Intersectional feminist practices ground my work in the digital humanities. In The Journal of Cultural Analytics, my co-authored computational analysis of discussions of feminist fiction centers inclusive knowledge making by recruiting the interpretive strategies of contemporary readers across digital platforms including the MLA International Bibliography, Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. Another recent collaboration reevaluates binary classifications and other traditional characterizations of gender identity in understandings of digital avatars; this piece, authored with games studies scholars at Michigan State and Northwood Universities, appears in Games and Culture.

Modern Sentimentalism laid the groundwork for these feminist approaches to digital scholarship. Here, archival platforms, computational methods, and data visualization (Google Ngrams) help me to establish that scholarly conversations about sentimentalism as an artistic practice have not kept pace with sentiment’s cultural purchase in the twentieth century. I theorize why this disparity persists and demonstrate that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, centrally shapes its principles and preoccupations.

My teaching also involves students in the use of digital tools to enhance textual analysis and to create socially-impactful projects. At Menlo, I am training a cohort of students in algorithmic media studies and ethnographic research as part of a program I have designed to examine (nearby) Silicon Valley contemporary culture. My essay on teaching Google Ngram Viewer, Voyant Tools, and other open-access digital methods to undergraduates appears in a recent volume in the MLA Options for Teaching Series.

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