GW English Alums on the Move: Ryan Cordell: From Scroll to Scroll
 |
| Photo Credit: Brooks Canaday/Northeastern University |
Ryan Cordell graduated from GW in 2004 and went on to the University of Virginia for graduate school in English. His interest in the digital humanities brought him to his current position, Assistant Professor of English at Boston’s Northeastern University, where he and various colleagues just won a grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities to use computational linguistics to trace the reprinting of poetry and short stories in nineteenth century American newspapers.
As a Northeastern news article about Ryan’s work explains:
By scanning enormous data sets of digitized information, researchers can now identify repetition in the global conversation, uncovering the features of media ranging from viral videos to outrageously popular blog posts.
Part of the core faculty of the NU Lab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Ryan is interested in the technologies of all texts, from the oldest to the newest — or, as he puts it, from “scroll to scroll.”
We’re thrilled that Ryan has already begun to distinguish himself as a cutting-edge theorist of the production and dissemination of literary texts, and we look forward to following his work as one of the important new voices in the emerging field of digital humanities.
