Rachel Buurma, Associate Professor of English, Swarthmore College and Laura Heffernan, Associate Professor of English, University of North Florida
May 3, 2019
12:00-2:00pm
JRL A-11
Berkeley English professor Josephine Miles (1911-1985) has received renewed attention lately as a foundational figure for the digital humanities: in addition to her early quantitative work on the history of poetry, she directed the first computerized concordance, A Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Dryden (1957). This talk situates Miles within a longer history of women distant readers in English. Drawing on archival research, we describe how Miles slowly built the large-scale dataset that fueled her major monographs in the same decades in which she regularly taught English 1A, Berkeley’s workshop-style freshman writing course. Seeing how Miles’s general education teaching influenced her quantitative research (and vice versa) gives us an entirely new account of distant reading’s history, one that prompts us to think and argue differently about its uses today.
If you need any additional accommodations to participate in the Forum, please contact Carmen Caswell (caswellc@uchicago.edu).