Paul Fyfe

Bio

My research and teaching include British Victorian literature, nineteenth-century book and media history, digital humanities, and AI. Published work is mostly available at the links below. My new book is called Digital Victorians, a long history of digital humanities based in nineteenth-century media cultures (Stanford University Press, Oct 2024). As a Co-PI on NC State’s new humanities research center on AI, I focus on the ethics of language models. I’m also working with colleagues on using multimodal AI on the analysis and discovery of nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers.

Previous digital research projects have included Oceanic Exchanges which tracked information flow across international nineteenth-century newspaper networks; Illustrated Image Analytics which experimented with how computer vision can search and sort Victorian periodical illustrations; Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) with colleagues in linguistics; and Victoria’s Lost Pavilion which virtually reconstructed Queen Victoria’s garden pavilion as a three-dimensional model. At NC State, I’m also part of the CRDM PhD program, the Visual Narrative interdisciplinary cluster, and the graduate certificate in digital humanities.

I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in the English department and first-year seminars in the University’s Honors program. These courses cover British Victorian literature (e.g. the Victorian survey, Major British Authors, the Nineteenth-Century Novel) or else bridge that literature with contemporary cultural change (e.g. Victorian Media Studies, Reading in the Digital Age, Introduction to Digital Humanities, Science Fiction). When possible, these courses offer hands-on experiences in historical and contemporary text technologies, such as learning to sew book bindings, developing research projects on humanities data sets, or trying critical making projects in the NCSU Libraries’ Makerspace. I also advise PhD students from the CRDM program as well as from UNC and Duke.

Find additional details in my CV (linked above).

Social: https://bsky.app/profile/pfyfe.bsky.social on Bluesky

Funded Research

Co-PI, “Embedding AI in Society Ethically (EASE).” Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence Grant, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2025-28.

Project member, “Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press.” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant, 2023-24.

ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2018-2019.

Project member, “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914 (OcEx).” Digging into Data Transatlantic Partnership Grants, 2017-2019. http://oceanicexchanges.org/

Project member, “Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE): Developing an Integrated Speech Corpus Analysis system for assessing stability and change in spoken Cross-Atlantic English.” Digging into Data Transatlantic Partnership Grants, 2017-2018. http://spade.glasgow.ac.uk/

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2015-2017. Senior Fellow 2017-.

PI, “Visual Analytics for Large-Scale Collections of Texts.” Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, North Carolina State University, 2016.

PI, “Victoria’s Lost Pavilion: Reconstructing the Arts in Digital Space.” CHASS Scholarship and Research Award, 2014. http://pavilion.chass.ncsu.edu/

PI, “Tracking Networks, Tracing Genre in Historical Text Bases.” Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, North Carolina State University, 2014-2015.

Publications

Books

Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. https://www.sup.org/books/literary-studies-and-literature/digital-victorians

with Antony Harrison, David Hill, Sharon Joffe, and Sharon Setzer. Victoria’s Lost Pavilion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781349951949 (pre-print of Chapter 5 “Radiant Virtuality”)

By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. (Paperback edition 2020) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/by-accident-or-design-9780198732334

Articles and Chapters

Keck, Jana, Mila Oiva, and Paul Fyfe. “Lajos Kossuth and the Transnational News: A Computational and Multilingual Approach to Digitized Newspaper Collections.” Media History (2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2022.2146905

“How to Cheat on Your Final Paper: Assigning AI for Student Writing.” AI & Society (2022) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z

“Access, Computational Analysis, and Fair Use in the Digitized Nineteenth-Century Press.” Victorian Periodicals Review 51.4 (2018): 716-37. (web copy)

“Reading, Making, and Metacognition: Teaching Digital Humanities for Transfer.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/2/000394/000394.html

“Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018) https://doi.org/10.22148/16.026

“Scale.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3-4 (2018): 848-51. (preprint)

“An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers.” Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016): 546-577. (web copy) (NAVSA Donald Gray Prize)

“A Great Exhibition of Print: Illustrated London News Supplement Sheet (1851).” Special issue “Object Lessons: The Victorians and the Material Text,” Cahiers Victoriens et Eduardiens 84 (2016). http://cve.revues.org/2928

“‘Data Copperfield’: A Pedagogical Experiment in Distributed Collaboration.” Co-written with Richard Menke. Journal of Victorian Culture 21.4 (2016). (free access)

“Mid-Sized Digital Pedagogy.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 104-117. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/62

“Technologies of Serendipity.” Victorian Periodicals Review 48.2 (2015): 261-266. (web copy)

“1862, Accidental Death: Lizzie Siddal and the Poetics of the Coroner’s Inquest.” Victorian Review 40.2 (2014): 17-22. (web copy)

“The Scholarly Monograph Unbound.” Literature Compass 10.8 (2013): 643-654. (preprint)

“Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in the Illustrated London News.” Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (2013): 61-91. (web copy) (INCS Essay Prize)

“The Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (2012). Web. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=paul-fyfe-on-the-opening-of-the-liverpool-and-manchester-railway-1830

“Electronic Errata: Digital Publishing, Open Review, and the Futures of Correction.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 259-280. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/4

“Digital Pedagogy Unplugged.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.3 (2011). Web. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000106/000106.html

“How to Not Read a Victorian Novel.” Journal of Victorian Culture 16.1 (2011): 102-106. (preprint)

“Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.3 (2010): 315-346.

“The Random Selection of Victorian New Media.” Victorian Periodicals Review 42.1 (2009): 1-23. (web copy) (RSVP Rosemary VanArsdel Prize)

Online edition of “Mrs. Holmes Grey” by William Michael Rossetti. The Rossetti Archive. Ed. Jerome McGann. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/wmrossetti014.raw.html