From Page to Algorithm: Reading, Writing, and Scholarship in the Age of Data

The debates sparked by generative AI give short shrift to a previous transformation in our scholarly activities represented by the massive troves of digitized text that make generative AI possible. In a few decades, we’ve gone from doing almost all of our writing, reading, research and teaching on paper to doing almost none of it on paper, and all of it on laptops, tablets, and phones, using algorithmic tools like search engines to navigate, discover, organize, and interpret the digitized and born-digital content we now almost exclusively work with. The databases, digital repositories, and the tools and processes that make the cultural and literary works held in them readable and analyzable – or that fail to do so – have reshaped and redefined these materials and our relations to them. What is scholarly work in the digital age? What new forms of research and publication are taking shape? What are the implications for established values and conventions of print-era scholarship: citation, originality, close reading and interpretation?

The first session, Text as Data, will reflect broadly on implications of mass digitization for the humanities and literary scholarship, including impacts on notions of scholarly labor: where is the line (and where should it be) between scholarly work and the new forms of technical work often entailed by digitization? The second, How Do Machines Read, will look at the effects on our work of algorithmic tools from search engines to more complex systems, which “read” not authors, works, or genres but encoded characters. Session three, How Do Humans Read, will explore the challenges posed by algorithmic text – search results, databases and data-centric visualizations, and now generative AI – to scholarly norms like argument, authorship, and citation. The final session, Publishing in the Digital Age, will explore the meanings of publication in the world of HTTP, webservers, and databases, and reflect on implications for copyright, access, archiving and sustainability.

Our discussions will be both philosophical, historical and pragmatic, with the aim to help students better understand and develop strategies for navigating these challenges in their own research. Students in the course will be encouraged to develop a proposal for a digital project (potentially for submission for participation in the Simpson Center Digital Humanities Summer Seminar in Summer 2025).