–deadline extended to May 13th– 

UCL Graduate Conference 2024

Close Reading in the Digital Age

If Franco Moretti is right to suggest in his seminal essay, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000), that literary scholars will be forced to revisit the scale of their research in the digital age, then close reading has to give way, as he argues, to ‘distant’ reading; that is to say, the study of literature will shift its emphasis onto the collection and analysis of data. Whether from digital archives and databases or to software for textual analysis, the digital humanities have provided the tools to implement quantitative analysis in literary studies – a crucial step in processing the sheer quantity of readily available digitised texts. Yet distant reading has not been accepted without reservations about its limitations.

Rather than being left aside as the remainder of an outdated form of scholarship, close reading remains a crucial tool towards understanding literature in the digital age. In fields other than literary criticism, close reading has proved essential for the analysis of digital texts, from what Jim Bizzocchi and Theresa J. Tanenbaum propose in 2011 about video games to the analysis of social media interactions, as Aimée Morrison puts forward in her 2021 study. In 2017, with words that appear to prophesy recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence and its yet underexplored effects on literary studies, Barbara Herrnstein Smith advances the notion that it is the very digital nature of our age that calls for closer attention to texts: ‘in the century upon us, where channels of communication are not only increasingly computerized but also increasingly corporatized and where texts of all kinds are turned to manipulative ends with digitally multiplied effectiveness, the ability and disposition to read texts attentively, one by one [...] is likely to be an advantage.’

In the spirit of the increasing convergence between close and distant reading, we welcome scholars of all disciplines, from the arts and humanities to the applied sciences, to present papers that delve into explorations of literature through digital methods, or the digital world through literary methods, or indeed any other permutation and variation between the two.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

- Literature and the digital humanities, including approaches, tools, and projects;

- The digital humanities and the pedagogy of literature;

- Natural Language Processing applied to literature;

- History of the book and digitisation;

- Participatory story-telling;

- Linguistics and literary stylistics;

- Representations of the digital in literature;

- Speculative fiction;

- Video game studies;

- Internet studies.

The conference will be held on the UCL main campus on Monday June 10th 2024. 

Please send 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers to uclpostgradconference24@gmail.com by the extended deadline Monday May 13th 2024 along with a brief biographical note.