Mark Algee-Hewitt

Mark Algee-Hewitt is the Associate Director of the Data Science for Artistic and Cultural Analysis program. As a leader on the faculty committee that spearheaded the creation of the subplan, he is excited to be a part of this new option for students: it is what he would have wanted to major in had it existed when he was an undergraduate.

In absence of this program, Mark’s undergraduate degrees were in Computer Science and Literature, and he has an MA in aesthetic philosophy and a PhD in Literary Study. Now Mark is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at Stanford University. The director of both Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and the Stanford Literary Lab, his work applies computational methodologies to the study of cultural and aesthetic objects, focusing particularly on patterns of language in large corpora of texts. Trained primarily in the analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature in English and German, as well as in computer science, his research has grown to investigate the covert patterns of language use in the contemporary media ecology that governs our world.

Mark’s interest in applying computation and statistics to the study of humanities questions lie in how these methods change our understanding of literature and art as cultural objects. They let us ask new kinds of questions at different scales than we could before. At the Literary Lab, he has led research into such diverse topics as the history of domesticity in the novel, the relationship between authors and writers in online fan fiction communities, the ability of climate fiction to teach real-world environmental facts to readers through fictional narratives, and the use of racialized language in American literature.

Whether at school or outside of it, Mark can usually be found with a book in his hand: reading is one of his chief passions. He also enjoys swimming and listening to or playing music.