Uses of Scale planning meeting at Illinois, March 8th.

On March 8th, researchers from several different universities will come together to discuss the opportunities digital collections are creating for literary study.

Schedule

Morning: Discussion among project participants. Room 109, Graduate School for Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel St.

9:15 What new opportunities do digital collections and methods open up (for literary study, or for the humanities more generally)? What are the remaining barriers to exploration? What are the barriers to entry for our colleagues and students? (See technical note below.)

11:00 How could institutions in the Humanities Without Walls consortium most effectively coordinate their efforts in this domain, to address the barriers we’ve identified?

12:00 break for lunch

Afternoon: Public events on the 3rd floor of the Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St.

1:30 Opening remarks, Ted Underwood.

1:45 – 2:45 Matthew Wilkens, “Where Was the American Renaissance? Computation, Space, and Literary History in the Civil War Era.”

3:00 – 4:15 Digital Collections and the Future of Literary Study: a discussion with Harriett Green, Ted Underwood, Robin Valenza, and Matthew Wilkens.

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Our goal in this meeting is to frame a flexible discussion that can grapple with a wide range of questions: theoretical, social, and institutional as well as technical. But because the technical obstacles to text mining at scale may be unfamiliar — and tend to form a hazy cloud of minutiae even after they are familiar! — it seemed worthwhile to list some of them in advance. They’re presented below in a very sketchy flowchart. Many important problems are missing here, and some problems listed have already been solved (perhaps in different ways by different research teams). But this at least gives us a place to begin discussion. (Click through for a full-size version, and click again to enlarge.)