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This is the Book Riot podcast. I'm Rebecca Schinsky. And I'm Jeff O'Neill. Let's go back to you, Rebecca.

If you're going to do it, it's back to you to

enter the show. We're messing it all around here. Jeff forgot his name on the first take.

Oh, because you screw up. You go back to the, okay, see, I hear how it's going. All right.

You threw me under the bus. You're coming under with me. I mean, you were under the bus. I just said, look at Rebecca down there. Listen, it's nice under here. We are joined today by Laura McGrath. We've been hyping up this

episode for a couple weeks. Laura, I'm going to let you introduce yourself because whenever I try

to explain what you do, it turns into like 75 sentences. My job is really quite simple at the top

level. I'm an English professor. I'm a professor

of English or assistant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. Where it gets

weird is what I study, which is not exactly normal, not in the sort of, you know, studying Shakespeare

sense. I study contemporary American literature,

and I focus on the American publishing industry. And so I do that in some different ways.

I spend a lot of time teaching a very traditional English course where we do close reading

and we talk about the way that text looks on a page and how writers make us feel and make us think

through what they write, you're a very standard issue English class. But then I also study

contemporary American literature by looking at big data. So I'm a part of a small contingent of

scholars that we call ourselves digital humanists. And I study the large-scale data that is produced by and

...