Participation in the Meliora Digital & Interdisciplinary Program involves attending the program’s year-long graduate seminar (DMST 501) that meets weekly in the program’s dedicated workroom, Room #211 (Conference Room C) in the Humanities Center, RRL 2nd Floor. Discussion-based sessions geared toward current fellow needs and interests have typically included, e.g.: guest lectures by practicing digital humanists, tutorials on and introductions to tools and methodologies applicable to both research and teaching, WIP presentation opportunities, relevant readings, and workshops (e.g., designing conference proposals). You can view the AY2024-25 syllabus here.
The following list of readings includes those discussed in the Mellon Foundation Graduate Program seminar (through 2023) and Meliora Digital & Interdisciplinary Program seminar titles. Links are provided when available. Square brackets denote links behind a paywall. This list is updated regularly.
Recently added titles:
Boden, Margaret A. Artificial Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Boyles, Christina. “Intersectionality and Infrastructure: Toward a Critical Digital Humanities,” in Anne B. McGrail et. al., People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 118-126.
Dobson, James. “Interpenetrable Outputs: Criteria for Machine Learning in the Humanities,” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 15:2 (2021)
El Khatib, Randa, and Marcel Schaeben. 2020. “Why Map Literature? Geospatial Prototyping for Literary Studies and Digital Humanities.” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 10(1): 7, pp. 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.381
Halpern, Orit. “Archiving: Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in Cybernetics,” from Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham, NC, 2014), 39-78.
Heise, Ursula, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. 2017. “Digital? Environmental: Humanities,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 385–94.
Jiang, Harry and Lauren Brown, Jessica Cheng, Anonymous Artist, Mehtab Khan, Abhishek Gupta, Deja Workman, Alex Hanna, Jonathan Flowers, and Timnit Gebru. 2023. “AI Art and its Impact on Artists.” In AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’23), August 08–10, 2023, Montréal, QC, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604681
Jørgensen, Finn Arne. 2014. “The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 4 (1): 95–112.
Liu, Alan. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?,” in Matthew K. Gold, ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Manovich, Lev. “How to See One Billion Images,” and “From New Media to More Media,” in Cultural Analytics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 1-37.
Ramsay, Stephen. “The Politics of Tools,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 17:2 (2023). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.html
Risam, Roopika. “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (Routledge, 2018): 78-86.
Digital Humanities and Digital Studies
Blevins, Cameron. “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston” Journal of American History 101.1 (2014)
Cramer, Florian. Post-Digital Writing.” Electronic Book Review (2012).
Critical Art Ensemble. The Electronic Disturbance (1994).
Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. Matthew K. Gold. (2012, 2016, 2017 editions)
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014).
Electronic Literature Collection.
Flanders, Julia. “The Productive Unease of 21st-Century Digital Scholarship.” DHQ 3.3
Franklin, Stan “History, Motivations, and Core Themes.” The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence eds. Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey. (2014)
Gavin, Michael. “Agent-Based Modeling and Historical Simulation.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.4 (2014).
Grusin, Richard. “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities: Dispatches from Two Recent MLA Conventions.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25.1 (2014).[doi:10.1215/10407391-2420009]
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Electronic Literature: What is it?”
—. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1 (Spring 2004). [doi:10.1215/03335372-25-1-67]
—. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003). [doi:10.1353/yale.2003.0018]
Hertz, Garnet and Jussi Parikka. “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method”, Leonardo, 45.5 (2012)
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.
—. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing.
Knowles, Anne Kelly. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008).
Lankshear, Colin. “The Challenge of Digital Epistemologies.” Education, Communication and Information 3.2 (July 2003).
Liu, Alan. “The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 11.1-2 (2011).[doi: 10.1177/1474022211427364.]
Mauro, Aaron. “Versioning Loss: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Materiality of Digital Publishing.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.4 (2014).
Ong, Walter J. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computer.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998).
Thomas III, William G. and Edward L. Ayers. “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities.”
Unsworth, John. “Knowledge Representation in Humanities Computing.”
Digital Editing/Archiving
Griscom, Richard. “Distant Music: Delivering Audio over the Internet.” Notes 59.3 (2003).
Gailey, Amanda. “Cold War Legacies in Digital Editing.” Textual Cultures 7.1 (Spring 2012). [doi:10.2979/textcult.7.1.5]
Manovich, Lev. “Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualization of Large Cultural Data Sets.”
—. “Database as Symbolic Form.”
—. The Language of New Media (2001).
Paton, Christopher Anne. “Appraisal of Sound Recordings for Digital Archivists.” Archival Issues 22.2 (1997).
—. “Preservation Re-Recording of Audio Recordings in Archives: Problems, Priorities, Technologies, and Recommendations.” The American Archivist 61.1 (Spring 1998).[doi:10.17723/aarc.61.1.x2184j76x6131w81]
Reed, Ashley. “Managing an Established Digital Humanities Project: Principles and Practices from the Twentieth Year of the William Blake Archive” DHQ 8.1 (2014)
Stephenson, Neal. “Mother Earth Mother Board.” Wired 4.12 (Dec. 1996)
Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format.
Stones, Alison and Ken Sochats. Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2.
Szabo, Victora. “Transforming Art History Research with Database Analytics: Visualizing Art Markets” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 31.2 (September 2012). [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668109]
—. “Wired! and Visualizing Venice: Scaling up Digital Art History” Artl@s Bulletin 4.1 (2015)
Contemporary Politics and Digital Humanities
Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (2008).
Powers, Shawn M. and Michael Jablonski. The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom (2015).
Wohlsen, Marcus. “Wired’s Totally Legit Guide to Rigging a Presidential Election” Wired 10 October 2016.
Media, Communication and Cultural Studies
Abbot, Carl. “Cyberpunk Cities: Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (2007). [doi:10.1177/0739456X07305795] Bowler, Anne.
“Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism.” Theory and Society 20.6 (1991). [JSTOR:http://www.jstor.org/stable/657603]
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic (July 1945).
Cline, Ronald. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call our Age the Information Age (2015).
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (1964)
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957).
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding” The Cultural Studies Reader (1993).
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology”.
Hoyt, Eric, Kevin Ponto, and Carrie Roy. “Visualizing and Analyzing the Hollywood Screenplay with ScripThreads.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.4 (2014).
Huebner, Andrew. J. “The Conditional Optimist: Walt Disney’s Post-War Futurism.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2.2 (2009). [doi:10.1080/17541320903346510]
Khatchadourian, Raffi. “The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines” The New Yorker January 30, 2017.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986).
McLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan, Eds. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone.
—. Understanding Media (1964)
—. “Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan–A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” Playboy March 1969.
McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1992)
—. Radiant Textuality (2004).
Miller, Laura. “Paul Auster’s Novel of Chance” The New Yorker January 30, 2017.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005).
Shannon, Claude. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948). [doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x]
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, (1975).