ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
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May 30, 2006
What to Do With a Million Books
The Humanities Division at the University of Chicago and the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of Technology have put out a call for papers for a colloquium entitled “What to Do With a Million Books,” to be held November 5th and 6th at the University of Chicago.
The goal of this colloquium is to bring together scholars and researchers in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry, and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.
The book, as the locus of our knowledge, has long been at the center of discussions in digital humanities. But as mass digitization efforts accelerate the shift from a print-culture to a networked digital-culture, it will become increasingly necessary to pay more attention to how the notion of a text itself is being re-constituted collectively. This shift makes evident the necessity for humanities scholars to enter into a dialogue with computer scientists to understand the new language of open standards, queries, visualization and social networks.
Digitizing ‘a million books’ is not only a problem for computer scientists. Tomorrow, a million scholars will have to re-evaluate their notions of archive, textuality and materiality in the wake of these developments. Our familiar modes of scholarly edition, analysis, interpretation and publication are being challenged and transformed in a world where blogs and wikis are busy creating new knowledge and folksonomies are shaping our access to online archives.
How will the humanities scholar and the computer scientist find ways to collaborate in the “Age of Google?”
Proposals for paper presentations, poster sessions, and software demonstrations are due August 15th. For the list of keynote speakers, the call for participation, and other details about the conference, please see TeleRead, by Quinn Anya Carey.
Posted by Katie Newman at May 30, 2006 11:39 AM