CALL FOR PAPERS – ‘Big Data’ in Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University; May 9-12, 2019
Organized by Susanna Allés-Torrent (University of Miami) and Albert Lloret (University of
Massachusetts Amherst)
The creation of digital collections of texts, or textual corpora, for research and preservation may be one of the seminal technological innovations in the digital humanities that still remains at the core of many text-oriented disciplines, including those belonging to medieval studies.
When creating a textual corpus, digital humanists face many key choices that will determine their project’s success. These decisions include the selection of standards, format types, methods for text recollection, searchability, access, lemmatization, and interoperability, among others.
Once a textual corpus is created, quantitative analysis allows researchers to study texts from a variety of critical perspectives and methodologies: statistics, stylometry, authorship atribution and verification, intertextuality, script recognition, stemmatology, text mining, topic modeling, etc.
These analytical methodologies are linked to the study of large amounts of information, to which one may be tempted to refer to as big data. But what constitutes “big data” in medieval studies and the digital humanities at large? Does thinking of textual corpora as “big data” help frame their forms and uses?
We invite paper submissions that reflect on the theory, practices, and challenges of creating— and researching through—textual corpora, including but not limited to:
• protocols and technologies for the creation of textual corpora.
• examples of textual corpora.
• methologies for the study of textual corpora (e.g., stylometry, stemmatology, script
recognition, etc.).
• theory of textual corpora and “big data” in medieval studies.
Please send a 100-word abstract and a Participant Information form to Susanna Allés-Torrent and Albert Lloret at
lloret@umass.edu by September 15.