Spanish Literature and Linguistics Workshop on Correlations

S.R. 012 Rodestraat 14, Antwerpen, Belgium

In this two-hour workshop, we will learn how to use linguistic and literary features to evaluate several hypotheses about Spanish literature. Organised with the specific purpose of reaching the students of Spanish Language and Literature who are interested in DH in mind, this workshop will be taught completely in Spanish.

Lecture Series: Julie Blake

S.R.213 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

Popular taste and public understanding of literature are shaped by many different life experiences and influences, including what happens in schooling. Dr. Julie Blake’s work is part of a body of research that seeks to understand the history of English literary education through its material artefacts and traces of classroom practice (eg Michael 1987, Rubin 2007 and Robson 2015). This history connects in interesting interdisciplinary ways with the history of literature, the reception history of different authors, the history of mass education, Britain’s colonial past and its postcolonial present. In her talk, Blake will share some of the practicalities and possibilities of building a digital “difference engine” for this research, and will discuss how this kind of approach might be developed and applied in other areas of literary history.

Antwerp DH Summer School 2020: Making a Digital Edition. Basic Skills and Technologies

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

In the past few decades, digital editing and digitisation of archival documents have been rapidly gaining prominence. Aiming to cater for both of these branches of Digital Humanities, our summer school offers an in-depth, hands-on curriculum to familiarise students with basic and more advanced tools in the field. Apart from acquiring a set of technical skills (including Command Line, HTML, CSS, TEI-XML XPath, XSLT, and eXist-db), our programme includes the more general practical guidelines on how to make a digital edition.

€150 – €200

Children’s Literature and Digital Humanities

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

In recent years, Digital Humanities has had a big impact on the field of literary studies as a whole, but its presence in children’s literature studies has been limited so far. This two-day conference seeks to unite scholars using digital tools for the analysis of children’s literature, culture and media to reflect on the state of the art, exchange methodological expertise, discuss avenues and issues for further research and build networks.

Workshop on Voyant and Spyral

Blackboard Collaborate (virtual) Blackboard Collaborate, Virtual

The Erasmus+ project DigiPhiLit has organized a basic course on Digital Humanities for the Study of Hispanic Literature. As it must be done online, we have opened it to anyone interested. Most of the sessions are in Spanish, but on February 16, Geoffrey Rockwell and Kaylin Land from the University of Alberta (Canada), will deliver a session on Text-Mining with Voyant Tools and Spyral in English (Geoffrey Rockwell is one of the two creators of Voyant tools with the belated Allison Sinclair. Kaylin Land is a former PhD student of Sinclair who is now being supervised by Rockwell). 

Lecture Series: Margherita Parigini

S.SJ.117 Sint-Jacobsmarkt 13, Antwerpen

The thesis « The Rule and the Doubt » is dedicated to the Italian author Italo Calvino, more precisely to the study of a narrative mechanism that plays a central role in his work: doubt used as the propulsion engine for writing. The aim of the thesis is to analyze this phenomenon in all its forms and to identify its various consequences in the narrative articulation of the text. The research is also supposed to develop a reflection on Calvino’s critical texts, exploring the hypothesis that the dubitative text is born at the crossroads of fiction and essay. In order to realize the research, an attempt was made to use different methods of analysis in a complementary manner: a more traditional approach derived to literary criticism, combined with a perspective linked to the DH dimension (e.g. Data Visualization). 

Lecture Series: Aafje de Roest

S.D.013 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium

Hiphop lezen: kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve methoden voor letterkundig onderzoek naar hiphop

Terwijl de wereld om ons heen steeds meer lijkt te verengelsen, grijpen zowel Nederlandse als Belgische jongeren massaal naar een jeugdcultuur in hun eigen taal: hiphop. Van Frenna tot Zwangere Guy en van Ronnie Flex tot Shay, Blu Samu of Coely – hiphop is de dominante jongerencultuur van dit moment, zowel wereldwijd als in Nederland. Die ongekende populariteit van hiphop, een door identiteitsvraagstukken gekenmerkt muziekgenre en idem jeugdcultuur, roept de vraag op hoe Nederlandse jongeren (artiesten en actief publiek) in hiphop hun culturele identiteit (her)definiëren. Op die vraag promoveert neerlandica en letterkundige Aafje de Roest (1993) aan de Universiteit Leiden (sectie Moderne Nederlandse letterkunde). Haar door NWO-gefinancierde onderzoek combineert kwalitatieve en kwantitatieve methoden om tot een antwoord op deze vraag te komen. Maar hoe onderzoek te doen naar een snel veranderende jeugdcultuur die misschien wel per definitie ‘ongrijpbaar’ moet blijven? In dit college verkent De Roest het antwoord op die vraag, en neemt zij je aan de hand van recente case studies uit de Nederlandse en Vlaamse scene mee in het spel van hiphopjongeren, die tegen een lokale achtergrond, maar in een werelds perspectief, hun culturele identiteit vormgeven.

Lecture Series: Julian Schröter

S.D.015 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

The challenges of investigating loosely structured genres and of operationalizing semantic content

Literary studies are often dealing with genres that are well established in literary discourse but can, on closer inspection, not be identified on the level of textual features. In other words, there are loosely structured genres that are not instantiated as clear-cut text types. The German novella, which is split up into two genres, that of the ‚Erzählung‘ and that of the ‚Novelle‘, is such a disordered genre. Research in literary genres, however, usually presumes the existence of a common text type on the level of textual features that can be revealed, for example, with stylometric analysis or based on classification tasks. It is the aim of a larger project to reveal the latent structures of German novellas. The presentation gives a systematic outline of the challenge of analyzing the historical change of the novella as a loosely structured genre.

CANCELLED: Lecture Series: Siebe Bluijs & Lois Burke

S.D.013 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium

Towards a Collection of Digital Literature from Flanders and the Netherlands (1971–2022)

Digital literature is an umbrella term that encompasses differing types of multimodal works of literature that are all reliant on the digital environment for their production, dissemination and/or consumption (Rettberg 2018). Digital literature can refer to hypertext fictions, algorithm-generated poetry, works created in virtual reality, online fan fiction, and various other permutations. Digital literature emerged as a concept and a field of study in the 1980s and 1990s. The rapidly changing nature and function of digital media since then have urged new definitions and approaches to this art form.

Lecture series: Gerhard Lauer

S.D.015 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

Stop tracking science. The aggregation and selling of users’ data by science publishers

The business model of science publishers has change over recent years. Not only content but data analytics is the new core of science publishing industry. This has detrimental effects on universities. My talk reconstructs the history of science publishing and analyses the current techniques of collecting traces of scientists using university libraries and science publishing platforms. Finally, the talk discusses a way out.