The Digital Americanists Society invites proposals for a roundtable about digital interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature or culture, to be proposed for the C19 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, April 12-15, 2012. This roundtable will take up the C19 Program Committee’s call to investigate how “the field’s contours have been enlarged—or foreshortened—by the investigative tools offered by digital technologies.” We seek scholars using digital tools—e.g. GIS, data mining, visualization, textual analysis, and other methods—to help them understand the nineteenth century. We are particularly interested in the ways that digital tools can lead scholars toward new interpretive insights into texts and other cultural objects. What new questions—or even new kinds of questions—do modern technologies allow scholars to ask about nineteenth century literature and culture? How do new forms of digital evidence contribute to or disrupt traditional modes of scholarship in the field?
Participants will speak to these questions by presenting their work in the Pecha Kucha format: 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds apiece. This format will keep presentations concise and lively, and leave significant time for an engaged discussion among panelists and the audience.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio (a few sentences will suffice) to Ryan Cordell at ryan.cordell@snc.edu by September 1, 2011.