Head over to Digital Humanities Quarterly to read some new writing from me!

Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces: From The Digital To The Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press; 2014) was an important book for me during the end of my dissertation-writing work, and I’ve come to use excerpts from the book regularly in courses I’ve taught on Digital Public Humanities and Digital Storytelling here at Brown. I asked if I could review it for Digital Humanities Quarterly so I could share the ways Emerson’s work has made me think differently about digital interfaces: what they promise users, what those promises often do to conceal and limit our imagined uses of technology, and how artists electronic literature have made creative work out of these limitations and conditions.

I had a lot of fun writing this book review, and I look forward to doing more writing in this vein. I’ve struggled for years to develop the “right” voice to use in “academic” writing, and the occasion of a book review for a supportive journal gave me some confidence and imagined leeway to write about popular culture, tell jokes, and reveal my personality a bit. Sometimes I feel like I was a few years too early (or maybe a few departments too removed from American Studies) to feel comfortable while writing stuff like this. I’ve still been doing some writing in more “traditional” academic styles and modes (though some of this work has also been collaborative writing, which has been fun and different in certain ways), but I do prefer this sort of thing. I was appreciative of the kind words people said about my writing on Infinite Jest and ebooks, which is in a similar mode.