Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English
Computational Analysis of Premodern and Non-Western Literature
Glickman Conference Center, Patton Hall (RLP)
University of Texas at Austin
April 6-8, 2022
About DH Beyond Modern English
Recent trends in the study of literature have seen a transformation in the kinds of textual corpus examined and a concomitant change in the analytical methods applied to these corpora. Common to the digital humanities, world literature, and other current approaches to literary research is an order-of-magnitude enlargement in the scale of analysis, whether entire centuries of novelistic production or even corpora containing millions of books spanning numerous genres. The quantitative resources and techniques that have enabled this development have been limited largely to modern and Anglophone contexts, two reasons for which are the bias towards the English language within commercial and technical fields, and the greater availability of modern texts, especially in digitized form.
DH Beyond Modern English is a two-part conference on the theme of computational approaches to the study of premodern and non-Western literature. The conference, held at Dartmouth College in Spring 2019 and the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2022, features participants drawn from a variety of disciplines and linguistic traditions, including Arabic, Bengali, Celtic, Chinese, Coptic, Japanese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Russian, Sanskrit, and Spanish. The conference (and a planned edited volume) will sketch a future for the field that encompasses philology, world literature, distant reading, and cultural evolution.
DH Beyond Modern English has been organized by the Quantitative Criticism Lab with support from the following sources at the University of Texas at Austin: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Engaged Scholar Initiative (courtesy of Dr. T.J. Bolt), Texas Global Campus Internationalization Fund, Offices of the President and Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Department of Classics, Graduate School Academic Enrichment Fund, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Center for European Studies, South Asia Institute, Program in British, Irish and Empire Studies, Center for East Asian Studies, UT Libraries, School of Information, China Endowment, Humanities Institute through the Barron Ulmer Kidd Centennial Lectureship, Initiative for Digital Humanities, POSCO Korean Studies Endowment, Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Plan II Honors, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas, School of Undergraduate Studies, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, Moody College of Communication, Center for Women’s & Gender Studies, Texas Language Center, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for Historical Studies, and the Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, History, Asian Studies, English, Anthropology, Spanish & Portuguese, Religious Studies, and Comparative Literature.
Registration
In-person attendance at the conference does not require registration: feel free to drop in on panels, and even individual papers, according to your interests and availability. Those who are unable to attend in person are welcome to do so virtually via Zoom, in which case please make sure to register using this link. Online attendees will need to sign into a Zoom account in order to gain access to the meeting.
DH Beyond Modern English Schedule
Wednesday April 6 RLP 1.302E (Glickman Center)
9:30am - 10:00am
Introductions
10:00am - 12:00pm
- Damián Blasi (Harvard University), “Rethinking Linguistic Diversity and its Role in the Study of Behavior and Cognition”
- Tanya Clement (University of Texas at Austin), “’Sighs, Sniffs, Whistles, Clicks’ in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Recordings”
- Rebecca Frost Davis (St. Edward’s University), “A Pedagogy for DH Beyond Modern English”
1:00pm - 3:00pm
- Valéry Berlincourt (University of Geneva), Jean-Philippe Goldman (University of Geneva), and Damien Nelis (University of Geneva), “Towards a Digital Edition of the Achilleid of Statius” (online)
- Neil Coffee (State University of New York at Buffalo) and Jeffery Kinnison (University of Notre Dame), “Tesserulae Recompostae: The Evolution of the Tesserae Project for the Digital Study of Intertextuality”
- Caroline Schroeder (University of Oklahoma), “Entity Recognition and Linked Open Data for Late Antique Egyptian Literature”
3:30pm - 5:00pm
- Dale Correa (University of Texas at Austin), “Making Arabic OCR Sustainable in the University Library Environment”
- Mark Ravina (University of Texas At Austin), “In Praise of Bad Scans: Finding Meaning in OCR Errors”
Thursday April 7 RLP 1.302E (Glickman Center)
9:30am - 12:00pm
- Barbara McGillivray (King’s College London) and Martina Astrid Rodda (University of Oxford), “Computational Valency Lexica and Homeric Formularity” (online)
- David Bamman (University of California, Berkeley), “Latin BERT: A Contextual Language Model for Classical Philology”
- Patrick Burns (Harvard University), “Error, Scale, and the Computational Redefinition of Philology”
- Peter Heslin (Durham University), “Literary Entropy: Quantifying Dis/order in Ancient Text Collections”
1:00pm - 3:30pm
- Michael Drout (Wheaton College), “Combining ‘Lexomic’ Digital Methods and Traditional Approaches in the Analysis of Beowulf”
- Georgia Henley (Saint Anselm College), “Digital Research in Medieval Celtic Studies: Successes, New Directions, and Opportunities” (online)
- David Mimno (Cornell University), “Early Modern English as a Low-resource High-resource Language”
- James Dobson (Dartmouth College), “Procrustes and Progress: Linear Alignment and Historical Analysis”
4:00pm - 5:00pm
Tool Demonstration
Friday April 8 RLP 1.302B (Glickman Center)
9:30am - 11:30am
- Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University), “Shabdakalpa: Making a Historical Dictionary of the Bengali Language” (online)
- Rajni Mujral (SRM University), “Dialogical Writing and Performance Text: Analysing Qissa in Panjab”
- Amba Kulkarni (University of Hyderabad), Pavankumar Satuluri (Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth), and S. R. Arjuna (Manipal Academy of Higher Education), “Developing E-readers for Sanskrit Texts Semi-automatically”
12:30pm - 2:30pm
- Andrew Janco (University of Pennsylvania), “Metrics of Change Over Time with a Corpus of Russian and Ukrainian Diaries” (online)
- Jennifer Isasi (Pennsylvania State University), “Literary Analysis of Spanish-language Novels with NLP and Character-level Metadata”
- Grace Fong (McGill University) and Song Shi (University of Pittsburgh), “The Potential of Text and Paratext Data for Exploring Social Networks in Ming Qing Women’s Writings”
2:30pm
Conference ends
DH Beyond Modern English Participants
S.R. Arjuna Manipal Academy of Higher Education
David Bamman University of California, Berkeley
Valéry Berlincourt University of Geneva
Damián Blasi Harvard University
Patrick Burns Harvard University
Sukanta Chaudhuri Jadavpur University
Tanya Clement University of Texas at Austin
Neil Coffee State University of New York at Buffalo
Dale Correa University of Texas at Austin
Rebecca Frost Davis St. Edward’s University
James Dobson Dartmouth College
Michael Drout Wheaton College
Grace Fong McGill University
Jean-Philippe Goldman University of Geneva
Georgia Henley Saint Anselm College
Peter Heslin Durham University
Jennifer Isasi Pennsylvania State University
Andrew Janco Haverford College
Jeffery Kinnison University of Notre Dame
Amba Kulkarni University of Hyderabad
Barbara McGillivray King’s College London
David Mimno Cornell University
Rajni Mujral SRM University
Damien Nelis University of Geneva
Mark Ravina University of Texas at Austin
Martina Astrid Rodda University of Oxford
Pavankumar Satuluri Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth
Caroline Schroeder University of Oklahoma
Song Shi University of Pittsburgh
Organizers
Pramit Chaudhuri University of Texas at Austin email
Joseph Dexter Harvard University email
Contact DH Beyond Modern English
Questions about the DH Beyond Modern English conference can be directed to pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu or jdexter@fas.harvard.edu.
Follow on Twitter at @qCritLab & #dhbme.
Poster for the DHBME conference can be downloaded as a PDF here.