CFP: THE DIGITAL AND THE HUMAN(ITIES): ACCESS, AUTHORITY & IDENTITY

THE DIGITAL AND THE HUMAN(ITIES): ACCESS, AUTHORITY & IDENTITY

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/tilts-2011/

February 3-6, 2011, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

250-word max abstract and 2-page vita due August 1, 2010

Plenary speaker: Laura Mandell, Professor and Director of Research Initiatives for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS), a yearly thematic institute series hosted by the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, invites paper proposals for the first of its 2010-2011 symposia, “The Digital and the Human(ities): Access, Authority, & Identity.”

This symposium will be the first of three events that aim to contribute significantly to the digital humanities by posing a series of hard questions about the tensions between its key terms. What can we say we have learned about the relationships between the digital and the human, and between the digital and the humanities? Efforts to promote collaboration and cross-fertilization between the humanities on the one hand and digital technology development on the other have overcome some conflicts between these areas of work. But to what extent have such efforts also revealed or repressed conflicts between the digital and the humanities that remain unresolved? Have they spawned new conflicts? Theorists routinely revise and extend concepts of the digital and of the human. But do practical initiatives in the digital humanities hold as yet under-articulated consequences for such theories? And, conversely, how might theoretical discussion of the digital humanities help clarify pressing practical problems in the field?

This symposium will focus on the threshold concepts of access, authority, and identity in relation to the electronic mediation of humanness. What do innovations in the digital provision of access and maintenance of authority mean for human identity, and, conversely, what do new ideas about, and forms of, identity mean for our evolving norms of access, authorship, and authorization? A number of high-visibility electronic experiments in radical access and the reconfiguration of authority have now come – and many have gone. What have we learned, and in what wayshave these experiments changed humanities conversations broadly?

Abstracts of 250 words or less and a 2-page vita should be submitted to the co-directors of the Institute (Brian Bremen, Matt Cohen, and Lars Hinrichs) c/o Andrea Golden at: amgolden@mail.utexas.edu by August 1, 2010. Papers will be roughly 15 minutes in length, presented in non-concurrent panels, so that all attendees can attend all sessions. For past and future TILTS themes, visit us at
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/tilts/.