My work combines nineteenth-century studies, media studies, and the digital humanities in order to question the ossified historical periods that are too-often used to explain both technology and literature. I complicate these methods of periodization in two ways. First, my scholarship traces the adaptation of nineteenth-century literary texts to show how they are mediated by the various technologies used to access them: from scholarly digital archives and nineteenth-century gadgets to social media and devices produced by contemporary maker culture. Second, I leverage the historical and repurposed technologies found in media archaeology and steampunk in order to question the progressivism of the modern electronics industry and the consumer culture that accompanies it — in which all that matters is the newest iPhone or the newest laptop. I leverage a multi-pronged approach to my scholarly output in order to challenge the exclusionary history of literary studies, recasting it as a grassroots participatory activity connecting to non-academic cultures as well as to various technologies and media. In addition to scholarly monographs and articles, I have written my own computer applications, published a digital archive, hosted a webinar series, and written pedagogical scholarship that highlighted student research.
Ultimately, my research is dedicated to showing how digital technology can be used to connect literary studies to the media technologies and participatory communities that it has traditionally excluded. I first made this commitment while editing The Blake 2.0 Blog with Jason Whittaker in 2011-12. Jason and I had initially designed the blog to give scholars an outlet for publishing up-to-date scholarship on William Blake and his adaptations. We had no idea that a vast, unknown, participatory audience existed for this work. Yet in one comment on the blog after another, we found thoughtful people questioning our assumptions about Blake while offering novel interpretations of his work. In his poem Milton, Blake compares infinity to both “a universe of starry majesty” and “a human form, a friend with whom he liv’d benevolent.” In that strangely compelling juxtaposition, Blake shows that it is in the hard and perpetual work of embracing the Other that we discover a broader reality. I’ve since stopped editing that blog, but the experience made me realize that a broader reality for literary study exists, if we only have the courage to embrace those of us existing outside the usual confines and marginalizations of academia.