about me

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Alex Christie, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Digital Prototyping at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. He teaches digital prototyping, videogame design, digital media production, project management, modernist (twentieth-century) literature, and digital humanities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is the recipient of Brock University’s 2019 Award for Excellence in Teaching for Early Career Faculty. His research areas include spatial humanities, genetic criticism (manuscript studies), modernist studies (twentieth-century literature), the digital humanities, and digital pedagogy. In 2020, he completed a six-year term on the Executive Board of the Modernist Studies Association as its first Chair of Technology and Infrastructure.


Research Area: Digital Textuality

Modern Manuscripts. Media studies. Humanities computing.

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My research in the area of digital textuality examines where modernist (twentieth-century) authors experimented with proto-digital editing methods in the first half of the twentieth century. Such methods evolved alongside twentieth-century media and influenced the design of early computing machines, charting a line of influence between twentieth century novelists and early humanities computing. I recover these lost connections between literature and computing in my monograph, Paper Processors. I am also prototyping a series of innovative reading environments that draw upon these lost experiments in digital writing. Incorporating techniques from videogame design and machine learning (AI), these prototypes explore new models for the electronic book (ebook).

Prototypes

Publications

Grants


Research Area: Spatial Humanities

Geospatial Criticism. Cultural Critique. 3D Data Visualization.

Z-Axis research is a mapping project that uses warped 3D maps to interpret modernist literature, rather than impose GIS-specific space on texts that predate digital mapping. This project’s z-axis method uses data from modernist novels to warp archival maps from the modern period in 3D. The results visualize the spatial experience of the modern city as represented by a given novel, considering marginal and incomplete perspectives on the ground, rather than top-down or totalizing views from above. This project was first conceived by myself and Katie Tanigawa.

Prototypes

Z-axis Map of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (Paris 1936)

Z-axis map of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Dublin, 1922)

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Legacy Mapping Tool

Publications

Grants


Research Area: Digital Pedagogy

Digital Pedagogy. Open Source Repository. Social Knowledge Creation.

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Access Pedagogy Toolkit at pedagogy-toolkit.org

Pedagogy Toolkit is an open source and community-driven repository of teaching materials, community-authored guides to teaching with DH tools, and open access syllabuses and a syllabus templating tool. This project applies an open source philosophy to course development, offering a platform for pedagogues to share, author, and develop digital activities and teaching platforms. The repository serves as a contact zone where tool developers and a range of humanities pedagogues can contribute their expertise. All content is free to use for any non-commercial purpose, including open source code for authoring teaching and project websites with no funds or technical expertise required. This project is powered by Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

Publications

Grants


Teaching Award

In 2019, I received Brock University’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for Early Career Faculty. This University-wide award is given annually to one Tenure-Track Faculty member.

Read the announcement


International Service

Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Executive Board

From 2014-2020, I served on the Executive Board of the Modernist Studies Association as it Webmaster (2014-2018) and then its first Chair of Technology and Infrastructure (2018-2020).

Conference Websites Created