Pre-Conference Workshop (12 June 2016)
“Digitisation and Cognition: Joint Futures for the Humanities?”
For selected participants only.
The pre-conference workshop for PhD students and early-career scholars investigates the potential connections between two areas which promise new perspectives for the humanities: cognitive approaches and digital humanities. What is their respective status as method, approach and heuristics? How can they inform each other? Can cognitive, empirical approaches to reading offer insights on the progressive digitisation of reading (and other cultural practices)? Can the digital technologies of corpus search, ngrams, etc. unlock new methods for the cognitive humanities? These and related questions about reading and digitization will be discussed together with Anne Mangen (Stavanger) and Caroline Bassett (Sussex/HCAS), and workshop participants will be invited to present their work (or planned work) on the intersection between the digital and the cognitive.
09.30 – 10.00 Coffee
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome
10.15 – 10.45 Marion Behrens: TBA
10.45 – 11.15 Erika Fülöp: Thinking (on) the Web and (in) Literature
11.15 – 12.00 Cody Mejeur: Video Games, Narrative, and Cognition
12.00 – 13.30 Luncheon
13.30 – 14.00 Diogo Marques: TBA
14.00 – 14.30 David Rodriguez: Reading as Navigation: mapping the Spatial Affordances of the American Novel
14.30 – 15.00 Ana Marques da Silva: TBA
15.00 – 15.30 Coffee
15.30 – 17.00 Discussion with Anne Mangen and Caroline Bassett
Photo: HCAS
Caroline Bassett
Professor of Media and Communications and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab at Sussex University, and Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Digital technologies challenge many forms of humanities research – transforming hermeneutic and critical methods of research and materialising new objects for investigation. It also tends to re-make old – and newer – divisions, for instance those dividing ‘Digital Humanities’ from Media and Cultural Studies. In response, the project of the Sussex Humanities Lab, which I lead, is to to develop an expanded form of digital humanities fusing core DH concerns with medium awareness/media studies and critical cultural theory.
Read more about Caroline’s research here and at the SHL Facebook page.
Photo: Anne Mangen
Anne Mangen
Associate Professor, Norwegian Reading Centre, University of Stavanger
A literary/media scholar by training, I currently do empirical research on the impact of digitization on cognitive and experiential aspects of reading, comparing the reading of different kinds of texts on various reading devices (print; e-readers; tablets; computers), and measuring the effect of technical and material affordances of the interface on, e.g., reading comprehension or narrative engagement.
Read more about Anne’s research here.