‘Channels of Digital Scholarship' Seminar I: New tools and old questions in the analysis of textual corpora’

‘From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’

To join us on Zoom, please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEvd-qhrDMjHtA8w5ZqY5GUnWUICa1e9v19
 

Convenors: Goran Gaber, Tristan Alonge
 

For several reasons, Early Modernity represents a fascinating field for Digital Scholarship. On the one hand, the abundance and variety of written and printed material – ranging from academic treatises, reference works, and newspapers to maps, theatre registers, and private correspondence – offer almost infinite possibilities for historical inquiry. On the other hand, the finite nature of these textual corpora presents scholars with a reasonably delimited and thus practically manageable area of research. Last but not least, widespread intellectual interest in this period regularly results in sustained large-scale projects of digitisation, interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, as well as technical and scholarly innovation.

It should therefore be of little surprise that such a conjecture has given rise to a large number of ground- breaking projects that have not only presented “old material in a new light” by, for example, processing, encoding, and analysing historical texts but have irrevocably altered the landscape of Early Modern scholarship as such, by enlarging both our understanding of what counts as historical material, as well as the scope of questions that such material can answer. The third session of the seminar series will thus present cutting-edge research initiatives from both sides of the Channel dealing with different types of textual corpora from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Speakers: 

Nicholas Cole (The Quill Project, Oxford) - “The records of negotiation: problems and opportunities”
Nicholas Cronk & Glenn Roe (The Voltaire Foundation)
Howard Hotson (Cultures of Knowledge, Oxford) - ‘Did Hartlib have a Circle? New Methods for Answering Old Questions’
Maria Susana Seguin ((IHRIM – UMR 5318 & Université Paul-Valery Montpellier - IUF) - "Constituting a virtual Corpus: the case of Philosophie cl@ndestine”


'Channels of Digital Scholarship' Seminar

Research in the digital humanities has experienced explosive growth and development in the last ten years. Two important factors have contributed to this progress: firstly, the very strong mobilisation of scientific and scholarly communities to engage with this emerging field in all humanities sectors; secondly, the extraordinary progress of digital tools and capacities. This has resulted in a profusion of initiatives at all levels: major digitisation projects led by libraries and academic institutions, digitisation of corpora of all kinds and for all periods, and multiple research projects with targeted objectives.

The aim of this first Channels of Digital Scholarship seminar series is to reflect upon new avenues for the analysis and use of textual corpora. Textual corpora and their uses represent several challenges in the development and validation of digital tools for analysis, the dialogue between disciplines, and the institutional structures that support the wide range of projects that are being developed. In this series of four seminars, the Maison Française d'Oxford and Digital Scholarship @ Oxford, with the help of leaders of digital humanities initiatives in the CIVIS network, propose to explore these challenges from Franco-British and international perspectives.

Conveners: Goran Gaber (EHESS (LIER-FYT)), Andrew Cusworth (Digital Scholarship, Oxford), Christophe Gaillac (Nuffield College, Oxford), Pascal Marty, Olivier Delouis, Tristan Alonge (MFO), Grégoire Lacaze (MFO/Aix Marseille).


logos partenaires

SEMINAR PROGRAMME (UK time)

24 May, 2-4pm: ‘Institutions & Networks: The cultural infrastructures of digital scholarship’
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEudOCrpjIvHtI5fHad7LS7zg74LrHQY2hr

25 May, 2-4pm: ‘Greek and Latin corpora’
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYudO-vrjsqH9f5d_XFIyfqGHa-NLdH_8Sg

31 May, 2-4pm: ‘From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEvd-qhrDMjHtA8w5ZqY5GUnWUICa1e9v19

1 June, 2-4pm: ‘Building and Mining Corpora for Social Media Discourse Analysis’
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0oduuqrj8jGtaykEVmZnxXQHT96nCArhR0