Work-in-Progress Seminar: Maria Skou Nicolaisen Wednesday, November 30 Notions of Text Reflected by Digital Technology: A Preliminary Study of Current Trends in Digital Literary Studies noon - 1:30 pm · Clemons Library, Room 407    (Note new location!)

For this brownbag seminar, visiting Ph.D. scholar in Information Science from the University of Copenhagen, Maria Skou Nicolaisen will discuss her Dissertation-In-Progress. She is doing a comparative study of the conceptual and institutional frameworks guiding current digital literary projects at UVA’s English Department and the Stanford Literary Lab.

Digital technology has introduced quantitative methods in the humanities, but the formation and alteration of the digital literary field to include large-scale textual analytics has tended to focus primarily on changing methodologies.  While the methodological impact of the digital on humanities disciplines is indeed an important research area, it seems to have left the equally important conceptual and theoretical changes underexamined in comparison.

Maria will discuss how technological innovation challenges and transforms the notion of text, or more specifically, how digital remediation alters some basic assumptions about the nature and affordances of the textual object itself.  Working under the assumption that technological remediation equally uncovers and alters theoretical assumptions about the textual object, the project revolves around insights from current DH practitioners through interviews concerning their diverse literary projects.

Please plan to join us on Wednesday.  Feel free to bring your lunch, and light refreshments will be served.

Maria Skou Nicolaisen is a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has chosen UVA to be both her host institution as well as a case study for her research mission. She is hosted by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and has, during her time here, interviewed faculty from UVA’s English Department and the the Stanford Literary Lab.