For this year's annual Donald R. Benson Memorial Lecture, Ryan Cordell will join us from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to present his lecture entitled "The Most Wonderful Invention of the Age: What 19th Century Print Tech Hype Can Teach Us About AI." The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 10th at 4:00pm in Curtiss Hall 0127. 

Ryan Cordell is 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 across disciplines on the Viral Texts project (https://viraltexts.org), which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. In 2020, Cordell published a whitepaper for the Library of Congress about the present and future of machine learning methods for libraries. Cordell holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Freie University Berlin, 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 (https://skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu).