[ecrea] CfP: Little Data and the Big Picture

The following call for papers (viewble at http://bit.ly/H79K6q) may be 
of interest to readers with inclinations to literary studies.

"Little Data and the Big Picture: What Everyday Literature Can Do for 
Comparison"
a seminar to be held at the
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
New York University
20-23 March 2014

Abstract deadline: 15 November 2013

The broad claims of Big Data hide the continued importance of the 
specific, individual, and random. This seminar examines the 
contributions that Comparative Literature has made and can make for 
understanding the stories that are written and read against the 
background of “digital humanities,” “new media,” and the “information 
society.” Prospective participants are invited to problematize these key 
terms and explore how textual cultures have evolved alongside, been 
shaped by, and resisted successive fantasies of a data-driven society. 
There has always been an everyday literature of letters, memos, 
telegrams, and notes.

How are the forms of today’s everyday literature analogous repetitions 
of past forms and how do they represent something qualitatively 
different? How do we judge? In some fashion, the papers in this seminar 
will explore ways that the specific, the particular, the analog, and the 
banal persist in the face of the general, the aggregate, the digital, 
and the grand arc. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 
Histories and counter-histories of the information society; everyday 
digital textuality; computer and human languages; networked social 
media; Tweet poetics; posting addiction; life writing; comparative media 
and textual cultures; reception; censorship; quantitative 
historiography; textual geographies; platforms (computer and otherwise); 
analog/digital tensions; political action; lacunae; interface; objects 
(virtual and/or tangible); participation and/or non-participation; 
material and immaterial conditions of reading and writing.

Submit a paper proposal at http://www.acla.org/submit (be sure to select 
"Little Data..." in the Seminar drop-down menu).  Learn more about the 
meeting and its "distinctive structure" at http://www.acla.org/acla2014.

Any questions about the seminar, inquiries about topic suitability, or 
nominations of possible participants may be directed to 
(scott.kushner /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(scott.kushner /at/ gmail.com)>.