January 2014

At this year's MLA in Chicago, I was part of a great panel on "Geospatial Literary Studies" organized by David Wrisley of the American University in Beirut. The "geospatial humanities"—digital humanities work that emphasizes place and geography—has been expanding in the past few years, and this panel was the first devoted to the subject at MLA. The panelists presented some fabulous projects, from mapping bookstores in nineteenth-century Manhattan...

Among the many great points Ted Underwood makes in his recent blog response to Franco Moretti's latest work, I wanted to flag his brief opening observation about the Internet's effects on scholarly interaction. "If the Internet is good for anything," he writes, "it’s good for speeding up the Ent-like conversation between articles, to make that rumble more perceptible by human ears." Academics have been largely inured to the...