Stephen Ramsay to speak in Melbourne (registration now open)

Registration is now open for the Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital research Conference to be held at the University of Melbourne on the 12th-14th December, 2011.

This is a free event, but please register soon to help planning. http://paradisec.org.au/2011Conf.html

The Keynote for the conference is Stephen Ramsay

Title of lecture: Found: Data, Textuality, and the Digital Humanities

“Computational processes generate lists: lists of numbers, lists of words, lists of coordinates, lists of properties.  We transform these lists into more exalted forms — visualisations, maps, information systems, software tools — but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived.  Whenever we treat the world as data, we are nearly always creating lists.

But what sort of *texts* are these, and can we consider them the same way that we consider other texts within the humanities?  In this paper, I offer some meditations on the nature of lists, and suggest that it is the paucity of information they provide — and the ways in which that paucity licenses narrative and explanation — that allows us to imagine computational representations as texts that can play a fruitful role in the wider context of humanistic inquiry”.

Stephen Ramsay is an Associate Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He designs and builds text technologies for humanist scholars, and has lectured widely on subjects related to literary theory and software design for the humanities. His book, *Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism*, will be published by University of Illinois Press later this year .

The conference programme is online:
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/conferences/index.php/humanities_perspectives/SDDR/schedConf/schedule

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities will sponsor a reception on the evening of the first day of the Conference. The keynote is sponsored by VeRSI.