Author: Matthew Wilkens

CFP: Digital Americanists at ALA 2015

WestincopleyBoston-300x115The Digital Americanists Society solicits abstracts (c. 200 words) for papers to be included in the Society’s pre-arranged sessions at the 2015 American Literature Association Conference (Boston, May 21-24). The Digital Americanists are eager to constitute panels of the most exciting DH work happening in and around American studies, literary and otherwise. If you have an idea for a panel rather than an individual paper, we’d be happy to hear about it; email us at digitalamericanists@gmail.com as soon as possible.

In keeping with the Digital Americanists’ commitment to a broad understanding of American literature, culture, digital media, and computational methods, we are pleased to consider submissions that address any facet of the relationship between those terms or that question the terms themselves. Submissions from early-career scholars and members of underrepresented groups are especially encouraged.

Deadline for submissions is Monday, January 19, 2015. Send abstracts (plain text, please, unless there’s a good reason to use something else) or questions by email to digitalamericanists@gmail.com. For more information about the Digital Americanists Society, see http://digitalamericanists.org. For information about the ALA and the 2015 conference, see http://americanliteratureassociation.org.

Two Digital Americanists Sessions at ALA 2014

The Digital Americanists Society has organized two panels at this year’s American Literature Association conference (Washington, DC, May 22-25, 2014). Details below; you can see the full program on the ALA conference site. Yes, we’re the first two slots of the conference. Hope to see you there!

Our sessions:

Visualizing Non-Linearity: Faulkner and the Challenges of Narrative Mapping
Session 1-A. Thursday, May 22, 2014, 9:00 – 10:20 am. Columbia B: Ballroom Level.
Organized by the Digital Americanists Society
Chair: Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University

  1. Julie Napolin, The New School
  2. Worthy Martin, University of Virginia
  3. Johannes Burgers, Queensborough Community College

Three members of the Digital Yoknapatawpha project discuss the advantages and challenges of collaboration in negotiating between scholarly readings of Faulkner and what is technically possible.

Digital Flânerie and Americans in Paris
Session 2-A. Thursday, May 22, 2014, 10:30-11:50 am. Columbia B: Ballroom Level.
Organized by the Digital Americanists Society
Chair: Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University

  1. “Mapping Movement, or, Walking with Hemingway,” Laura McGrath, Michigan State University
  2. “Parisian Remainder,” Steven Ambrose, Michigan State University
  3. “Sedentary City,” Anna Green, Michigan State University
  4. “Locating The Imaginary: Literary Mapping and Propositional Space,” Sarah Panuska, Michigan State University

Four short papers addressing the theoretical and suppositional nature of maps in relation to Alice Kaplan’s Paris memoirs, the relationship between movement and stasis for Ernest Hemingway, a reconfiguration of the woman and the city in Mina Loy’s poetry, and the unmappable locations of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

CFP: Digital Americanists at ALA 2014

The Digital Americanists Society solicits abstracts (250 words) for papers and/or full panels to be included in the Society’s pre-arranged session at ALA 2014 (Washington, DC, May 22-25, 2014). The Digital Americanists are eager to constitute a panel of the most exciting DH work happening in American Studies. If you have a panel idea, we’d be happy to hear about it; email us at digitalamericanists@gmail.com as soon as possible.

In keeping with the Digital Americanists’ commitment to a broad understanding of American literature, culture, and digital media, we are pleased to consider submissions that address any facet of the relationship between those terms. Submissions from early-career scholars and members of underrepresented groups are especially encouraged.

Deadline for submissions is January 21, 2014. Send abstracts and questions by plain text email to digitalamericanists@gmail.com. For more information about the Digital Americanists Society, see http://digitalamericanists.org. For information about the ALA and the 2014 conference, see http://americanliteratureassociation.org.

Digital Americanists at ALA 2013

A word from Amanda Gailey, president of the Digital Americanists Society:

We will elect new officers this week both in-person at our business meeting at ALA (Thursday, 5/23, at 10:30, Courier 7th floor) and via absentee ballot by email. If you would like to run for the position of secretary/treasurer or vice president, please let me know as soon as possible. In accordance with our constitution, our current vice president, Matthew Wilkens, will move into the role of president, and the person we elect vice president will become president in 2015. All offices are two-year commitments. I encourage you to run! Also, if you would like us to address any specific issues at the business meeting, please let us know.

You need not be at ALA to run for office, but if you are, I invite you to attend our panel, “Interpretation, Interface, Archive, Classroom” on Thursday at 4:30 in St George D 3rd Floor.

This message went out to the Digital Americanists listserv; if you’d like to join the list, there’s info on the About page.

CFP: Canadian Association for American Studies

Recently passed along and of potential interest to Digital Americanists. See the link below for (slightly) more information.

OCTOBER 24 – 27, 2013
THE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
WATERLOO, ONTARIO
Sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies
http://caas2013.uwaterloo.ca/

“Total Money Makeover”$: Culture and the Economization of Everything

Economic models now occupy a central place in the analysis of American culture. The “hegemony of economic explanations of cultural practices” (Koritz 1999) has been with us for some time. Concepts such as “cultural capital,” “the literary marketplace,” and “modes of exchange” are regularly deployed to demystify culture’s relationship with power and profit. As useful as economic models have been for opening up new avenues of analysis in American studies, we wonder if this turn to economy in American studies doesn’t privilege economic models in ways that ought to be scrutinized. Indeed, it can be argued that the recent financial crises in the United States and Europe are consequences of unquestioned faith in the explanatory and organizing power of economics as a field of knowledge. We must ask whether the economization of everything, along with the dominance of economic models for analysis, has deprived culture, and cultural study more generally, of modes of
resistance and a distinctive field of action. Is it possible or desireable, without reverting to an untenable idealism, to recover a sense of culture as a privileged domain?

The 2013 CAAS conference invites proposals for papers on the topic of culture and economics, but especially papers that privilege culture as a field of knowledge and subject the economic to its critical gaze.

Papers on other topics relevant to the interdisciplinary study of American culture, history, and society are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of 300-words, along with a brief bio, to the conference organizers, Victoria Lamont and Kevin McGuirk, Department of English, University of Waterloo, at caas2013@uwaterloo.ca by March 15, 2013. Presentation time for papers is 20 minutes maximum. Panel submissions will also be considered.

CFP: New American Notes Online

A CFP that may be of interest to Digital Americanists …

NANO: New American Notes Online

Call for Papers: Issue 2.1

Deadline: 30 March 2012

Special Theme: Evaluation, Critique, Peer Review

What are the best and newest methods for creating, evaluating, and disseminating scholarly and creative work? This question motivates the next issue of NANO. As digital formats help to foster new ways to share and critique written and artistic work, as more people try to squeeze through the narrowing bottleneck of publishing, approval, and jobs, something has to give, or at least change.

Four guiding questions:

1. How have changes to the university, to scholarly publishing, and to digital publishing formats changed peer review? Will changes to peer review change the nature and methods of scholarship?

2. How have creative contests in the fields of poetry, short story, painting, sculpture, or design changed in terms of evaluation, prizes, and prestige?

3. What can the humanities learn from other disciplines in terms of evaluation and peer review?

4. How can we solve some of the current problems?

Possible Topics:

print/book/online culture, peer review, online peer review, poetry contests, short story contests, art and design contests, evaluation, judging, Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, merit, approval, assessment, credit, collaboration and/or single author, contribution, attribution, plagiarism/remixing, authority/media bias, tenure and promotion, grading, popular culture evaluation, online discussion, digital/paper editing, marking up, peer-to-peer review, external linking, criticism, critique, crowd-sourcing, advice, monograph, scholarly electronic editions, Google, Google Scholar, e-books, e-journals, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, research tools, research blogs, editing tools, archiving, coding, open access

See Submission Guidelines on our website for more details:
www.nanocrit.com

Send queries or completed notes to editor.nanocrit@gmail.com

CFP: Digital Americanists at ALA

Call for Papers
Digital Americanists

American Literature Association
23rd Annual Conference
May 24-27, 2012
San Francisco, CA

Digital Americanists (digitalamericanists.org) invite proposals for 20-minute papers to be presented at the American Literature Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012.

The panel is open to papers that address any topic pertaining to American literature and digital scholarship, including:

  • text analysis methods
  • teaching digital American literature
  • using archives in scholarship
  • theorizing the archive

Please send abstracts of between 250 and 500 words in .doc, RTF, or PDF to both Amanda Gailey (agailey2@unlnotes.unl.edu) and Matthew Wilkens (mwilkens@nd.edu) by January 24, 2012.

CFP: Digital Americanists Panel for C19

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.