The Simpson Center has long been committed to supporting visiting speakers in the broad fields of digital humanities, data science studies, and digital culture. Past speakers include Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara), Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), Jentery Sayers (University of Victoria), Johanna Drucker (University of California, Los Angeles), Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman (Northeastern University), Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland), Anne Balsamo (University of Texas at Dallas), Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University), Michelle Caswell (University of California Los Angeles), and Lauren Klein (Emory University). Recent conferences sponsored by the Simpson Center range from a May 2015 working conference proposed by UW faculty member Marshall Brown, then editor of Modern Language Quarterly, on Scale and Value: New Approaches to Literary History which resulted in a special issue of the journal, to a two-day October 2018 conference organized by UW faculty members Adrienne Russell (Communication) and Matthew Powers (Communication) on The Shifting Landscape of Public Communication, resulting in their edited collection Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Featured Digital Humanities Speaker:
Ryan Cordell
Date & Location:
Thursday, May 8, 2025 | 4:00-5:30pm
CMU 120
Bibliography & the Sociology of Large Language Models
Drawing on experiments from the Viral Texts project, this talk will reflect on the relationship between bibliography & AI in two directions. First, the talk will consider how bibliographic methods can help scholars, as D.F. McKenzie wrote of printed texts, “to describe not only the technical but the social processes” of AI models’ “production and reception.” The talk will argue that historical practices, such as reprinting in historical newspapers, can offer vital interpretive purchase for theorizing the dominant text-reuse technology of our moment. From here, the talk will describe a series of experiments aimed at understanding what analytical use LLMs might offer scholars researching in large-scale historical collections, for tasks such as genre classification, textual segmentation, or topic identification.
Ryan Cordell (Information Sciences and English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is co-PI of the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. Cordell is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and directs UIUC’s Skeuomorph Press.
