Humanizing Computerized Literary Criticism
Posted on April 6, 2006 01:39 PM
The Computing in the Humanities Users' Group presents
Humanizing Computerized Literary Criticism
Stephen Ramsay
Department of English
University of Georgia
3:30, Friday April 14
STG Conference Room
Graduate Center, Tower E
The emerging field of "digital humanities" is still grappling with its dual intellectual roots in the humanities and computational sciences. Its central questions still revolve around the relationship between computational processes and textual interpretation: do they intersect, compete, cohere at all? Computation comes to us, along with the cultural burden of science, as an activity associated with the inexorable calculus of fact and truth. As humanists, we usually regard computation itself as occupying the realm of objectivity and fact, although the results of computation may form the basis for interpretation and subjective evaluation.
This talk probes this pairing, considering texts as various as ancient Sumerian tablets and the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and examining the computational, analytical, and interpretive strategies we bring to the encounter. Ramsay suggests that even computational processes, at least in those areas of interest to the humanist, are already rife with the subjective--and indeed, that computation itself is not only an interpretive act, but one that requires the perspectives and contexts of humanities scholarship.
Stephen Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He specializes in the computational analysis and visualization of literary texts, and is one of the co-investigators for The Nora Project . He has written a number of software systems for humanistic inquiry, and is currently the lead developer of Tamarind -- an automatic XML preprocessor and corpus builder for scholarly text analysis. He has lectured widely on subjects related to text analysis theory and software design for the humanities.
This talk is organized by the Scholarly Technology Group at CIS.
For more information, contact stg_info@brown.edu or see http:// www.stg.brown.edu