Now that we live immersed in the postdigital era without hardly noticing it and that any given cultural object seems susceptible to be recycled by a digital technology available to anyone, it is time to ask ourselves about the underlying conceptual and methodological models that these technologies impose.
What kind of cultural recycling (of reading, of literatures, of literary histories) are the so-called Digital Humanities proposing? We observe that the construction of digitised corpora, the essentially quantitative and probabilistic methods, and the capacity of machines to quantify data propose a model of objectivity, a single epistemology that seems to clash with plural hermeneutics.
If these methods make it possible to look at the past through new lenses, how can we do so without forgetting the interstices and ambiguities that they leave out? Can phenomena of the past, such as the transcultural or transtemporal interweavings and the mediality of other eras (in contrast to the present one) be helpful to understand more precisely the mediatisation and recycling of literature today? Particularly, those mediations and recycling carried out by Digital Humanities’ methods?
It is not a new model, it is an old one: we only have to take a look at its history (its promises can already be found in nineteenth-century positivism) or at the institutionalisation of Digital Humanities as a disciplinary field, which tends to be conservative in its principles and hierarchies. Nevertheless, this model is considered innovative in terms of its creation, modification, and introduction of a socio-cultural use in literary studies. This is indeed why we must question the epistemological bias of this model. In culture, in literatures, biases are observable. We need to critically question the specific characteristics of digital methodologies in the field of literary studies and their underlying conceptualisations and epistemologies, since they can guide future approaches, as well as point to its limitations and blind spots: we need Critical Digital Humanities.
Contributions may focus on one of the following aspects:
- Theories and methods of literary analysis in Digital Humanities: limitations and how to overcome them.
- Methods and applications of the digital analysis of literary corpora and texts as forms of cultural recycling: underlying conceptualisations.
- Analysis of mixed methods that blend previous literary-theoretical traditions and procedures that are specific to the Digital Humanities: epistemological foundations.
- Analysis of processes of cultural and transtemporal interweaving in literatures using digital methodologies: possibilities and limitations.
- Macro-recycling of literary histories: new focuses, blind spots.
The languages of the conference will be Spanish, English and German. Guest lectures will be translated into Spanish.
Key speakers: Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) and Rabea Kleymann (Technische Universität Chemnitz)
Interested applicants can send their proposals including name, institution, email address, title of the proposal, keywords and an abstract of at least 250 words to reclit-ji@ucm.es by March 15, 2024. The committee's decision on the acceptance of the proposals will be notified within two months.
A monographic publication will be released with the contributions selected by the scientific committee.
Faculty of Philology, Complutense University of Madrid, September 26 and 27, 2024
Organised by LEETHI Group
Coordinators: Miriam Llamas, Amelia Sanz, Secretary: Irene Pérez
Scientific Committee: Tina Escaja (The University of Vermont), Alckmar Luiz dos Santos (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), Teresa Numerico (Università degli studi Roma Tre), Manuel Portela (University of Coimbra), Johanna Vollmeyer (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Web of the event: https://www.ucm.es/leethi/literary-recycling-for-postdigital-readers
