[ecrea] Digital Shakespeare Monday 16 May 2011 (Workshop)

Digital Shakespeare

Monday 16 May 2011

Workshop and Talks

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building

Organised by Dr. David M. Berry and Dr. Tom Cheesman


Few dispute that digital technology is fundamentally changing the way in 
which we engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and 
more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through 
digital technology. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning 
to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the 
epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme 
(sometimes conceptualised as 'close' versus 'distant' reading, see 
Moretti 2000). Of course, this development is variable depending on 
disciplines and research agenda, with some more reliant on digital 
technology than others, but it is rare to find an academic today who had 
no access to digital technology as part of the research activity and 
there remains fewer means for the non-digital scholar to undertake 
research in the modern university (see JAH 2008). Not to mention the 
ubiquity of email, Google searches and bibliographic databases which 
become increasingly crucial as more of the worlds libraries are scanned 
and placed online. These, of course, also produce their own specific 
problems, such as huge quantities of articles, texts and data suddenly 
available at the researcher's fingertips, indeed, "It is now quite clear 
that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. 
Several million books have been digitized...and nearly every day we are 
confronted with a new digital historical resource of almost unimaginable 
size" (JAH 2008).

In this workshop we will look at how we might use the new digital tools 
of text aggregation, processing and information or data visualisation to 
provide the ways of looking at and thinking about Shakespeare. From 
making data patterns, to narrativising through algorithms and 
visualisation we aim to examine how these approaches and methods can 
assist in undertaking humanities research into textual materials.


 Programme

11.30-12.00     Registration (4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building)

12 noon:        Introduction and Welcome (David Berry)

12.15-12.50:    The Swansea VVV Project: Visualising Version Variation 
(Tom Cheesman)

13.00-13.45:    Understanding through Visualisation (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam)

13.45-14.00:    Coffee Break

14.00-14.30:    Shakespeare in Arabic (Sameh Hanna, Salford)

14.30-15.00:    Visualising Textual Corpora (Geng Zhao, Swansea University)

15.15-16.15:    Computational Information Design  (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam)

16.15:  Reflections on the workshop (Tom Cheesman, Robert S. Laramee)

16.45:  Ends


There is no charge for the workshop but as space is limited please email 
(d.m.berry /at/ Swansea.ac.uk) if you are interested in attending.

http://www.delightedbeauty.org/

Funded by the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH)



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Dr. David M. Berry
Department of Political and Cultural Studies
Room JC015
James Callaghan Building
Swansea University
Singleton Campus
Swansea
SA2 8PP

Tel: 01792 602633

http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/ArtsHumanities/berryd/