Professor Katherine Bode
Research interests
- Digital Humanities, Computational Literary Studies, Data-Rich Literary History
- Book History, Publishing Studies, Reading and Reception Studies
- Australian Literature, Literature in Australia, Literary Cultures
Biography
Professor Bode completed a PhD in English at the University of Queensland in 2006, and prior to arriving at ANU, held an ARC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2007–10) at the University of Sydney and a lectureship in English at the University of Tasmania.
Appointed to the ANU's Centre for Digital Humanities Research (then the Digital Humanities Hub) in 2011, Professor Bode headed the Centre from 2011 to 2013. In 2013 she was awarded an ARC-funded Discovery Project to explore Australian and international fiction in digitised 19th-century Australian newspapers (2013–16), and in 2016 moved to a continuing appointment in ANU's School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. She has subsequently received other ARC grants to extend her exploration of newspaper fiction, including a Special Research Initiative, in 2020, to investigate 20th century newspapers, and a Discovery Grant in 2023, to explore Irishness in Australian literature. From 2018 to 2023 Katherine was an ARC-funded Future Fellow, for a project exploring the relationship computing, reading and writing in literary studies.
Katherine is author of books including A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018) and Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012) and editor of other projects including "Data Worlds" (the inaugural special issue of Critical AI), "To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database" (a digital platform, launched in 2018), the edited collections Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014) and Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Studies (2009), and "Reading," a special issue of Australian Literary Studies pubilshed in 2007.
Researcher's projects
From 2018 to 2023 I am funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for a project entitled "Reading at the Interface: Literatures, Cultures, Technologies." This project aims to use new, extensive digital evidence of reception to progress a central insight of cultural criticism: that meaning is not carried by texts but produced in interactions between texts, contexts, and readers. It will create an interactive digital platform to connect scholarly work in Australian literary studies to public discussions of literature, enrich reading experiences and provide a vehicle for literary research that engages diverse publics and enhances understanding of Australian literature. Read more about the project here.
From 2013 to 2016 I was funded by an ARC Discovery Project for "To be continued," which aimed to explore fiction in historical Australian newspapers. By analysing the millions of newspaper pages digitised by the National Library of Australia‘s Trove database, I discovered over 21,000 publications of fiction in Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These stories came from across the globe, including Britain, America and Australia, as well as France, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Exploring their circulation and contents provides new insights into how literature travelled globally in this period, and the consequences of this movement for literary, reading, and cultural history. This project also motivated a reconsideration of the relationship of literary history to the archive in this age of digital remediation. Find more information about the project here.
In 2020, the "To be continued" project was supported by another ARC grant, a Special Research Initiative, to continue discovering and exploring fiction in Australian newspapers, this time with a focus on 20th-century publications. That project, called "Read all about it" also investigates public participation in literary curation and digital library collections and creates digital infrastructure for Australian literary studies and the National Library of Australia. In December 2023, I will begin another ARC funded project, with Professor Ronan McDonald and Associate Professor Maggie Nolan, called "Irishness in Australian Literature."
More information about my projects as well as links to my publications and a full cv are available here.
Available student projects
I am available to supervise PhD, Masters and Honours projects that employ computational methods to explore research questions in literary studies, reception studies and/or book history, or use humanities methods to explore computational technologies, infrastrucutres, and cultures.
Current student projects
Chair of Panel/Primary Supervisor:
Galen Cuthbertson, Artifacts of Interpretation: Machine Learning in the Study of Literary Reception
Neil Hogan, Locating Fiction: Retrieval, Analysis and Critiques of Speculative Fiction Subgenres from Twentieth Century Newspapers
Fiannuala Morgan, Visualising Australia’s Literary Imaginary
Miriam Potter, An Ecocritical Reading of Patrick White
Supervisor:
Charlotte Bradley, Imaginative Methods: Exploring and Evaluating Creative Futures-Oriented Methods for Engaging Publics in the Responsible Scaling of Cyber-Physical Systems
Past student projects
Chair of Panel:
Tobi Evans, Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Masculinities in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire
Supervisor:
Publications
- Bode, K 2023, 'What's the Matter with Computational Literary Studies?', Critical Inquiry, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 507-529.
- Bode, K 2023, 'Doing (Computational) Literary Studies', New Literary History, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 531-558.
- Bode, K 2021, 'Data Worlds: Patterns, Structures, Libraries', in Debjani Ganguly (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 765-786.
- Bode, K 2021, 'The Difference an Editor Makes', Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 401-404.
- Bode, K 2020, 'Why You Can't Model Away Bias', Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 95-124.
- McLean Davies, L, Bode, K, Martin, S et al. 2020, 'Reading in the (post)digital age: Large databases and the future of literature in secondary English classrooms', English in Education, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 299-315.
- Bode, K 2019, 'Large, Vigorous and Thriving: Early Australian Publishing and Futures of Publishing Studies', in Millicent Weber & Aaron Mannion (ed.), Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 1 - 28.
- Bode, K 2019, 'Computational Literary Studies: Participant Forum Responses, Day 3', Critical Inquiry, no. April 2019: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/computational-literary-studies-participant-forum-responses-day-3-2/
- Bode, K 2019, 'Computational Literary Studies: Participant Forum Responses, Day 2', Critical Inquiry, no. April 2019: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/computational-literary-studies-participant-forum-responses-day-2-3/
- Bode, K 2019, 'Computational Literary Studies: Participant Forum Responses, Day 1', Critical Inquiry, no. April 2019, online: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/computational-literary-studies-participant-forum-responses-2/
- Bode, K 2018, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History, University of Michigan Press, United States.
- Bode, K 2018, To Be Continued: Discovering Serialized Fiction in Trove's Digitized Newspapers, National Library of Australian blog, https://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove/2018/02/28/to-be-continued
- Hinchcliffe, G & Bode, K 2018, 'To be continued: Collections as collaborations', Digital Humanities Australasia conference 2018, Digital Humanities Australasia, Australia.
- Bode, K 2017, 'The Equivalence of "Close" and "Distant" Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History', Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 77-106.
- Bode, K 2017, 'Fictional Systems: Mass-Digitization, Network Analysis, and Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspapers', Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 100-138.
- Bode, K & Hetherington, C 2017, To Be Continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database, http://cdhrdatasys.anu.edu.au/tobecontinued/
- Bode, K, ed., 2017, How I Pawned My Opals and Other Lost Stories by Catherine Martin, Obiter Publishing, Australia.
- Bode, K 2017, 'From Adelaide To Genoa: Locating Catherine Martin's Lost Fiction', in Katherine Bode (ed.), How I Pawned My Opals and Other Lost Stories by Catherine Martin, Obiter Publishing, Australia, pp. i-xiv.
- Bode, K 2017, 'Part I: Book History: Australia', in Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950, Oxford University Press, United Kingdom.
- Bode, K 2017, 'Literature as Olympic Event?: Understanding the Scoreboard for Australian Women's Writing', eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 89-93.
- Bode, K 2017, 'A response to some responses.' Blog: https://katherinebode.wordpress.com/a-response-to-some-responses/
- Bode, K 2016, 'Thousands of Titles Without Authors: Digitized Newspapers, Serial Fiction, and the Challenges of Anonymity', Book History, vol. 18.
- Bode, K & Hetherington, C 2015, 'Retrieving a world of fiction: Building an index - and an archive - of serialized novels in Australian newspapers, 1850-1914', Script and Print, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 197-211.
- Bode, K & Hetherington C 2015, 'Retrieving a World of Fiction: Building an Index - and an Archive - of Serialised Novels in Australian Newspapers, 1850-1914', The Indexer, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 57-65.
- Towsey, M, Bode, K, Burrows, S et al 2015, 'Remapping Cultural History? Digital Humanities, Historical Bibliometrics, and the Reception of Print Culture', Digital Humanities 2015, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia, pp. online.
- Bode, K 2015, "To Be Continued": A World of Fiction in Australian Newspapers, pp. 62-67pp.
- Bode, K & Osborne, R 2014, 'Book History from the Archival Record', in Leslie Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, Cambridge University Press, London, pp. 219-236.
- Longley Arthur, P & Bode, K, eds, 2014, Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, London.
- Bode, K & Longley Arthur, P 2014, 'Collecting Ourselves', in Paul Longley Arthur, Katherine Bode (ed.), Advancing Digital Humanities, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, London, pp. 1-12.
- Bode, K & Murphy, T 2014, 'Methods and Canons: An Interdisciplinary Excursion', in Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode (ed.), Advancing Digital Humanities, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, London, pp. 175-193.
- Bode, K 2014, 'Mining a 'Trove': Modelling a Transnational Literary Culture', Digital Humanities 2014, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne Switzerland, pp. online.
- Bode, K 2012, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field, Anthem Press, UK.
- Bode, K & Dale, L 2012, '"Bullshit"? An Australian Perspective; or, What can an Organisational Change Impact Statement tell us about Higher Education in Australia?', Australian Humanities Review, vol. 53, no. November.
- Bode, K 2012, '"Sidelines" and Tradelines: Publishing the Australian Novel, 1860 to 1899', Book History, vol. 15, pp. 93-122.
- Bode, K 2012, 'From British Domination to Multinational Conglomeration?: A Revised Histroy of Australian Novel Publishing, 1950 to 2007', in Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal (ed.), Sold by Millions - Australia's Bestsellers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, pp. 22-45.
- Bode, K 2012, 'Modeling Gender: The 'Rise and Rise' of the Australian Women Novelist', Digital Humanities 2012, ed. Jan Christoph Meister, University of Hamburg, Germany, pp. 119-120.
- Bode, K 2011, ''we're not truckin' around': On and off-road in Samuel Wagan Watson's Smoke Encrypted Whispers', Humanities Research, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 109-119.
- Bode, K 2010, 'Publishing and Australian Literature: Crisis, Decline or Transformation?', Cultural Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 24-48.
- Bode, K 2010, 'Looking (im)properly: Women Objectifying Men's Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction', in Sarah Frantz and Katharina Rennhak (ed.), Women Constructing Men; Female novelists and their male characters, 1750-2000, Lexington Books, Lanham, pp. 185-206.
- Bode, K 2009, 'Along Gender Lines: Reassessing Relationships between Australian Novels, Gender and Genre from 1930 to 2006', Australian Literary Studies, vol. 24, no. 3-4, pp. 79-95.
- Bode, K & Dixon, R, eds, 2009, Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture, Sydney University Press, Sydney.
- Bode, K 2009, 'From British Domination to Multinational Conglomeration? A Revised History of Australian Novel Publishing, 1950 to 2007', in Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon (ed.), Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture, Sydney University Press, Sydney, pp. 194-222.
- Bode, K & Dixon, R 2009, 'Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age?', in Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon (ed.), Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture, Sydney University Press, Sydney, pp. 1-27.
- Bode, K 2008, Damaged Men Desiring Women: Male Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction, VDM Verlag, Saarbracken Germany.
- Bode, K 2008, 'Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s', Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 58, pp. 435-450.
- Bode, K 2008, 'Beyond the Colonial Present: Quantitative Analysis, "Resourceful Reading" and Australian Literary Studies', Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL), vol. N/A, no. Special Issue - The Colonial Present, pp. 184-197.
- Bode, K 2008, '"Opportunistic Transpositions and Elisions": Roger McDonald's The Ballad of Desmond Kale; or, The Fiction Question: Who Owns Stories?', Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 89-95.
- Bode, K 2008, 'Divergent convergences', Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 58, pp. 549-550.
- Bode, K 2008, 'The Aussie Battler in Crisis: Shifting Constructions of White Australian Masculinity and National Identity', in Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal (ed.), Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader, SSS Publications, New Delhi, pp. 337-57. (Republished)
- Bode, K 2006, 'Aussie Battler in Crisis? Shifting Constructions of White Australian Masculinity and National Identity', Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-18.
- Bode, K 2006, '"Unexpected Effects": Marked Men in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction', Australian Literary Studies (ALS), vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 443-59.
- Bode, K 2006, 'Reading (in/and) Miranda', Australian Literary Studies (ALS), vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 356-367.
- Bode, K & Dale, L, eds, 2006, Australian Literary Studies: Special Issue on Reading, vol. 22, no. 3.
- Bode, K 2001, 'The Pregnant Man: Gender, Identity and Sexuality in the Poetry of Dorothy Porter's "Akhenaten"', LiNQ, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 22-29.
Projects and Grants
Grants information is drawn from ARIES. To add or update Projects or Grants information please contact your College Research Office.
- Close Relations: Irishness in Australian Literature (Secondary Investigator)
- Design Justice AI (Primary Investigator)
- Read all about it: Digital participation in Australian newspaper fiction (Primary Investigator)
- Reading at the Interface: Literatures, Cultures, Technologies (Primary Investigator)
- To be continued: Exploring the world of novels in colonial periodicals (Primary Investigator)
