About

Paul Fyfe is a professor in the Department of English at NC State University, where he also serves as the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. His research and teaching encompass British Victorian literature, nineteenth-century book and media history, digital humanities, and AI. Fyfe's work explores the intersection of historical media cultures and contemporary digital technologies, with a focus on digital humanities and the ethics of language models. His recent book, 'Digital Victorians,' published by Stanford University Press in 2024, offers a long history of digital humanities rooted in nineteenth-century media cultures. Fyfe is a Co-PI on NC State's Center for AI in Society and Ethics (CASE), where he concentrates on the ethics of language models. He has led and collaborated on various digital research projects, including studies on international nineteenth-century newspaper networks, computer vision applications in Victorian periodicals, and multimodal AI analysis of illustrated newspapers. His academic contributions extend to teaching a range of undergraduate and graduate courses that bridge Victorian literature with contemporary cultural and technological change, often incorporating hands-on experiences with historical and digital text technologies. Fyfe also advises PhD students from multiple programs and institutions, contributing to the development of digital humanities scholarship and digital media studies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Meteorology
• Psychology
• Advertising
• Law
• Pedagogy
• Geology
• Social psychology
• Business
• Mathematics education
• Geography

Selected publications

• The Advent of Periodical Indexes and the Event of Victorian Studies

  Victoriographies · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When does Victorian studies begin? How does the field understand its own history? In contrast to more conventional stories about the origin of Victorian studies, this article recovers the constitutive work of bibliographers, list makers, librarians, and uncelebrated knowledge workers who envision and support the archives of a field. I demonstrate how the field forms in relation to the regeneration of nineteenth-century texts in twentieth-century mediums. Notable scholars including Walter Houghton and Michael Wolff – among the founding editors of Victorian Studies – were each involved with large bibliographic projects to document nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. But I shift the spotlight to a cohort of lesser-known scholars who recognised the potential of micropublishing and the computerisation of bibliographic records. Arguably, these projects helped to establish the infrastructure and institutional contexts in which Victorian studies continues to be practised, now in digital forms. The advent of periodical studies helps to reveal an infrastructural rather than intellectual history of Victorian studies, and to recover the uncelebrated collaborative labour that significantly shaped the field.

  PublisherDOI

• British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45 ed. by Alexis Easley (review)

  Victorian Studies · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Fully-Searchable Multimodal Dataset of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1890

  Journal of Open Humanities Data · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper introduces a dataset of 72,081 wood-engraved images extracted from the Illustrated London News (ILN) from the years 1842 to 1890. In the mid-19th century, the ILN revolutionized news consumption by combining text with high-quality wood-engraved illustrations published at scale. While digitization has facilitated text-based analysis of historical periodicals, visual content remains challenging to explore systematically. We address this gap by providing a large-scale dataset of 19th-century news illustrations and their multimodal embeddings. Our methodology involved six steps: 1) Collecting 56,699 scanned ILN pages from the Internet Archive; 2) Annotating 908 pages to finetune a YOLOv8 object detection model; 3) Using the finetuned model to extract illustrations; 4) Applying an Open-CLIP model to generate multimodal embeddings; 5) Using Tesseract OCR to convert illustration captions into machine-readable text; 6) Developing a Flask application for text and image-based multimodal retrieval. The resulting dataset and application allow flexible analysis of 19th-century visual representations of news, and suggest new avenues for research in computational humanities, media history, periodical studies, and visual culture studies. By releasing the dataset, the project code, and the embeddings, our project aims to facilitate similar efforts with other historical materials, contributing to a broader understanding of visual culture. At the same time, this paper also underscores the limitations of interpreting historical imagery with modern AI models, identifying the potential effects of bias and interpretive distortion.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digital Victorians

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2024-09-02 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution.   Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.

  PublisherDOI

• The Term Paper Turing Test: "Cheating" for AI Literacy

  The WAC Clearinghouse eBooks · 2023-08-25

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using Multimodal Machine Learning to Distant View the Illustrated World of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1900

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-06-30

  paratextOpen accessSenior author

  This paper applies multimodal machine learning (CLIP) to distant view the Illustrated London News. After extracting a sample of 874 illustrations, we use CLIP to identify maps and images of steamships. Without task- or data-specific training, CLIP can be used to quickly explore and analyze historical visual data at scale.

  PublisherDOI

• How to cheat on your final paper: Assigning AI for student writing

  AI & Society · 2022 · 182 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Mathematics education
  PublisherDOI

• Review: BibSite

  Reviews in Digital Humanities · 2022-12-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The platform is designed for scholars, instructors, professionals, and students of bibliography, in the broadest sense of the term, to easily find materials that can further their own research, teaching, and studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multilingualism and Periodical Studies: A Report from an RSVP + ESPRit Workshop

  Journal of European Periodical Studies · 2022-06-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lajos Kossuth and the Transnational News

  Media History · 2022-11-16 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The scale of newspaper digitization and emergence of computational research methods has opened new opportunities for scholarship on the history of the press–as well as a new set of problems. Those problems compound for research that spans national as well as linguistic contexts. This article offers a novel methodological approach for confronting these challenges by synthesizing computational with conventional methods and working across a collaborative multilingual team. We present a case study studying the transnational and multilingual news event of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth’s journey to the United States in 1851–52. Our approach helps to demonstrate some of the characteristic patterns and complexities in transatlantic news circulation, including the pathways, reach, temporality, vagaries, and silences of this system. These patterns, in turn, offer some insights into how we understand the significance of this era for histories of the press.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Qian Ge

  3 shared

• Stephen Ramsay

  Piedmont Atlanta Hospital

  2 shared

• Mila Oiva

  2 shared

• Ryan Cordell

  2 shared

• Mark Sample

  2 shared

• Alan Liu

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

• Julianne Nyhan

  2 shared

• Bethany Nowviskie

  James Madison University

  2 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2003

• M.A., History

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1998

• B.A., History

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1995

Awards & honors

• Honorable mention for Digital Victorians, Rosemary Mitchell…
• DELTA Faculty Fellow, North Carolina State University (2024,…
• University Faculty Scholar, North Carolina State University…
• NC State University Libraries Faculty Award (2018)
• Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of V…