Ryan Cordell

Ryan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (http://nulab.neu.edu). His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell is collaborating with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on an NEH-funded project (http://viraltexts.org) using robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of antebellum texts. These “viral texts” help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period. Cordell serves on NITLE's Digital Humanities Council and as vice president of the Digital Americanists scholarly society. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet’s forthcoming new journal, DHCommons (http://dhcommons.org), and he also writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/).