James E. Dobson
Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing
Special Advisor to the Provost for AI
Director of the Writing Program
I am a literary and cultural critic who specializes in intellectual history and U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I use a number of approaches--theoretical, historical, formalist, and computational (sometimes called "digital humanities" or "cultural analytics")--to answer persistent intellectual problems. I am thus also interested in the critical analysis of twentieth-century and contemporary computation methods including machine learning, computer vision, and various approaches to text and data mining. My first book, Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave, 2017), concerns the relation between autobiographical writing, modernity, and technology in the work of Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Adams. Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019), my second book, establishes a new theoretical paradigm through an account of new computer-aided techniques that are increasingly used in the humanities, including machine learning and text mining and their relation to literary hermeneutics and critical theory. Moonbit (punctum books, 2019), co-authored with Rena J. Mosteirin, explores the creative and critical potentials in the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code using critical code studies, erasure poetry, and critical theory. The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), my third monograph, is a genealogy of computer vision and machine learning. It traces the development of a series of important computer-vision algorithms, uncovering the ideas, worrisome military origins, and lingering goals reproduced within the code and the products based on it, and examines how these became linked to one another and repurposed for domestic and commercial uses. I have also just finished a co-authored creative and critical account of the Perceptron (Perceptron, punctum books, forthcoming), the first widely popular machine learning algorithm, and its inventor, Frank Rosenblatt. In past years I have taught courses on the digital humanities, autobiography and selfie culture, critical AI, surveys of nineteenth-century American literature, and several courses on Dartmouth literary history, including one titled "Dartmouth Fictions."
Contact
Department(s)
English and Creative Writing
Education
- Ph.D. Indiana University
- A.M. University of Chicago
- B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Selected Publications
Books
with Rena J. Mosteirin, Perceptron (punctum books, forthcoming 2024)
The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) [Reviewed in Critical AI, H-Net Reviews]
Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2019) [Reviewed in American Literary History, Journal of Folklore Research, Choice Reviews, Leonardo Reviews, Pedagogies, Journal of Web Librarianship, Journal of Literary Theory]
with Rena J. Mosteirin, Moonbit (punctum books, 2019)
Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017) [Reviewed in Biography]
Articles and Chapters
"On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks," International Journal of Digital Humanities 5 (2023): 431–449.
"Objective Vision: Confusing the Subject of Computer Vision," Social Text 41, no. 3 (2023): 35-55.
Speaking Engagements
"Memorization, Hypomnemata, and GenAI: On the New Industrialization of Knowledge," Plenary Talk, Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 2024.
"Reading Computers Watching Images," Keynote, AI and Visual Heritage, University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden, June 11, 2024.
"A Short History of Artificial Intelligence and the Automation of Vision and Text Production," Cameron University, Lawton, OK, March 29, 2024.
Panelist. Ivy+ GenAI Conference. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, November 17, 2023.
"Beyond Computational Formalism," Computational Formalism. Neukom Institute Workshop. Dartmouth College. March 31, 2023.
"Computer Vision and the Imaginary," LACK: Psychoanalytic Theory in 2023. University of Vermont, Burlington, VT. April 20-22, 2023.
"Neo-Structuralism and Subjectivity in Sentiment Analysis," CDHI International Conference 2022, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON. September 2022.
"The Return of Subjectivity to Sentiment," Stylistique outillée et analyse des émotions et sentiments en littérature. Paris, France. June 2022.
"Proxies, Tracking, and Neighbors: Belonging and Loss After Biopolitics," In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning. Dartmouth College. April 21-24, 2022.
"Necropolitics, Algorithmic Governmentality, and the COVID-19 Pandemic," Plenary Talk, Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 2021.