CFP: DCSC Conference - Digital Humanities and Book History
The Program Committee invites proposals for DH+BH, September 22-24, 2022, collaboratively hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Southern Methodist University, the University of California Los Angeles, and Texas A&M University. DH+BH is the inaugural conference of the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative (DCSC).
Digital scholarship happens at the convergence of a range of disciplines, technologies, and communities. The Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative is a community that seeks to explore, celebrate, question, and disrupt these intersections in order to advance an inclusive dialog that spans boundaries and highlights unlikely connections in the field of digital humanities. History of the book, grounded in the discipline of bibliography, is a rich field that is particularly amenable to digital interventions. Bibliographic data includes temporal, spatial, and named entity information that can be analyzed at scale. Long durée analyses of textual data can offer insights on topics, audiences, and patterns of language use over time. This event offers an opportunity for these communities to converge.
The discourse of “books” hinges on inheritances and new possibilities. What do books and bibliography mean in a time of catastrophic climate change and violent political polarizations? And how does technology in its manifold forms present opportunities for conversation, intervention, and activism? We want to confront the numerous problems of a problematic field at a problematic time. Established scholars have made much of eighteenth century archives of the Enlightenment; what will future scholars make of our contemporary values mundane and elevated?
The organizers situate this conference as part of a longer and ongoing continuum of the history of the book. The codex has never not intersected with other media and technology – from woodcuts and engraving plates, to wood and cast type, to the machinery of industrial print, to the multimodal publications of the present and future. Each of these innovations has required the development of new modes of production, circulation, and readerly engagement, and each now requires innovations in both material and digital preservation. Counter to the canonistic and nationalistic agendas which have been prevalent in digitization projects and are driven by the priorities of governmental funding agencies, we recognize that the urgency of preserving and sharing materials from marginalized and stigmatized groups is not as programmatic as it should be, nor is it well-represented in the fields of book history and in digital humanities. We further acknowledge that the future of the book – in new and old forms, and as transmedia objects – is both uncertain and exciting. We believe that the cohort emerging from this event will be well suited to develop a community of practice that centers scholarship, collection and preservation, and sociotechnical innovation in these emerging forms and the literacies that frame them.
The planning committee practices intentional inclusion and encourages submissions from researchers, students, librarians, archivists, practitioners of craft and print, information and technology professionals, and data scientists. We welcome perspectives from all individuals and are interested in fostering a dialog of critical, self-reflexive DH invested in different vectors of identity, and we encourage research produced by or concerning vulnerable and marginalized communities, historically or contemporaneously. In keeping with our focus on communities, we encourage submissions on DH praxis grounded in and accountable to the needs and ethics of local communities.
This hybrid and distributed event will take place at the partner institutions and online.