Target group

Members of the Doctoral School of Arts, Humanities and Law. The seminar is also open to PhD candidates at other Flemish universities.

The seminar is primarily developed for and by doctoral candidates in the Department of Literary Studies, but is open to all PhD researchers engaging with digital humanities in their research.

Level

All PhD students, in particular students who are in the first or second year of their PhD. 

Lecturers

Three internationally renowned scholars will be invited as key lecturers:

Virtual Research Environments: Melissa Terras

Dr Melissa Terras is the Reader in Electronic Communication in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL), where she teaches Internet Technologies, Digital Resources in the Humanities, and Web Publishing. Her research interest span Digital Humanities, Digitization and Digital Imaging, Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Palaeography, Knowledge Elicitation, and Internet Technologies; always focussing on applying computational technologies to Humanities, in order to allow research that would otherwise be impossible.

Melissa Terras is the general editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and is on the executive of both the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing. Her monographs include Image to Interpretation: An intelligent system to aid historians in reading the Vindolanda texts (2006), and Digital Images for the Information Professional (2008).

Digital Text Editions: Matthew Kirschenbaum

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), an applied thinktank for the digital humanities. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature and creative new media (including games), textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia's Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (where he was the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive). His dissertation was the first electronic dissertation in the English department at Virginia and one of the very first in the United States.

Kirschenbaum's first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2007. Taking its cues from textual studies and recent critical interest in writing and inscription technologies, Mechanisms addresses itself to the material and historical particulars of landmark works of new media and electronic literature, applying computer forensics to conduct new kinds of media-specific readings and drawing on significant new archival sources for works like Michael Joyce's Afternoon and William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa." Mechanisms has won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Quantitative Research: Stefan Gries

Stefan Th. Gries is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. Gries has authored three books - one research monograph, an introduction to statistics with R for linguists, and a book on corpus linguistics with R. He has also co-edited four volumes - two on corpora in cognitive linguistics, one on corpus linguistics, and one on cognitive linguistics. He has (co-)authored articles in the leading peer-reviewed journals of his fields (Cognitive Linguistics and International Journal of Corpus Linguistics) as well as in many other peer-reviewed journals. He is founding editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, associate editor of Cognitive Linguistics, and performs editorial functions for the following international peer-reviewed journals: Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics, CogniTextes, Constructions and Frames, Corpora, Journal of Advanced Linguistic Studies, and Language and Cognition.

Content & Call for papers

The approach of the workshop is two-pronged. An open round-table discussion aims to familiarize Ghent University doctoral students who are not yet engaging with digital humanities with the field, and the possibilities it offers their research. This workshop also seeks to promote high quality research, by creating an interactive forum at which doctoral students already involved with digital humanities will present their work. By bringing together interested humanities scholars from different fields and in different stages of their academic careers, this workshop hopes to inspire interdisciplinary collaborations with a basis in Digital Humanities. Presentations by a number of existing Ghent University projects will illustrate some of the possibilities Digital Humanities offers.

The event will be framed by three one-hour keynote talks: Stefan Gries of the University of California, Santa Barbara (a quantitative corpus linguist active in the field of cognitive linguistics), Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland (a New Media specialist, whose recent research investigates the impact of digital media on contemporary literary production) and Melissa Terras of University College London (an expert in digital imaging, image processing, and internet technologies). Each of these speakers will discuss their research, elucidating the ways in which developments in Digital Humanities have shaped their work. These keynotes will take part in the round-table and will provide the doctoral students with feedback on their papers, in order to guide the students' methodological and theoretical approaches to their research.

Relevant topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Digital editions and digitization
• Digital imaging and image processing
• New Media, digital materiality and digital-born texts
• Quantitative research in the humanities
• Virtual research environments and online scholarly collaborations
• Online literary production
• Alternative modes of publishing and Open Access

Please submit expressions of interest or proposals for papers to Jasper Schelstraete. The deadline is 1 September 2012.

Time schedule

10-13 October 2012

Language

English

Credits (doctoral training programme of 60 ECTS)

3 credits for attending the seminar (specialist course) + 2 credits for presenting a paper (research related activity: doctoral colloquium)

Evaluation criteria (doctoral training programme)

Presence + Active participation

Venue

Faculty Room, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Gent

Number of participants

10-16 participants

Registration fee

Free of charge for members of the Doctoral Schools

Information and registration

Please contact Jasper Schelstraete