About

I am a Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

I discovered digital humanities (“humanities computing,” as it was then called) while I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the mid-nineties. I found the whole thing very exciting, but felt that before I could get on to things like computational text analysis and other kinds of humanistic geekery, I needed to work through a set of thorny philosophical problems. Is there such a thing as “algorithmic” literary criticism? Is there a distinct, humanistic form of visualization that differs from its scientific counterpart? What does it mean to “read” a text with a machine? Computational analysis of the human record seems to imply a different conception of hermeneutics, but what is that new conception?

I figured that when I had that all worked out, I could get on to the project of “doing DH.” But twenty-five years have passed, and I’m still stuck on these problems. At some point, the major DH conferences started offering “meta-DH” as a keyword. That’s a pretty good description of what I do.

I published a book about these matters in 2011 (Reading Machines), stopped to write a book on mathematics with my far-flung colleague Patrick Juola (Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist), and published another book in 2023 with the University of Minnesota Press (On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations).

I have been teaching students in the arts and humanities how to program since the early 2000s, and (lest I forget my roots) I also regularly teach classes in theater history, world literature, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

I am also an electronic composer who has worked on video games, short animated films (as the audio half of Perlin Trio), theme music, and in fixed media. I have a particular interest in long-duration recordings of synthetic sound sources shaped through montage, repetition, contrast, and duration. I tend to draw on acousmatic listening, drone, and tape techniques, focusing on the slow internal life of sound: combination tones, spectral beating, low-frequency instability, and timbral drift.

I am obsessed with programming languages, ancient languages, textual interfaces, microcontrollers, UNIX, computer music, and any sort of technology for producing beautiful documents.

I am on Mastodon at @sramsay@hcommons.social, Bluesky at @sramsay2.bsky.social, Bandcamp at stephenramsay.bandcamp.com and keep various coding projects at SourceHut.

Incoming: home

Keywords: CDRH, digital humanities, Reading Machines, mathematics, On the Digital Humanities, teaching, Perlin Trio

Last Modified: 2026-06-04T18:42:12:-0500