Let us say that knowledge (moral, scientific, novelistic, poetic) existed in the past in forms which are somewhat obscure to us now. Can we use digital tools to give us apertures onto these forms that we did not have before? My two main research and teaching interests- the digital and eighteenth-century European literature, intersect in their enquiries in these areas. 

The two 'Literature and the Digital' courses at Royal Holloway do more than add what John Naughton has called 'power steering for the humanities'. They are designed to show how the use of digital tools, from smart phones and tablets to algorithms and network visualisations, can make a qualitative change to reading, writing and interpreting literature. 

Students are required to ask themselves: has the digital produced a type of knowdge that is new in kind? What aesthetic or intellectual affordances do the many forms of digital technology make us as we read and interpret; as we think about and indeed compose beautiful writing?