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March 25th, 2026
Join us on Tuesday, April 7 for Digital Humanities (DH) Day, a half-day conference exploring creative and critical approaches to digital scholarship. The event will run from 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM with a featured talk at 10:30 AM in Stewart Center, Room 202.
Agenda
This year’s keynote speaker, Associate Professor Ryan Cordell (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), will present “Anemoia, AI, and Skeuomorphism: The Material Turn in Digital Humanities.” His talk explores a growing interest in analog and “dead media” practices—such as printing presses, typewriters, and other tactile forms—as a response to today’s increasingly AI-driven digital landscape. Rather than resisting technology, this “material turn” highlights hands-on, creative practices as a way to think critically about digital tools and emphasize human choice, design, and agency.
We hope you’ll join us for a morning of ideas, discussion, and community!
About Ryan Cordell
Ryan Cordell is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cordell primarily studies circulation and reprinting in nineteenth-century American newspapers, but his interests extend to the influence of computation, digitization, and machine learning on contemporary reading, writing, and research. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. Cordell serves as a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and also directs UIUC’s Skeuomorph Press & BookLab.
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