Open to all interested in the field at Stockholm University and beyond, this event is arranged by Digarv in cooperation with the Stockholm University Humanities Faculty research school theme Digital Humanities.

The seminar is held via Zoom, please register to receive the password. 

Registration

Jacquard loom punch card. Ca. 1801.
Jacquard loom punch card. Ca. 1801.

Programme

10:00 – 10:15

Introduction

Anna Dahlgren & Pelle Snickars, Stockholm University

10:15 – 11:00

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, King's College London (emerita)

Your current research in 30–50 years time? A few thoughts on the future worth of today’s digital scholarship

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, retired, is a former lecturer in Digital Art History at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She also worked for the Courtauld Institute of Art and internationally. Having completed her PhD on computer-aided iconological analysis of anthropomorphic landscapes in early-modern Western art, she went on researching and fostering applications of digital techniques to documentation and study of art and architecture. In the course of her long career she was involved in a number of major collaborations in this area. Her publications (see bentkowska.info) include Debating Digital Art History, International Journal for Digital Art History, 1 (2015) and Digital Techniques for Documenting and Preserving Cultural Heritage, Arc Humanities Press 2017, co-edited with Lindsay MacDonald.

11:00 – 11:45

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, University of Geneva

Can we visualize globalization? The case of art and images

Presentation of Atlas and its “sibling” project Visual Contagions. 
https://artlas.huma-num.fr/en/about/
https://www.imago.ens.fr

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is Full Professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland (Faculté de Lettres – School of Humanities), chair for Digital Humanities. From 2007 to 2019 she was Associate Professor (maître de conférences) in modern and contemporary art at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS, PSL) with an Habilitation à diriger les recherches. Joyeux-Prunel’s research encompasses the history of visual globalization, the global history of the avant-gardes, the visual culture of petroleum, and the digital turn in the Humanities. She has founded and managed Artl@s  since 2009. In 2016 she founded Postdigital (www.postdigital.ens.fr), a new research project on digital cultures and imagination. Since Automn 2019 she has led the Jean Monnet Excellence Center IMAGO, an international center for the study and teaching on visual globalization.

11:45 – 12:00

Break

12:00 – 12:45

Christof Schöch, Trier University

Current Challenges in Computational Literary Studies

Within the broader field of Digital Humanities, Computational Literary Studies (CLS) is one of the most long-standing areas of practice, going back at least to the 1960s. My aim is to describe, in the abstract, and to illustrate, through some concrete examples from projects I know well, some of the most pressing, general challenges I currently see in the field. The idea is that these are areas that we should all contribute to in the coming years, if we want to move the field forward. These four challenges concern operationalization, diversity, metadata and reproducibility.

Christof Schöch is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Trier, Germany, and Co-Director of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. He is also chair of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History and president of the Digital Humanities Association for the German-speaking area (DHd). Christof Schöch studied Romance languages, English and Psychology in Freiburg and Tours. Christof’s interests in research and teaching are located at the confluence of French literary studies and Digital Humanities. His methodological focus is on quantitative methods of text analysis and building of digital textual resources for Computational Literary Studies. In terms of materials, he is focusing on French Classical and Enlightenment drama as well as on the modern and contemporary French novel. He is also interested in new forms of scholarly publishing and collaboration and pleads for Open Access to publications and research data. He is an active member of the Romance Studies and Digital Humanities communities.

12:45 – 15:15

Break

15:15 – 16:00

Douglas Biber, Northern Arizona University

When an uptight register lets its hair down: The historical development of grammatical complexity features in specialist academic writing.

This is a presentation of a project that has been analyzing historical change in the style of academic writing, especially in relation to grammatical complexity.  The major surprising findings are that academic writing has evolved to become LESS complex in terms of traditional lingusitic indicators (especially dependent clauses) but much more complex in other ways that are not normally analyzed; and that academic writing has evolved to become LESS explicit in the expression of meaning.  

Douglas Biber is Regents' Professor, Applied Linguistics Program, English Department, Northern Arizona University. Biber has published 11 authored and co-authored books and numerous articles articles and book chapters on linguistics, English grammar, and register variation (in English and cross-linguistic; synchronic and diachronic).   

16:00 – 16:45

Johanna Drucker, UCLA

Humanistic and Hermeneutic: Contradictions and Challenges for Digital Methods

“Humanistic and Hermeneutic: Contradictions and Challenges for Digital Methods”
In spite of many decades of critical and theoretical conversation, digital methods have become increasingly normative and standardized in humanities research. The result is that rather than increasing the engagement of humanistic methods, digital tools and platforms have become increasingly opaque in their instrumentality. How do the values of hermeneutic inquiry play a role in the development of tools and platforms? This talk takes examples from the study of chronology and temporality to demonstrate its argument. 

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in artists’ books, the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Her recent titles include Downdrift: An EcoFiction and The General Theory of Social Relativity, both published in 2018. Off-World Fairy Tales, a collaboration with Susan Bee, was published by Litmus Press in 2020. Other new titles include Visualization and Interpretation(MIT Press, 2020) and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020).