Wednesday, July 11, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – ‘Big Data’ in Medieval Studies

54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
<http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions>
Western Michigan University; May 9-12, 2019

Sponsored by Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/digital-philology-journal-medieval-cultures>

Organized by Susanna Allés-Torrent (University of Miami) and Albert
Lloret (University of
Massachusetts Amherst)

The creation of digital collections of texts, or textual corpora, for
research and preservation may be one of the seminal technological
innovations in the digital humanities that still remains at the core
of many text-oriented disciplines, including those belonging to
medieval studies.

When creating a textual corpus, digital humanists face many key
choices that will determine their project’s success. These decisions
include the selection of standards, format types, methods for text
recollection, searchability, access, lemmatization, and
interoperability, among others.

Once a textual corpus is created, quantitative analysis allows
researchers to study texts from a variety of critical perspectives and
methodologies: statistics, stylometry, authorship atribution and
verification, intertextuality, script recognition, stemmatology, text
mining, topic modeling, etc.

These analytical methodologies are linked to the study of large
amounts of information, to which one may be tempted to refer to as big
data. But what constitutes “big data” in medieval studies and the
digital humanities at large? Does thinking of textual corpora as “big
data” help frame their forms and uses?

We invite paper submissions that reflect on the theory, practices, and
challenges of creating— and researching through—textual corpora,
including but not limited to:

• protocols and technologies for the creation of textual corpora.
• examples of textual corpora.
• methologies for the study of textual corpora (e.g., stylometry,
stemmatology, script
recognition, etc.).
• theory of textual corpora and “big data” in medieval studies.

Please send a 100-word abstract and a Participant Information form to
Susanna Allés-Torrent and Albert Lloret at lloret@umass.edu
lloret@umass.edu
> by September 15.


Susanna Allés Torrent
Assistant Professor
University of Miami
http://susannalles.com
susanna_alles@miami.edu

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