CALL FOR PAPERS

DHChicago: New Archival Knowledges
University of Chicago, May 19-20, 2016
Organized by the Macroanalysis & the Humanities Working Group

DHChicago seeks to bring together scholars from across the Chicagoland area and across the disciplines to present work on one of the most promising areas of the digital humanities: macroanalysis, or the computational analysis of textual data and metadata. We are specifically looking for presenters whose work engages with questions, some of which may include:

• What new knowledges can computational approaches produce about large cultural archives?
• How can we fold these knowledges back into existing debates within the humanities?
• How compatible are humanistic questions and computational methods?

The broader goal of DHChicago, building on the work done by organizations such as the Chicago DHCS Colloquium, is to lay groundwork for longer-term intellectual support by fostering inter-institutional and inter-departmental ties, connecting scholars to new resources, and creating new networks of potential interlocutors and collaborators for future endeavors. To this end, the conference seeks presentations that favor a practical, “under the hood” approach. We welcome presentations on ongoing as well as finished projects, and we encourage presenters to talk about the process of building their projects from the bottom up. What problem does the project address? Why did you choose a certain method to engage this problem? How did you arrive at a particular visual representation of your research?

Daniel Shore will deliver a keynote address on Thursday afternoon, entitled “In Defense of Search,” from his forthcoming monograph, Cyberformalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017). The conference will take place on Friday. Shore will also be leading a workshop that day on the syntactical analysis of regular expressions. Please email us to sign up to attend the workshop.