Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

You’re invited: Digital Humanities Day hosted by Libraries and School of Information Studies on Tuesday, April 7

March 25th, 2026

You’re invited to join us for Digital Humanities (DH) Day, hosted by Libraries and School of Information Studies, on Tuesday, April 7. The event will run from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM, with a featured talk at 10:30 AM in Stewart Center, Room 202.

This half-day conference celebrates creative and critical approaches to digital scholarship. Topics will range from online discourses around AI and disability to reconstructing complex networks of historical diplomacy and bilingual education.

Agenda

• 8:30 AM: Welcome and networking, refreshments provided
• 9:00–10:00 AM: Student presentations by DH certificate candidates
  • Diana Torres Arias, Comparative Literature
  • Loizos Bitsikokos, Communication
  • Lane Matthew Bradley, Communication
  • Marlene Burtscher, Linguistics
  • Priya Makarand Dabak, Curriculum and Instruction
  • Cathy Kerton-Johnson, History
  • Daeun Kang, Linguistics
  • EmmaRose Milburn, Anthropology and History
  • Kostiantyn Moharychev, History
• 10:00–10:15 AM: Student Q&A
• 10:15–10:30 AM: Break
• 10:30–11:30 AM: Keynote address by Ryan Cordell

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.