The Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria (http://etcl.uvic.ca/) invites you to attend the first meeting of the 2014-15 Brown Bag Speaker Series. This is a series of informal lunchtime seminars for faculty and graduate students in the Faculty of Humanities and across the university to discuss issues in digital literacy, digital humanities, and the changing face of research, scholarship, and teaching in our increasingly digital world. For an hour once per month, we meet to hear from an invited speaker, share ideas, and build knowledge.
On Thursday, 25th September, from 12 until 1 p.m., Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa (PhD Candidates in the English Department at the University of Victoria) will be presenting a talk entitled, “Z-Axis Scholarship: Modelling How Modernists Wrote the City” Details are below. Please share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in attending.
Thursday, 25th September—12 – 1 p.m.
MacLaurin Building D287, University of Victoria
Abstract: Can we map the way an author writes the city? To what extent do electronic mapping environments impose contemporary understandings of space upon texts that predate GIS? In this talk, Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa will address these questions by introducing z-axis research, a project that uses geodata taken from modernist novels to warp archival maps from the modernist period. The resulting 3D maps express the ways in which modernist authors imagine and construct urban space, visualizing subjective experiences on the ground rather than totalizing views from above. Join us for this discussion to see warped maps of Dublin and Paris, suitable for display on-screen and eventually in-hand via 3D printing, and hear about the geospatial analyses they enable for modernist literature.
Bios: Alex Christie is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Victoria and a research assistant for the Modernist Versions Project and Implementing New Knowledge Environments. He conducts research on z-axis geospatial analysis, textual versioning, and scholarly communication in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab; his dissertation traces the use of textual rearrangement to produce cultural arguments through modernist manuscripts and poetry, examining experiments in rule-based literary expression that predate digital computing.
Katie Tanigawa is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Victoria and a research assistant for the Modernist Versions Project and Implementing New Knowledge Environments. Her research for the MVP/INKE involves versioning modernist texts using the z-axis method, and her research for her dissertation focuses on representations of poverty in modernist literature.
Bring your lunch and join us to discuss digital technologies and research in our community!
