Most of my research is in the field of ‘Computational Bibliography’ — the use of code and data to analyse the history of printing and publishing. I'm especially interested in typography, and my forthcoming book is a data-driven study of the uses of blackletter, roman, and italic in the sixteenth century. I am currently a Language Engineer at Oxford Languages, developing new features for the online Oxford English Dictionary. Before that, I was Research Assistant in Digital Humanities at the University of Geneva, and taught medieval and early modern English at the University of Oxford.

Projects

🐙 Octopus An app for quickly constructing complex search queries, and searching them in eight databases at once, developed for researchers at the OED

🎯 Q-Gen A Chrome extension that generates XML citations according to the OED's house style

📚 To The Reader A database of early modern printed prefaces, built for the University of Geneva's English Department

🔠 Eebography A font that recreates the visual distortions of the Early English Books Online database

Publications

‘Typography’, The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Adam Smyth (OUP, 2023)

‘Kludging Type: Some Workarounds in Early English Print’, Printing & Misprinting, ed. by Anthony Grafton, Paolo Sachet, and Geri Della Rocca de Candal (OUP, 2023)

James Misson & Devani Singh, ‘Computing Book Parts with EEBO-TCP’, Book History, Volume 27, 2022

‘Copland, Robert (Tudor poet)’, The Chaucer Encyclopedia, eds. Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld & Katie Walter (Wiley Blackwell, 2022)

‘The Pilgrim’s Tale’, The Chaucer Encyclopedia, eds. Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld & Katie Walter (Wiley Blackwell, 2022)

‘For Lack of Letters: Early Typographical Shibboleths of English and Other Foreign Languages’, Print, Agency, and Regional Identity, ed. Rachel Stenner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

‘Signifying Nothing: Following a Hole through Three Text Technologies’, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 2, 2021/

Louise Mycock & James Misson, ‘Lone pronoun tags in Early Modern English: the dramas of Marlow, Shakespeare, and Jonson,’ English Language and Linguistics, 2020

[Review] ‘Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing, John Boardley’, Journal of the Early Book Society, Volume 22, 2019