Engl507

"Arguing with Computers" | Three Public Panels @UVic

Monday, March 31, 2014 | 10am-12:30pm | CLE C109 | UVic

Since January 2014, eleven students in English 507 at UVic have been developing projects at the intersection of computation, literature, theory, and culture—all in response to the theme, "Arguing with Computers." In so doing, they have asked how (if at all) computational methods facilitate exegesis, hermenuetics, and deconstruction. They have also explored the cultural assumptions at work in technologies, and they have unpacked how computers are persuasively integrated into the histories of literary and cultural criticism. For instance, how is computational analysis part and parcel of a longer legacy of mediation, of understanding reading, writing, and our relations with materials? How is human vision welded to machine vision, and under what assumptions about time, space, and labour? How do we combine existing practices in close reading with emerging computational modes, such as distant reading, surface reading, procedural rhetoric, algorithmic criticism, web ethnography, pattern recognition, and compiling? How (if at all) and when (if ever) do human-computer approaches yield surprise for literary critics? Or tell us something new or unique about literature and culture?

On Monday, March 31st at 10am in CLE C109, these eleven students will present some of the important research they have conducted in English 507. We invite you to attend, watch, listen, comment, and ask questions. Details are below. Feel free to attend the event in part. Should you have any questions or concerns, then please don't hesitate to email Jentery Sayers at jentery@uvic.ca.

How Do You Patch an Archive? (10-10:30am | Q&A: 10:30-10:45am)
Patrick Close, James Linde, and Kevin Tunnicliffe
This panel attempts to surmount familiar archival gaps and aporia through computational techniques of synthesis, conjecture, and modelling. Irrespective of our diverse research—spanning medieval encyclopaedias, modernist collegiate history, and contemporary laptop music—we have found that supposed technological solutions to traditional archival problems (such as access, immediacy, and completeness) are instead open questions about academic methodology.

Methodology as Mediation (10:50-11:20am | Q&A: 11:20-11:35am)
Lawrence Evalyn, Heather Stirling, Renee Vander Meulen, and Caroline Winter
This panel examines how our research on non-textual objects—including illustrations in Pride and Prejudice and the Illustrated London News, early Kleenex advertisements, and metadata on 208 Gothic novels—has been shaped by questions of materiality, access, categorization, and visuality. By focusing on process, we explore how research answers are produced not only by the questions asked, but also by the methods employed in the asking.

Subjective Spaces (11:40am-12:10pm | Q&A: 12:10-12:25pm)
Maleea Acker, Faye Campbell, Mayah Holtslander, and Danielle McKeirnan
This panel troubles definitions of space and identity through the intersections of community, culture, landscape, memoir, and memory. Our projects tackle questions of boundary and representation while making use of text analysis and geo-mapping to complicate notions of place. Projects range from Amy Levy’s nineteenth-century Jewish novel and Diane di Prima’s memoir of her time in New York City to M. Wylie Blanchet’s West Coast travel narrative and the social network, couchsurfing.org.