The ETCL’s own Aaron Mauro will be giving a guest lecture at the New York University Department of English entitled “An Experiment is a Story: Experimental Literature and the Digital Humanities.” We hope you can attend!
Abstract:
Experimentation is a common practice for both the humanities and the sciences. Despite the common core of problems animating many research and development projects, finding points to test, explore, and modify scientific methods and tools for humanistic inquiry has only recently become a pressing concern. For my part, the confluence of experimental literature and digital technology represents a fertile ground to use scientific methods for humanistic ends. This talk will describe the methodological and theoretical currents at work in the digital humanities by showing the results of a few experiments in machine reading, big data analysis, virtual computing, and digitization. In this middle ground between literary interpretation and computing, I’ll share how my studies of contemporary experimental literature have become a creative and generative process. By blurring the line between fact and artifact, the act of prototyping, modeling, and testing literary texts represents a synthesis of technological and speculative ways of knowing.
Biography:
Aaron Mauro (Ph.D Queen’s University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and member of the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria. He is also a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow working in collaboration with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (inke.ca). His research areas include comparative media studies, digital humanities, 20th and 21st Century U.S. fiction, philosophy, and literary theory. His work has appeared in ImageText, Mosaic, and Modern Fiction Studies.