CFP: Life Narrative and the Digital 2023

The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna will present Life Narrative and the Digital 2023: Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop September 26-27 of this year.  This combination of conference and workshop, “brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and different career stages to explore the possibilities, uses, and challenges of digital methods and technologies for auto/biographical research and practice.”

From the call, questions of particular interest include:

• In what ways can digital methods and technologies aid the study and analysis of biographical data?
• How can the digital help us devise innovative pathways to the representation of historical individuals’ lives? (e.g. digital platforms)
• To what extent do digital formats of life narration tie in with new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice? (e.g. metabiography, relational biography, persona studies, group biography, object biography, etc.)
• How do we deal with uncertainty and the issue of data quality in the digital representation of biographical data?

The workshop track of the event will take place on September 26 and will feature short presentations of “work-in-progress, with a strong focus on tools, technologies, software, and methods, and with an emphasis on feedback and exchange,” while the conference portion will occur the following day, September 27, and will follow a traditional conference format, with research papers and panel discussions. The latter will be open to the public, though participation in both formats is free of charge.

Proposals for 300-500 words for both tracks will be accepted until May 26, with notifications of acceptance by June 23. Selected contributions will be published in the European Journal of Life Writing.