Faculty Research Fellow
Alan Galey’s research and teaching are located at the intersection of media studies, the history of books and reading, and the digital humanities. His current primary research is a project called Bibliographic Methods for Born-Digital Texts: From Paratext to Performance. He has won awards for both his teaching and research, including the 2013 Bowers Prize for best article in the field of textual studies, and directed the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture.
Fellowship Research Project: The Philology of Streams: Understanding Digital Texts with Complex Histories
How does the modern idea of content obscure the complex natures and histories of digital texts? The illusion of perfectly transmissible content has long been familiar to scholars who work with print and manuscript texts with complex transmission and publication histories. Digitized and born-digital texts have histories as well, and the philological disciplines (e.g. textual criticism, scholarly editing, book history, bibliography) give us a unique set of tools to recover those histories. Using these tools to analyze streaming platforms alongside the curation work of fan communities can help us to see within the black boxes of digital platforms.