CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – An international who’s who of pioneers and practitioners in the field of digital humanities will gather at the University of Illinois for a major conference.
Digital Humanities 2007 will be held June 2-8 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana. Registration is available on site; those who register also may attend the annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America.
The conference is the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Nearly 200 participants from 18 nations are expected to attend more than 100 poster sessions and presentations.
The U. of I.’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science is the primary sponsor, with support from NCSA and the U. of I.’s Center for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. John Unsworth, the dean of the library and information science school, is the conference organizer.
Franco Moretti will give the opening plenary talk at 6 p.m. on June 4; his topic is “Quantitative Data, Formal Analysis: Reflections on 7,000 Titles (British novels, 1740-1850).” Moretti is a professor of English and of comparative literature at Stanford University and director of Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel. He also is the author of “The Atlas of the European Novel,” among many other works.
Wilhelm Ott will give the second plenary talk at 5:30 p.m. on June 5, as the winner of the biennial Busa Award, which is given to recognize outstanding achievements in the application of information technology to humanistic research.
Ott is the long-term director of the Computing Center at the University of Tuebingen in Germany and the creator of TUSTEP, the Tuebingen System of Text processing Programs. TUSTEP is a professional toolbox for scholarly processing textual data, including those in non-Latin scripts, with a strong focus on humanities applications.
The 2006 conference was held in Paris. The 2008 conference will be held in Oulu, Finland, June 25-29.
