Headshot: James E. Dobson

James E. Dobson

Associate Professor

Appointments

Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing

Special Advisor to the Provost for AI

Director of the Writing Program

Area of Expertise

digital humanities,

digital studies,

nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literature,

American studies,

autobiography,

literary theory,

intellectual history,

computational science

Biography

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 approachestheoretical, 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."

Education

Ph.D. Indiana University

A.M. University of Chicago

B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Publications

Books

with Rena J. Mosteirin, Perceptron (punctum books, forthcoming 2025)

The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) [Reviewed in Critical AI, International Journal of CommunicationH-Net Reviews, Transbordeur, Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies]

Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2019) [Reviewed in American Literary History, Journal of Folklore ResearchChoice ReviewsLeonardo Reviews, PedagogiesJournal 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 Impersonal and Personal Data." American Literature 97, no. 3 (2025): 467-490

"Beyond Computational Formalism or, Architecture Matters," Journal of Cultural Analytics 10, no. 3 (2025).

"Early Machine Learning and Artificial Animal Intelligences," Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 57, no. 1 (2024): 63-89.

"On the Confusion Matrix," Configurations 32, no. 4 (2024): 331-350.

"On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks," International Journal of Digital Humanities 5 (2023): 431–449.

"Memorization and Memory Devices in Early Machine Learning," Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture 4 (2023): 40-49.

"La governamentalità algoritmica nella pandemia da COVID-19," ["Algorithmic Governmentality and the COVID-19 Pandemic"] Ácoma: Rivista internazionale di Studi Nordamericani 22 (2022): 186-206.

Dobson, J.E and Sanders S., "Distant Approaches to the Printed Page," Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 12, no. 1 (2022): 1-28.

"Computation and Close Reading," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 48, no. 3 (2021): 405-417.

"Vector Hermeneutics: On the Interpretation of Vector Space Models of Text," Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37, no. 1 (2022): 81-93.

"Interpretable Outputs: Criteria for Machine Learning in the Humanities," DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly  15, no. 2 (2021).

"Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson and the Campus Novel." In Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 123-141. New York: Routledge, 2016.

"Lucy Larcom and the Time of the Temporal Collapse." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 33, no. 1 (2016): 82-102.

Speaking Engagements

"Pattern Matching in Vector Space: The Ontology of Multimodal Models," SHOT: Society for the History of Technology, University of Luxembourg, Belval, Luxembourg. October 11, 2025.

"Genre and GenAI," Séminaire du médialab, Sciences Po, Paris, France. October 7, 2025.

"Demystifying the World of Artificial Intelligence," Dartmouth Club of Western Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. June 2, 2025.

"Neural Network Computing Before GPUs," Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. May 5, 2025.

"Norms, Guardrails, and Impersonal Data: Regulating Behavior in the Long AI Era," Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, Dartmouth College, January 20, 2025.

"On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks," Digital Theory Lab, New York University, New York, NY. November 15, 2024.

"New England's Transatlanticism and National Disidentification," Jewett Unbound. Paris, France, October 2024.

"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.

Contact

James.E.Dobson@dartmouth.edu
(603) 646-8612
HB 6032

Departments

English and Creative Writing