Em Nordling is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Emory University, where they study Digital Humanities, and the literary intersections of 19th-century crowds and histories of quantification. In addition to their almost decade of experience in digital archives and research management, they currently work as Graduate Research Assistant at the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI (AIAI) Network and Editorial Assistant at the Post45 Data Collective. They formerly served as Operations Coordinator for Emory’s Graduate English Advisory Committee, Research Data Associate at Sounding Spirit Research Lab, and reviewer/essayist at Tor.com.

Em’s past work picked up themes of protest and collective action from numerous perspectives—from digital archives, to creative writing, to on-the-ground activist and social justice research support. Now, as a scholar, Em has turned to British literature of the long nineteenth century to understand how the period’s burgeoning theories of quantification, population, and race science impacted representations of protest crowds. In an era of industrialization, urbanization, and revolution, fear of mass uprising mingled with fears of overpopulation and racial degeneration. Crowds were discussed simultaneously as statistics, and as what Thomas Carlyle describes as a “flood of savages” descending the evolutionary ladder. In their dissertation, Ciphering the “World Chimera:” Crowds & the Racial Imagination in Britain’s Long Nineteenth Century, Em argues that these seemingly disparate ideas—of crowd as either number or destructive, racialized body—are linked by an unarticulated connection between narrative and statistical abstraction. Using both literary and quantitative text analytics, they scrutinize what it means to “fix” or define humans and humanistic production by quantity alone.