The Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has published a call for proposals for their BH and DH: Book History and Digital Humanities conference. To be held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from September 22-24, 2017, the conference “aims to study how digital humanities grows out book history, how ‘bh’ and ‘dh’ continue to be mutually informative and generative, and how also they contradict each other.” Possible topics include:
- Book as technology
- The relationships between and among librarians, technologists, and humanities faculty and students
- The making of digital bibliographies, catalogs, and archives out of analog ones (and librarian, largely women information laborers)
- Histories of digitization (and/or of microfilm, other storage and transmission media)
- What happens to the “traditional humanities” vs. “digital humanities” antagonism when we see the latter as a continuation or inheritor of book history?
- Critical Race Studies in BH and DH and the critiques of both from African American studies, postcolonial studies, and Native American studies
- digital remediation of manuscript, print, and books
- Histories of particular institutions that connect BH and DH such as the American Library Association, the UVA English Dept, the William Blake Archive.
- Printing history and digital humanities (e.g. understanding circumstances of production key to OCR, etc)
- Importance of labor to create metadata, reference books, accumulate information – what kind of labor is acceptable, privileged, valuable?
- Quantitative methods in Book History (esp. Annales school, French/Continental tradition) and continuity with digital humanities methods
- Bibliographical methods in Book History and continuity with digital humanities methods
- How has DH dealt with/expanded what “reading” means and how is this connected to book history’s approach to history of reading?
- BH and DH methods for studying group reading, collaborative reading and writing, institutions of reading, reading “against the grain”, readers as writers, etc.
- Encoding the physical book – how to make computers understand and display what book historians care about
- DH and BH and the collecting/accumulating/”cabinet of curiosities” tradition; media archaeology
- history of information organization/data collection as part of history of science, book history and digital humanities, structures of digital and pre-digital information
- web archiving and preservation of information about readers and texts in the present
- And more. We welcome an expansive, capacious, and argumentative field for this conference!
Proposals are due April 15, 2017.
