Ryan Cordell
Associate Professor
PhD, English Language and Literature, University of Virginia
Room 5147, 614 E. Daniel St.
Other professional appointments
- Affiliated Associate Professor of English, Northeastern University
- Affiliated Faculty; NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; Northeastern University
Research focus
Book history, book arts, print culture, bibliography, digital humanities, text and data mining, machine learning, and critical making.
Honors and Awards
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, hosted by the Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, 2023-2025
- Senior Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017-present
- Lead Investigator with Geoff Ward (Washington University), David Cunningham (Washington University), and David Smith (Northeastern University), for the Virality of Racial Terror project, Mellon Grant, January 2023–December 2025
- UIUC Campus Research Board Grant, Surveying the Humanities MakerLab Movement (SHMLM) project, spring–fall 2023
Biography
Before joining the iSchool, Ryan Cordell was associate professor of English at Northeastern University and a core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His scholarship seeks to illuminate how technologies of production, reception, circulation, and remediation shape the meanings of texts within historical communities, as well as how the complexities of historical texts pressure modern scholarly infrastructure. Cordell primarily studies circulation and reprinting in nineteenth-century American newspapers, but his interests extend to the influence of digitization and computation on contemporary reading, writing, and research. He collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. He is also a practicing letterpress printer who explores intersections between historical and contemporary information technologies through the lens of maker culture. Cordell is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and serves as the Delegate Assembly Representative for the MLA's Forum on Digital Humanities.
Cordell is director of the Skeuomorph Press and Book Lab, an experiential research and pedagogy studio for the history and art of the book, which is located in the CU Community Fab Lab.
Current Projects
- The Virality of Racial Terror in US Newspapers, 1863-1921”
- Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, 2012-present
Selected Past Projects
- Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks In Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914, a six nation Digging Into Data project
- Historical and Multilingual OCR, with David Smith, 2017-2018
- Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, James McGrath, and Alicia Peaker et al, 2013-2015
Courses currently teaching
Office hours
In person: Monday 10–11 a.m.
Online: Wednesday 10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Publications & Papers
“Word Embedding Models and the Hybridity of Newspaper Genres,” with Avery Blankenship, The American Historical Review 29.1 (March 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad493
“Programmable Type: The Craft of Printing, The Craft of Code,” Teaching the History of the Book, ed. Emily Todd and Matt Pangallo, University of Massachusetts Press (2023)
“The Ripple Effect of Dataset Reuse: Contextualizing the Data Lifecycle for Machine Learning Dataset and Social Impact,” with Jaihyun Park, Journal of Information Science (27 December 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515231212977
“Closing the Loop: Bridging Machine Learning Research and Library Systems,” Library Trends 71:1 (August 2022), https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2023.0008
“Material Culture of the Digital,” Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber, Cambridge University Press (2022), pre-print available
“Newspapers and Periodicals as Transitional Media,” American Literature in Transition, 1851-1877, ed. Cody Marrs, Cambridge University Press (2022), pre-print available
Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers, with David A. Smith, Abby Mullen, Jonathan Fitzgerald, and Avery Blankenship.
"Machine Learning + Libraries: A Report on the State of the Field," commissioned by LC Labs, the Library of Congress, 14 July 2020. Announcement post
"Speculative Bibliography," Anglia 138:3 (September 2020), special "Archives" issue, ed. Daniel Stein.
"A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual OCR," with David A. Smith, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Society, 6 February 2019.
Presentations
"Novels in the News: The Reprinting of American Fiction in Nineteenth Century Periodicals," with Avery Blankenship, Penn Price Lab in Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 5 March 2020
"Speculative Bibliography," Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, Washington, 10 January 2020
"Teaching Humanistic Data Analysis," Gale Digital Humanities Day, British Library, London, UK, 2 May 2019
“Platform Literature: Printers’ Memes in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers," Digital Humanities Roundtable Keynote, Colby College, Waterville, Maine, 26 October 2018
"A Pre-History of Fake News," Numapresse Final Conference, Montpellier, France, 15 June 2018
"Stranger Genres: Computationally Classifying Reprinted Nineteenth Century Newspaper Texts," with Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City, Mexico, 27 June 2018
"Viral Texts: Aggregating Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers," University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 9 May 2018
"Fake News: Mapping the Pages of 19th-Century Newspapers," with M. H. Beals, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, 3 May 2018
"Programmable Type: the Craft of Printing, the Craft of Code," Edward S. and Melinda Melton Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 23 March 2018
"Little Bits of Paper," BH and DH Conference, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 22 September 2017