Research in the digital humanities has been at the center of my scholarly interests since beginning my graduate work at the University of Iowa, with a particular focus on digital editing and stylometric authorship attribution.
I have been a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive from 2013 to 2018 and have worked on transcribing, encoding and annotating more than 1000 pieces of Whitman’s correspondence using Extensible Markup Language (xml). I have also contributed to the publication of a British edition of Leaves of Grass on the Archive and performed batch image processing. Currently, I am a contributing editor to the journalism section of the Whitman Archive, working on an NEH grant on an authorship attribution project, related to Whitman’s journalistic writings.
From 2015 to 2018, I have taken on the role of managing editor for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, the leading academic journal of Whitman studies. During this time, I have overseen the journal’s transition from a pay-walled print publication to an open access, digital-only journal. My duties as managing editor include lay-outing the journal (using Adobe InDesign), proofing its articles, and maintaining the journal’s website and social media accounts. This role has also allowed me to be involved in the publicity efforts surrounding the rediscoveries of Manly Health and Training (2016) and Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (2017)—hitherto unknown Whitman-texts that were published in full in WWQR and made available for free to the general public.
Besides incorporating basic distant reading measures (such as Google n-grams) and digital archival research into my published work, most of my DH work to date has centered around statistical authorship attribution. I have been using the R library stylo to assess the author signal of short texts, employing bootstrapped lists of character trigrams. The results of his method, applied to the disputed corpus of Edgar Allan Poe, have been published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, establishing Poe as the author of a pamphlet on Mesmerism, as well as raising doubts over the attribution of a commonly accepted ‘early poem.’
Building on my previous authorship attribution research, I have been active in textual recovery work focused on Whitman’s journalism. Most notably, I am a co-PI on the NEH research grant “Walt Whitman’s Journalism: Finding the Poet in the Brooklyn Daily Times” for the Walt Whitman Archive. Recently, I have rediscovered unknown prose from Whitman’s early period with my colleague Dr. Zachary Turpin, which Whitman had contributed to a New Orleans newspaper. This discovery, which I have published about with Turpin, constitutes one of the most significant finds from Whitman pre-Leaves period in recent years. It also serves as the foundation of my upcoming edited collection of Whitman’s NOLA writings with LSU Press (release date: March 16, 2022). You can read more about this discovery on Deutsche Welle (in English and German) and on WV Public Broadcasting.
Alongside Hilton Cordoba and Kristen Lillvis, I am also one of the co-creators and co-editors of the Movable project, a platform for people in Appalachia and beyond to share, highlight, and document stories of recovery from substance-use disorder (funded by grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council and SAMHSA). For this work, the Movable team was awarded Marshall’s Distinguished Artists and Scholars Team Award in 2020 (lecture available here).
I am currently serving as vice president of the Digital Americanists Society.