The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields. “Corpus studies,” for example, emerged in linguistics but now informs scholarship in language and literary studies worldwide. Moreover, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” inspired Lauren Tilton’s “distant viewing” in historical research. Such transfers underscore the dynamic interplay among humanistic disciplines, and the transformative potential of computation as it moves between language and literary studies and other humanistic fields.

This special issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites scholarly articles, critical essays, and book reviews that examine how interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration shape the transfer of computational methods between language and literary studies and the wider humanities. We welcome contributions that engage the complex relationships between technology and humanities, including (but not limited to) the following questions:

Histories of Computational Transfer across the language and literary studies and other humanistic fields: How has the movement of computational tools and techniques reshaped the studies of language and literature? What can language and literary scholars learn from experiences of adopting computational approaches—especially the failed attempts? What do these “failures” reveal about the limits of computational work in the humanities?

Computational Technology and Interdisciplinary Methodologies: Which emerging or established methods should be translated to or from language and literary studies? How can such transfers open new directions for research, pedagogy, interpretation, and collaboration in literary and language scholarship?

Ethical Challenges of Transfer and Interdisciplinary Studies: How can we mitigate misuse or overreach when computational technologies enter language and literary studies? What critical frameworks are needed to ensure responsible adoption of technology in humanities? 

Please direct all questions to MMLA at mmla@luc.edu or to the editor of this issue, Shu Wan (shuwan@buffalo.edu)

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2027