From Archives to Argument Symposium:
Day 2: New Perspectives
The Atlas of Digitized Newspapers and Oceanic Exchanges - Emily Bell
Oceanic Exchanges brought together computational periodicals research from six countries to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries, producing The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata, an open access guide to international newspaper databases, their histories and digitisation choices, to better understand the relationship between digital archive and digital researcher.
Digitizing Samuel Beckett’s Novel Watt: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and Beyond- Dr Mark Byron
The six manuscript notebooks and partial typescript of Samuel Beckett’s wartime novel Watt (first published in 1953) present a substantial reservoir of material that did not survive into print, but which illuminate many of the textual curiosities of the novel. My work in digitizing the manuscript notebooks shows how this relationship between primary documents and published text can take complex and surprising forms.
One Hundred Years of Migration Discourse in The Times - Lorella Viola
This presentation investigates the historical changes in the public discourse of migration in the United Kingdom using the Times Digital Archive from 1900 to 2000. It does so by merging two techniques: neural word embeddings and the discourse-historical approach. Striking correlations have been found between the language used to describe migration, concurrent events, and public discourse.
Materiality and a History Of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) - Stephen Gregg
Via a few case studies, this paper will explore the traces of ‘bookish’ materiality in ECCO, revealing the entangled processes to which these eighteenth-century books have been subject. It will emphasise the necessity of users to better understand the cultural and technical history of commercial databases.
The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 - Dr Erin McCarthy
The European Research Council-funded project “RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700” was a collaborative, interdisciplinary project to develop a large-scale, quantitative account of the ways early modern women’s writing was read and transmitted. This paper will reflect on the challenges and opportunities we have faced in turning from data gathering to data analysis. It will also introduce the publicly accessible version of the RECIRC database, launched in Galway in January 2020
Genre, Gender & The Gaze: Digital Approaches Towards A Critical Literary History of The Face - Dr Tyne Daile Sumner
This presentation introduces some of the digital literary studies approaches being explored in the ARC Discovery project, 'Literature and the Face: A Critical History' based at the University of Melbourne and the University of Geneva. It focuses on the need to strike a balance between large scale text corpora analysis and close reading along genre and gender lines.
Food, Health and The Health Food Industry: A Database Pilot - Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi
This paper explores the bibliographic records on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) published by GALE to unravel the links between health and food in the period c.1678-1805. The research objectives involve developing a methodology to identify records relating to food and health by isolating titles and keywords in the already existing English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) database, conducting preliminary digital analysis of the bibliographical metadata by using analytical and data visualization tools, and importing relevant data to a customized ‘Food and Health’ database on the Heurist platform.