Twitter Handle: @ryancordell
Website: http://ryan.cordells.us
Bio: I'm currently Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. My scholarship focuses on the intersections between literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum America. If you're interested in specifics about my work, see my CV. I'm working on a number of projects at the moment. I'm building a digital edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Celestial Railroad" that will allow scholars, teachers, and students to follow the rich publication history of "The Celestial Railroad" in American periodicals during the 1840s and 50s. That relatively narrow focus has lately expanded into a collaborative effort with a colleague in Computer Science to automatically uncover reprinted texts in large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. I plan to use those reprinted texts to help map—both geographically and as a network—relationships among nineteenth-century publications. The ultimate goal of that project is to create a robust, large-scale model of nineteenth-century textual networks that will help scholars understand which publications shaped (or were shaped by) popular literary culture. I serve on NITLE's Digital Humanities Council as secretary/treasurer of the Digital Americanists scholarly society. I'm also on the board of the DHCommons project. DHCommons aims to combat isolation in the digital humanities by connecting people with expertise with digital projects that need that expertise. I write about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.