The Viral Texts team is currently working on a hybrid digital-print book project, Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers through the University of Minnesota’s Manifold Scholarship Initiative. We have just published two draft chapters online with Manifold Scholarship:
- David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell, “Textual Criticism as Language Modeling”
- Jonathan D. Fitzgerald and Ryan Cordell, “Classifying Vignettes, Modeling Hybridity”.
From the beginning, Viral Texts has been a collaborative project and it was important to us all that our book reflect that collaboration—each chapter is being written by the team members who worked on a respective facet of the project, including faculty and (now former) graduate research assistants.
It’s been harder to write a book this way, particularly as brilliant grad students such as Abby Mullen and Jonathan Fitzgerald have defended dissertations and gone on to be brilliant in other jobs at other institutions. Despite these challenges, we hope the final book will (we hope) better reflect the project’s ethos than a monograph could.
We are still working on a readable, resource-light method for displaying the all the reprints of each texts we reference and for enlarging our graphs, but in the meantime we have transcribed one witness of each text we discuss—these are available as resources as you read the chapters.