Medieval Yack Meets Digital Hack: Theorizing the Digital Humanities
Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory invites one-page abstracts for 20-minute papers theorizing the digital humanities [DH] via Medieval Studies. DH is a field filled with early period specialists. From digitization efforts and quantitative methods to social media-based public scholarship, medievalists have long stood at the forefront of digital initiatives. DH, moreover, has been more associated with questions of methodology and praxis than, as Gary Hall puts it, “a concern with theory or ideology.” Thus, despite the work of scholars like N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker, the digital humanities has not always been as rigorously theorized as it could be. This suggests a great need for work that theorizes DH within and beyond the context of Medieval Studies. This session seeks to not merely ask which digital tools or methodologies are germane to Medieval Studies, but the ways in which Medieval Studies compellingly reconfigures the DH landscape at a theoretical level.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Alternative DH/new media genealogies
- Computational/quantitative methodologies reframed via the premodern
- Digitality and embodiment
- Interdisciplinarity and collaboration
- Invention – rhetorical, generic, artistic, technological, racial
- Materialisms, media, and the digital
- Public scholarship and new media/social media
- Scholasticism’s theoretical resources
Please submit queries or abstracts to Corey Sparks: ctsparks@csuchico.edu. Abstract submissions are due by September 15, 2018. Early submissions are encouraged since the session may close at any point up until the deadline.
EXM 