Roundtable: “Digital Generations of 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers”
2017 British Women Writers Conference
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
June 21-24, 2017
The history of using computers to study 18th- and 19th-century British women writers is at least 30 years old and has been overshadowed by attention to the William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archives. In 1987, J. F. Burrows published his seminal text-analysis book project on dialogue in Austen’s novels, Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method. Scholars in the 1990s began creating digital archives, like The Forget-Me-Not Hypertextual Archive; digital editions, such as Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” in Romantic Circles; and single-author studies as websites, such as Lisa Vargo’s 1998 Anna Laetitia Barbauld Website. The landscape of newer published digital work, such as Shelley's Frankenstein manuscripts in the Shelley-Godwin Archive, make it clear that scholars continue to produce and value electronic scholarship on British women writers, yet more critical discussions of methods and projects are needed.
This roundtable seeks broadly to energize such discussions of electronic scholarship, past and present, on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers. For example, papers may discuss how digital scholarship on British women writers has changed since the 1980s and 1990s. Can we identify “generations” of approaches to studying women writers with computing? What unique insights do computer technologies add to the study of women writers and their texts? The organizer invites a range of proposals including papers that use electronic texts and computing for analyses, papers that recover histories of DH projects on women writers, and theoretical explorations of feminist methodologies in DH as they relate to BWWC literary periods.
If you are interested in having your work considered for this roundtable, please submit a 300-word proposal to Kirstyn Leuner at Kirstyn.J.Leuner@dartmouth.edu by January 15, 2017. Please give your email the subject line “BWWC 2017 Roundtable Proposal” and include a short bio with your proposal.