Abstracts of papers

Asst. Prof. Titika Dimitroulia, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

“Corpora in Literary Studies”

The aim of this communication is to present the use of corpora in digital literary studies. In the context of corpus-linguistics and quantitative text analysis, we will show the importance of corpora design and the possible interaction of literary and non-literary corpora. We will focus on the study of interrelations in macro-structures and the contribution of corpora in stylistic studies, from authorship attribution to individual author’s and translator’s style and particular features linked to narrative and plot. In this context, we will present briefly two projects, one on authorship attribution in translation, and one on stylistics through parallel corpora.

David McClay, Senior Curator, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland

“Giving Birth to a Digital Childe”

For many years the National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been successfully developing digital strategies and platforms to engage traditional and new audiences with its internationally renowned literary and publishing collections. Key to this success has been increased inter-institutional collaboration, academic engagement and audience development. Increasingly creative and innovative approaches have allowed NLS to develop ambitious digital resources which allow greater and better access to collection material. Whilst NLS, alone and through wider Scottish collaborations, have presented traditional literary materials and interpretations in increasingly engaging ways through digital platforms, the increasing expectations of content users means that digital engagement has to be constantly and increasingly improving. This paper then will first present a review of recent and current NLS and wider Scottish digital projects, before discussing the challenges and opportunities in bringing the NLS’s unparalleled book and archival resources for Lord Byron’s early nineteenth-century poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage alive through digital curation for a twenty-first-century audience.

Assoc. Prof. James Mussell, University of Leeds

“‘In Our Last’: Serials, Seriality, and the Archive”

The book has long been associated with the body and we accommodate the body of the book to our own bodies – cradling it, turning its pages – often without even noticing. The body of the book seems to offer a point of resistance to those that would make it disembodied, digitized, broken into bits. Yet there is no such thing as pure content, an unmediated soul, and a body of some sort is always necessary for reading to take place. If digitization resurrects the book, it does so by turning it into something else.

As print works through repetition, it puts into place a gothic economy of co-presence, of haunting. While the insistent bodies of books remind the reader of other copies, and their readers, elsewhere, it is serials that fully embody the repetitive logic of print. ‘In our last’ was how nineteenth-century journalists and editors referred to previous issues. My paper examines the presence of these past issues, whether explicitly discussed in the pages of the current issue, or uncannily present through the repetition of its form. Newness is always tempered by repetition in periodical publication as forms from past issues are repeated in the present maintaining continuity and allowing the identity of the publication to transcend any particular issue. Resurrection thus underpins the progression of periodical publication. Spirit lives on, the body dies.

‘In our last’ also suggests something that is disavowed in periodical publication: the possibility of an ending. The success of a periodical depended upon deferring this end for as long as possible. I argue that it was by maintaining focus on the recent past while preventing that past from encroaching on the present that periodicals attempted to delay their end. But ‘In our last’ has one final meaning. In the concluding part of my talk I contrast the print archive, which is dead, having reached its end, with the digital resources that return it to us. I will argue that what these new returns reveal is how much more there is to know about print, and why what we think of as print culture is something other than the objects in the library.

Assoc. Prof. Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

“Technologies of Memory: Book History and the Digital Humanities”

Digital humanities scholars are reworking the technologies of memory – storage, access, study – that we inherited from the nineteenth-century, the great age of the printed book. But what is the future of the nineteenth-century book in the digital age? In building the global digital library, we need to attend to the richly-encoded structures of the book and its history, even as we use digital technologies to unfold and enliven our bookish inheritance. This talk will look in two directions: towards the horizons of opportunity opened by digital tools and texts and also towards the possibility of loss that threatens our research libraries in an age of digital surrogates.

Asst. Prof. Katerina Tiktopoulou & Eleni Petridou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

“Projecting D. Solomos’ Edition in the Digital Age”

Dionysios Solomòs seems to be the most challenging poet of the Greek nineteenth century, because of his ideological significance in Modern Greek history and the textual difficulties his work and his archive presents. His writings, left incomplete in most of the cases, survive mainly in manuscript form and periodical printings and his reading is since haunted by contingency.

In Solomos’ archive case digital tools not only can provide digital curation and access to its material but can actually contribute to the ongoing theoretical discussion about the editing of the works. This paper will therefore focus on the perspective of Solomos’ digital edition and will discuss its presuppositions, its purposes and its goals and, in conclusion, aspects of a genetic digital edition of Solomos’ work.