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. When I’m not trying to make music to go with something else, I tend to make “classical drone” using analog synthesizers and tape techniques.
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, Subvert at stephen-ramsay, Bandcamp at stephenramsay.bandcamp.com and sourcehut as sramsay.
Keywords: CDRH, digital humanities, Reading Machines, mathematics, On the Digital Humanities, teaching, Perlin Trio