Digital Diversity 2015: Writing | Feminism | Culture

Orlando turns 20

Edmonton, Canada 7-9 May 2015

How have new technologies transformed literary and cultural histories? How do they enable critical practices of scholars working in and outside of digital humanities? Have decades of digital studies enhanced, altered, or muted the project to recover and represent more diverse histories of writers, thinkers, and artists positioned differently by gender, race, ethnicity, sexualities, social class and/or global location?  This conference examines the trajectory of feminist digital studies, observing the ways in which varied projects have opened up the objects and methods of literary history and cultural studies. It marks the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in digital methods that produces Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles, from the Beginnings to the Present (orlando.cambridge.org). Alongside pioneering projects such as the Women Writers Project, the Corvey Project, the Dickinson Electronic Archives, the Perdita Project, and the Victorian Women Writers Project, Orlando blazed a new path in the field, bringing together feminist literary studies with emerging methods of digital inquiry.  These twenty years have witnessed a revolution in how we research, produce, and circulate knowledge. It is time to reflect upon the impact of the digital turn on engagement with the literary and cultural past.

We welcome presentations that will together reflect on the past, present, and future of digital literary and cultural studies; examine synergies across digital humanities projects; and stimulate exchanges across such fields as literary history, history, art history, cultural studies, and media studies.

Potential topics include:

• Transformations and evaluations of feminist, gender, queer and other recuperative literary studies
• Digital manifestations of critical race studies, transatlantic/transnationalist or local/community-based approaches
• Collaborations between digital humanities specialists and scholars in other fields
• Born-digital critical and creative initiatives in cultural history (journals, blogs, electronic “branch” projects, crowdsourcing, multi-media, and interactive projects)
• Editorial initiatives, digitization and curation of primary texts, representation of manuscripts and the writing process
• Inquiry into texts, networks, and historical processes via visualization and other “distant reading” strategies
• Authorship and collaboration: the work of women and other historically marginalized writers, traditional models of scholarship, and new conditions of digital research and new media
• Sound and sight: sound and visual arts studies in digital environments
• Identities and diversity in new media: born-digital arts in word, sound, and image, in genres including documentaries, blogs, graphic novels, memoirs, hypertexts and e-literature
• Conditions of production: diversity in academia, publishing, library, information science, or programming, past and present
• Cultural and political implications of particular tools or digital modes of presentation
• Pedagogical objectives, practices, environments
• Dissemination, accessibility, and sustainability challenges faced by digital projects

The conference will include paper/panel presentations as well as non-traditional presentation formats. Please submit abstracts (500 words for single paper, poster, or demonstration, and 1500 words for panels of 3 papers or workshops) along with a short CV for each presenter. We are applying for funding to support the participation of students and emerging scholars.

We welcome proposals for other non-traditional formats. Half- to full-day workshops will be held on the first day of the conference; demonstrations and poster presentations will be embedded in the conference program. Proposals for workshops should provide a description, outline, and proposed schedule indicating the length of time and type of space desired.

The deadline for all submissions is  26 September 2014. Send proposals and CVs by email, to digdiv2015@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @digdiv2015.