Senior Fellow in Research Area 5: "Building Digital Communities"

July 2025

Herman Melville and the Digital Humanities: Material Texts, Computation and Al in a Broken World

For his fellowship period, Christopher Ohge will primarily work on a book project under contract with Bloomsbury (titled Herman Melville and the Digital Humanities: Codes, Computation, and the Material Text), as well as continuing to contribute to the Melville Electronic Library, the digital scholarly edition of Melville which he co-directs. The major thrust of this research is to both demonstrate various digital approaches to the textual legacy of the 19th century cosmopolitan writer Herman Melville and to show how these analyses can foreground humanistic thinking in the age of AI. The project aims to elucidate how the classical (or pre-digital) mathematical concept of computation was essential to Melville's aesthetic sensibility, and that Melville's relentless interest in unconventional ways of reading and writing translates into a form of worldly literacy and literary language model. This trend toward an Informatik –– or an information science–– has hitherto not been studied in detail. Using data that has been curated by Melville's Marginalia Online and the Melville Electronic Library for roughly the past two decades, this collaborative research model uses mixed methods––textual editing, book history, data analysis, corpus linguistics, aesthetics and artificial intelligence––to model Melville's complex thought and the global impact of his writing.

Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the Institute of English Studies and Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He serves as the co-director of the Melville Electronic Library, and has also contributed to scholarly editions such as the Melville’s Marginalia Online and the Mark Twain Papers & Project. He has taught in the MA programme in the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies since 2017 and has convened additional courses at the London Rare Books School. He is the author of the book Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (2021) and other writings on Herman Melville, textual editing and digital humanities. In 2023 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation to complete a digital edition of the 1834 British anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud (available at https://antislavery-anthologies.org/books/bow-in-the-cloud/index).