, Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman, and undergraduate Andrew… Continue reading Your Mistake was a Vital ConnectionOblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities
Sites of Pain and Telling
The Expressive Work of Spaces of Torture in Videogames At the 2014 MLA conference in Chicago I appeared on a panel called "Torture and Popular Culture." I used the occasion to revisit a topic I had written about several years earlier—representations of torture-interrogation in videogames. My comments are suggestive more than conclusive, and I am… Continue reading Sites of Pain and Telling
An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
Below is the text of my presentation at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. The panel was Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media, and it was assembled by Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon, Zach Whalen, and myself. Seeking to have a rich discussion period—which we did indeed have—we limited our talks to… Continue reading An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
5 BASIC Statements on Computational Literacy
(This is the text of my five minute position statement on the role of computational literacy in computers and writing. I delivered this statement during a "town hall" meeting at the annual Computers and Writing Conference, hosted at North Carolina State University on May 19, 2012.) I want to briefly run through five basic statements… Continue reading 5 BASIC Statements on Computational Literacy