Distinguished Lectures in Digital Humanities: "Patterns and Meaning"
Event details
| Date | 01.03.2016 |
| Hour | 14:00 › 15:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Franco Moretti Stanford University |
| Location | |
| Category | Cultural events |
“No one has ever seen the objects studied by contemporary historians”,
Krzysztof Pomian wrote a few years ago, “and no one could ever have seen them
[...] because they have no equivalent within lived experience”. True, no one has a
“lived experience” of demographic change or of literacy rates – or of image like
those used by computational criticism (or digital humanities, as they have been
disastrously named by the US federal agency in charge of funding them). We are
still studying novels, in the new space of literary labs, but we prepare them for
analysis in a way that changes what is in front of our eyes, and in a way that
fully supports Pomian’s point. Reading a novel, watching a play, listening to a
poem: this is the “lived experience” of literature. The images of computational
criticism are abstractions. So: what does it mean, studying literature through a
series of abstractions?
Krzysztof Pomian wrote a few years ago, “and no one could ever have seen them
[...] because they have no equivalent within lived experience”. True, no one has a
“lived experience” of demographic change or of literacy rates – or of image like
those used by computational criticism (or digital humanities, as they have been
disastrously named by the US federal agency in charge of funding them). We are
still studying novels, in the new space of literary labs, but we prepare them for
analysis in a way that changes what is in front of our eyes, and in a way that
fully supports Pomian’s point. Reading a novel, watching a play, listening to a
poem: this is the “lived experience” of literature. The images of computational
criticism are abstractions. So: what does it mean, studying literature through a
series of abstractions?
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
Organizer
- Institute of Digital Humanities
Contact
- Sabine Süsstrunk