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). 

Linked Pasts Symposium

The annual Linked Pasts conference, which has previously been held at KCL, Madrid, Stanford, Mainz, Bordeaux and virtually at London brings together scholars, heritage professionals and other practitioners with an interest in Linked Open Data as applied to the study of the ancient and historical worlds.

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.

Antwerp DH Summer School 2022: Genetic editing, from manuscripts to born-digital writing processes

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

Intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills to design a fully-fledged, TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts. Registration information: Early bird registration deadline: 15 March 2022. Regular […]

€200 – €250

Lecture series: Peter Stokes

S.R.118 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Belgium

Machine Learning for Digital Scholarly Editions: The Case of eScriptorium

Digital and computational tools and methods are becoming increasingly part of scholarly activity, including in Digital Scholarly Editing. One example of this is in transcribing texts from manuscripts, where machine learning is becoming more and more effective. To this end, eScriptorium is being developed to leverage Machine Learning to help in transcription, whether automatic, semi-automatic or manual. In principle the software should be useful for any type of edition, in any language and script and from any date. In practice, however, this raises many questions, including to what extent AI can or should be employed in preparing editions, how much the expert should remain ‘in the loop’, but also to what extent it is even possible to develop a single tool that can work for everything from Greek papyrus to 20th-century notebooks to Old Vietnamese inscriptions and beyond. This talk will therefore present the current state of the art while also addressing some practical and theoretical questions that remain for the future.