Directory of Research and Expertise

---

Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Digital resources, Digitisation, English Literature, History of the book, Manuscript studies, Modernism, Palaeography, Philosophy, Romanticism

Regions:

England, North America, United Kingdom

Summary of research interests and expertise:

I work at the intersection of English literature and computation (computation as a way of thinking and analysing, in addition to creating formal systems through logical and quantitative means). My academic specialties are textual scholarship and book history; nineteenth and twentieth century literature, with a particular focus on romanticism, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, antislavery archives and print culture, and modernist authors; digital publishing (XML technologies and other markup languages); data science and corpus analysis approaches to literature, particularly with the R programming language. I also like to experiment with new methods which I am still learning, such as machine learning, network analysis, graph databases and technologies, spatial networks, and digital curation.

In addition to my current role, I serve as Associate Director of the Herman Melville Electronic Library, an Associate Editor for Melville's Marginalia Online, and as a core faculty member for eLaboratories, based at the University of Virginia Center for Digital Editing, which will soon debut its Fundamentals online course in the Editing of Historical Documents. Before coming to London I was an Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Boston University and the University of Maine.

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	Good	Good
German	Intermediate	Intermediate

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
01-Feb-2025	Beyond Representation: Some Thoughts on Creative-Critical Digital Editing. Chapters In Twenty-First Century Digital Editing & Publishing, edited by James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Bridgette Wessels, Michael Kurzmeier, Órla Murphy, and Sophie Whittle (forthcoming, Scottish Universities Press, 2024).
31-Oct-2024	Hypertext as Method in Book History Chapters “Hypertext as Method in Book History,” with Alessio Antonini, Francesca Benatti, and Sam Brooker. In DH + BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History, edited by Cait Coker and Spencer Karolis (forthcoming, Windsor & Downs Press, 2024).
01-Jul-2024	Mary Anne Rawson’s The Bow in the Cloud (1834): A Scholarly Edition Edited Book Started in March 2018 with the support of a digital humanities start-up grant from the John Rylands Research Institute (University of Manchester), this project is a digital edition of Mary Anne Rawson’s 1834 anti-slavery anthology. In 2023 it received an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to complete the edition. The edition is based on all the surviving manuscripts of the submissions (with their covering letters) that were sent to the anthology editor, Mary Anne Rawson. It also offers, for the first time, a textual history of the anthology and its role within the network of abolitionism and anthologies in the early nineteenth century. In addition to creating an edition, the project is modelling all the anthology-related material in the OCHRE graph database, in partnership with the University of Chicago’s Forum for Digital Cultures.
21-Jun-2024	Digital Editing and Pedagogy: Making Editions / Building Arguments Articles With John Bryant, Mary Isbell, and Mary Erica Zimmer. Scholarly Editing 41 (2024). The emergent discipline of digital editing can be as much of an opening for textual scholars as it is for students. Each narrative in this collaborative essay begins with the understanding that editing is a mode of critical thinking that involves the management of historical documents. Such thinking is shaped, in these case studies, by certain (and by no means all) editorial activities—transcription, contextual and textual annotation, tagging, collaboration and open editing, the tracing of networks of writers, readers, and publishers—that individuals within a community of learners can use “to open” for themselves certain “ways” of learning. The aim of this kind of digital pedagogy is for instructor and pupil to enact the spirit of independence by engaging in the pursuit of editing and thereby rise together as learners.
04-Sep-2023	Hypertext as Method: Reflections on Hypertext as Design Logic Conference papers With Alessio Antonini, Megan Bushnell, Francesca Benatti, Alessandro Adamou, and Sam Brooker. HT '23: Proceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Article No. 45 (September 2023), pp. 1–4.
01-Sep-2023	Re-experiencing composition: meditations on digital scholarly editing at the “Melville Electronic Library” Articles Special issue of Sztuka Edycji. Textological and Editorial Studies on 'Digital Editing Practices', vol. 23, no. 1 (2023), pp. 15–27.
25-Aug-2023	Digital Melville and Computational Methods in Literary Studies Articles Mischke, Dennis and Christopher Ohge. "Digital Melville and Computational Methods in Literary Studies." Leviathan, vol. 25 no. 2, 2023, p. 35-60. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lvn.2023.a904374.
10-Jul-2023	A Digital Humanities Climate Coalition Toolkit for Researchers and Institutions Research aids (With James Baker, Lisa Otty, and Jo Lindsey Walton.) In digital humanists, every project we create, every software application we use, every piece of hardware we purchase impacts our environment. In response to this need for greater awareness, the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC) created a Toolkit (https://sas-dhrh.github.io/dhcc-toolkit/) using minimal computing principles.
01-Jul-2023	eLaboraties Fundamentals of Editing Research aids The eLaboraties Fundamentals of Editing online course is a 14-unit series of standalone (and free) modules that prepares you to plan, create, manage, and publish a scholarly edition in print and/or digital formats.
03-Apr-2023	Review of Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization, by Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld Review Library & Information History, Volume 39 Issue 1, pp. 63-65, ISSN 1758-3489 (Apr 2023).
09-Sep-2022	Provocations Toward Creative-Critical Editing Journal articles Special issue, co-edited with Mathelinda Nabugodi, of Textual Cultures 15.1 (Spring 2022). This special issue examines the promises of creative-critical editing. It has three sections: Questions and Experiments, Creative-Critical Case Studies, and The Aesthetic Experiences of Digital Editions.
02-Sep-2022	A New Companion to Herman Melville Edited Book (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022.) This new companion to Melville, co-edited with Wyn Kelley (MIT), features 47 original chapters, including new critical perspectives on all of Melville's works, and sections on book history, environmental approaches, digital humanities, and public engagement.
02-Sep-2022	Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning Chapters In A New Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Kelley and Ohge (2022).
19-Mar-2022	Poetry and Diffidence: A Brief History Journal articles Essays in Criticism 71.4 (October 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgab020. An essay that examines the trajectory of the word 'diffidence'––and its various senses––in poetry. It argues that this concept illustrates a tension between outer and inner posturing of pride and shame, trust and doubt, respect and respectability.
05-Nov-2021	Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience Monographs (Cambridge University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766739. Abstract: Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are explored through two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic ‘inventions’ based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience. Access the figures at  https://christopherohge.com/figures-for-publishing-scholarly-editions-archives-computing-and-experience/
13-Nov-2020	'It was a Mistake': Abolitionism, Revision, and Mark Twain's 'A Scrap of Curious History' Journal articles Mark Twain Annual 18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0065 An essay that examines the surviving manuscript of Mark Twain's “A Scrap of Curious History,” an unfinished attempt to write fiction about abolitionist activity in antebellum Missouri that was initiated not by memory but by his witnessing a backlash to anarchist uprisings in France in 1894.
24-Aug-2020	Encoding and Analysis, and Encoding as Analysis, in Textual Editing Chapters Co-authored with Charlotte Tupman. In the Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities, edited by Stuart Dunn and Kristen Schuster (Taylor & Francis).
15-Nov-2019	Melville's Historical Imagination in 'The House-top' Chapters Collected in "This Mighty Convulsion": Melville and Whitman Write the Civil War, ed. Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman (University of Iowa Press). An essay that examines Melville's doubleness in his Civil War poem, "The House-top"––which shows an ingenious combination of literary allusion, historical source study, and prosody.
24-Apr-2019	The Making of an Anti-Slavery Anthology: Mary-Anne Rawson and The Bow in the Cloud Articles This online article examines the unexplored textual history and social network surrounding The Bow in the Cloud, an anti-slavery anthology published in 1834 in Great Britain.
25-Feb-2019	Review of American Literature and the New Puritan Studies Review The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographic Society 7.20.1 (March 2019).
15-Feb-2019	Melville Incomplete Journal articles American Literary History 31.1 (Spring 2019). **Winner of the 2020/21 Boydston Essay Prize** This essay considers the difficult choices editors must now make in the era of digital editions by examining the final Northwestern Newberry edition of Melville's Billy Budd and Other Uncompleted Works.
07-Jan-2019	Billy Budd, Sailor: A Fluid-Text Edition Edited Book The first digital edition of Melville's final, uncompleted novella contains various edited units that give the reader unprecedented access to the Billy Budd manuscript. On view are MEL’s edition, with its textual, contextual, and revision annotations, links to collations of MEL’s base version and reading text and projected collations of the 20th-century versions of Billy Budd, and a display of all leaf images of the Billy Budd manuscript.
01-Jun-2018	At the Axis of Reality: Melville's Marginalia in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare Journal articles Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 20.2 (June 2018). An examination (co-written with Steven Olsen-Smith and Elisa Barney Smith) of Herman Melville's marginalia in his 7-volume set of Shakespeare using digital techniques.
01-Jun-2018	Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online Journal articles Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 20.2 (June 2018). An introduction (co-written with Steven Olsen-Smith) to a special issue of Leviathan that I guest-edited on using digital text analysis techniques to study marginalia. In addition to co-writing a lengthy article on Melville's marginalia in Shakespeare, I also edited articles on––and wrote R and XSLT code for––Melville's marginalia in Chapman's Homer and Milton.
31-Aug-2017	Mark Twain: April Fool, 1884 Edited Book Scholarly Editing 38 (2017). A digital edition and network analysis (co-edited with Leslie Myrick) of April Fools letters written to Mark Twain as part of a hoax perpetrated by the novelist George Washington Cable in 1884.
31-Jul-2017	Melville’s Late Readings and the Revisions in the Billy Budd Manuscript Chapters In Critical Insights: Billy Budd, edited by Brian Yothers (Salem Press, 2017).
15-Oct-2015	Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3 Edited Book (As associate editor). University of California Press, 2015 (with etext on marktwainproject.org).
01-May-2014	‘Lest we get too transcendental’: Christopher Pearse Cranch’s Changes of Mind in ‘Journal. 1839’ Articles Scholarly Editing 35 (2014). A critical introduction to the electronic edition of the Transcendentalist poet and artist Christopher Cranch's 1839 Journal.
01-May-2014	'Journal. 1839', by Christopher Pearse Cranch Edited Book Scholarly Editing 35 (2014). This is born-digital edition consists of a diplomatic transcription of Cranch's important travel journal (with manuscript images), which also includes draft caricatures of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
01-Mar-2014	The Authorship of the ‘F—’ Story, Re-examined Articles Notes & Queries 61.1 (March 2014). This short article argues for the linguistic parallels between the anonymous "F--" story and Samuel Beckett's early published prose.
01-Jan-2012	Melville’s Marginalia in Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism Edited Book Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis Marnon (launched 2012). Introduction: <http://melvillesmarginalia.org/intro.aspx?id=42> Edited book: <http://melvillesmarginalia.org/PreviewMode.aspx?DocumentID=42>
01-Oct-2008	A Transcription of Melville’s Marginalia in Christopher Marlowe’s Works and Selections from Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare Articles Co-authored with Steven Olsen-Smith and Dennis C. Marnon. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 10.3 (October 2008, special issue).

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
Mary Anne Rawson’s The Bow in the Cloud and The Network of Anti-Slavery in Britain Institute of English Studies Project period: 01-Mar-2018 - 30-May-2018 Research interests: History of the book
Herman Melville Electronic Library I have been contributing to this project since 2010, and in 2019 was named the Associate Director. Having recently released the digital fluid text edition of Billy Budd, Sailor, I am starting to work on the Melville family correspondence project.
Mary Anne Rawson’s The Bow in the Cloud and The Networks of Anti-Slavery Print Culture in Britain This digital archive project started in 2018 with a John Rylands Research Institute Digital Humanities Project Start-up Grant, and is now being supported by a 2023 NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication. The project reveals hitherto unknown details about the publication of the 1834 antislavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, and examines its impact on other antislavery publications until 1865, including the last campaign by the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.
Melville's Marginalia Online Serving as an associate editor, I am working with a group of interns to encode and publish searchable editions of Melville's seven volumes of books by the German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Current PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 04-Oct-2021 Until:	Researching perspectives and methods to develop a more sustainable and accessible Catalogue Raisonné The research explores the following: Catalogue Raisonné History, Historical Publishing, Digital Catalogue Raisonné Database Platforms, Interface Design (UI UX), Database Approaches, Object-Oriented Programming, Users Perspectives, Archival Studies, Primary Source Material, Interviews, Accessibility, Open Access, Metadata (Marc standards, AACR2, RDA, SCIPIO, LCSH/LC), Finding Tools, Preservation, Copyright, Creative Common, Sustainable Strategies, Affiliations, Qualitative Case Study with the Ted Stamm Catalogue Raisonné and a Quantitative sample data research survey.
From: 01-Sep-2021 Until:	Implicit Histories: Decoding the 1921 Archive A LAHP-funded Collaboratice Doctoral Award, in partnership with findmypast.com, examining taboo in the 1921 census.  Historians have long sought to recover marginalized voices and experiences, and the popularity of genealogical websites such as Findmypast (FMP) demonstrates the public appetite for understanding these histories better. This studentship is framed around the centenary release of the 1921 census, which FMP is digitising in partnership with the National Archives for a major public launch in January 2022, the largest release of UK census data in a generation. FMP, which partners with more than 400 archives, has identified a public need around the interpretation of ambiguous historical language conventions, especially euphemism, in the official records. Newspapers and other contemporary contexts help supplement socially coded phrases used to conceal experiences once considered ‘taboo.’ The student will have an unequalled opportunity to access back-end datasets at FMP from October 2021 and will work with literary historians and data scientists to reduce the opacity in textual archives, deciphering the conventions and euphemisms of previous generations to make them easy to understand for anyone researching today. The project will identify patterns such as coded phrases used in different records, and repeated patterns in census and other connected data, that once uncovered will help reveal unwritten histories buried in the archives.
From: 01-Sep-2020 Until:	The Early Reception of Ernest Hemingway, (1925-35): Masculinity, Nationality, and the Construction of an Icon “The Early Reception of Ernest Hemingway, (1925-35): Masculinity, Nationality, and the Construction of an Icon” seeks to show how, when, and why the received wisdoms of Hemingway's 'Americanness' came to existence. The thesis challenges the established, undisputed notion of Hemingway primarily writing as an American-abroad by foregrounding the multi-cultural elements in Hemingway’s prose and his in-depth international cultural encounters that the reception has overlooked up until this point. By exploring Hemingway’s reception, then, another story emerges that precedes Ernest Hemingway and speaks to a wider twentieth-century American phenomenon: the issue of the construction of American identity, its legitimacy, and its defining characteristics that according to critics manifest themselves in Hemingway’s prose.

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Professional Affiliations

Professional affiliations:

Name	Activity
Melville Society

Collaborations:

Name	Type	Activity	Start date	End date
eLaboratories, Center for Digital Editing, University of Virginia	Core Faculty Member and Board Member	Research Training, Digital Pedagogy	27-Jul-2020
Mapping Humanities in the UK	Board member		01-Aug-2022	01-Nov-2023

Consultancy & Media

Media experience:

Yes

Back to top