The SF Nexus

The vast majority of twentieth-century literature remains undigitized, unavailable for access online even for the purposes of data analysis. The field of “distant reading” in literary criticism remains dependent upon impoverished datasets that are not representative of book history, especially mass-market genre fiction. We began a digitization project of mass-market science fiction at Temple University Libraries in the fall of 2017. We are currently expanding the project to include a range of special collections around the country with science fiction holdings…..

Author

Alex Wermer-Colan as the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Temple University Libraries' Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, formerly known as the Digital Scholarship Center where Alex held a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship. His Ph.D. in English involved a specialization in critical theory and natural language processing with a focus on twentieth-century Euro-American culture. At Temple Libraries, he has collaborated with librarians, archivists, students, faculty on an ongoing digitization project of mass-market science fiction. Alex regularly advises and collaborates with faculty and students on text mining projects for curating library collections as data, conducting research in fields of cultural analytics and web studies, and training graduate students in emerging methods in interdisciplinary research and teaching.