Dave Thieme

Thieme
Research Interests: Contemporary American Literature, Digital Humanities, New Media, Critical Theory

Biography

Dave holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and came to the Department while taking courses as a student-at-large while employed in Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory.  He became convinced that discussions of interpretive and critical theory of texts within the English classroom could offer new avenues into the study of algorithmic language comprehension—the question of why and how humans find patterns of meaning in texts that machines cannot recognize.  His dissertation will therefore focus on the difference between machine and human generated textual production and interpretation, how this difference manifests itself in close reading of texts themselves, and a general theory of textual complexity that hopes to begin to explain why nonhuman cognitive agents find certain aspects of texts difficult to understand or reproduce.