I explore topics in digital scholarly editing/publishing, public humanities, cultural studies, and critical game studies.

Interested in collaborating on research? – contact me

Current Projects

Subject Matter: Table Top

Subject Matter: Table Top is a podcast about board games and the subject matter that animates them. In this podcast, Steve Gotzler and Jordan Tynes explore the world of tabletop games with people who possess a deep understanding of the various themes, settings, systems, or content that we encounter in them. What does an economist think about while playing Monopoly? What about a quilter sitting down for a round of Patchwork? A planetary geologist and Terraforming Mars? Or a farmer and Agricola?

Steve, Jordan, and their guests consider how games communicate information about the variety of subjects they take up. They also ask how games can influence players’ feelings about each other, and the world that they inhabit. From the physical components strewn about the table, to the rules we share while playing, sit down for a round of playful discussion about the cultural relevance of tabletop gaming.

Collaborators: Jordan Tynes (ongoing)

• Visit the SM:TT website to learn more.
• Listen to episodes on Apple, Spotify), or Google
• Follow us on instagram and twitter

MARXdown

MARXdown is an online digital project developed for the Contemporary Marxist Reading Group (CMRG) at Carnegie Mellon University using the lightweight markup language Markdown. Designed to support group annotation of key texts for our CMRG, it provides a centralized and accessible online space for ongoing critical engagement between readers and materials related to the study of Marxist theory. This digital reading edition brings together the original English translation from 1887 Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 with extant scholarly sources to create a multi-layered annotated edition of the text, providing critical reading guides and supplemental historical and sociological data in one easily accessible and user-friendly interface.

Collaborators: Avery J. Wiscomb, Daniel Evans. (ongoing)

• Visit the project repo on GitHub.
• Check Out a Praxis Session we developed on “Deploying Lightwight Digital Editions in the Community and Classroom” for the 17th Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA).

Past Projects

The Frankenstein Variorum

This project is preparing a new digital variorum edition of the novel Frankenstein. The variorum edition is a digital collation of five distinct versions of the novel produced between 1816 and 1831. With Professor Jon Klancher, Avery J. Wiscomb, and John Quirk, I have been working as a part of the team using the hypothes.is software to generate and manage a set of linked annotations across all 5 versions of the text.

Collaborators: Jon Klancher, Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, Matthew Lincoln, Rikk Mulligan, John Quirk, Emma Slayton, Raffaele Viglianti, Scott B. Weingart, Avery J. Wiscomb.(2018-2019)

• Visit the project repo on GitHub.
• Check out the project website

The Historical TV Guide / Mapping the Television Mega-Text

The Historical TV Guide uses digital tools to gather available textual data sources on television programming in the 1950s drawn from textual sources in online databases, archives and encyclopedias of television programming, much of which no longer exists in watchable form. Originally a distant reading project, entitled “Mapping the Television Mega-Text,” we also used computational methods to analyze working-class content on 1950s television.

Collaborators: Kathleen M. Newman, Daniel J. Evans, Scott B. Weingart, Emma Slayton. (2017-2019)

• Visit the project repo on GitHub.
• For more information check out the project website, or watch a short video on the project, that we produced for the Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook at CMU.

The Frankenstein Complex

Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “The Frankenstein Complex” demonstrates the continuing relevance of Victor Frankenstein and his creature to contemporary audiences by relating rare university holdings such as the 1818 first edition of the text, and documents in the history of science from pioneering figures such as Luigi Galvani, to CMU’s ongoing areas of scientific research including brain-computer interfaces, robotics, the visual arts and artificial intelligence. Examining these areas of contemporary research in light of the novel’s much wider cultural legacy, the exhibit locates them within a ‘complex’ of ideas about the mind, the body, nature, ethical dilemmas, revolutions, and creators of all kinds. Ultimately, the exhibit encourages visitors to better understand how Frankenstein plays an important role in shaping our perceptions of technological innovations, and also how we continue to think about ourselves as humans.

Collaborators: Avery J. Wiscomb, John Quirk. (2018)

• Find coverage of the exhibit here

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