James E. Dobson is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where he has been teaching in the humanities since 2012 and researching computational methods since 2003. His interests and publications span a wide range of topics, from accessing computational and data resources on large, distributed computing networks to autobiographical self-representation in American literature. Most recently, he has focused on computer vision, computational hermeneutics, and the history of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
He is the author of three books: Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave, 2017), Critical Digital Humanities (University of Illinois Press, 2019), and The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). He is also co-author, with Rena J. Mosteirin, of the critical code study and poetic interpretation of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer titled Moonbit (punctum books, 2019), and Perceptron (punctum books, 2025), a creative and critical account of the perceptron—one of the earliest and most successful machine learning devices—and its inventor, Frank Rosenblatt.
