NMALH Day 2 Introduction and "Newspapers and/as Social Media" Panel
Channel: Northeastern NULab
Date: 2014-02-05

Introduction to Day 2 and Session 6 of the "New Media in American Literary History" Symposium at Northeastern University, December 5-6, 2013.

Session 6, "Newspapers and/as Social Media," comprised the following panelists and presentations:

Meredith McGill (Rutgers), respondent
Laura Murray (Queens), "How to Read a Newspaper"
Hester Blum (Penn State), "Arctic Newspapers as a Social Media Network"
Ryan Cordell and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern), "'Infectious Texts' in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

"New Media in American Literary History" was cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School (http://www.rarebookschool.org/fellowships/mellon/), the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks (http://www.northeastern.edu/nulab/), and the Northeastern University Humanities Center (http://www.northeastern.edu/humanities/). The event was organized by Ryan Cordell (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University English Department) and Rhae Lynn Barnes (Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University History Department).

"New Media in American Literary History" brought together "digital" and "analog" scholars interested in the history of American print media to discuss common questions, challenges, and identify potential collaborations. Our goal was to bridge the gap between digital and more "traditional" disciplinary work. The conference put scholars employing methodologies such as text mining, topic modeling, digital curation, and network analysis—in other words, "big humanities data"—into direct and productive dialogue with Americanist scholars, graduate students, and archivists employing well-established practices in book history, textual analysis, media studies, and critical bibliography in their work.