DIGITAL TEXTUALITIES/ CANADIAN CONTEXTS

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory Launch Conference, Sept. 20-22, 2016

Papers on the intersection of text and the digital in the Canadian context are invited for a two-day conference celebrating the launch of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) at the University of Alberta.

Keynote: Lori Emerson (University of Colorado at Boulder)

The conference provides an occasion to take stock of digital approaches to writing and culture in Canada, whether they focus on Canadian artifacts or digitally investigate literary and cultural matters from within the Canadian academic context. How have the particulars of Canadian culture, infrastructure, and academic structures impacted digital literary and cultural studies? What kinds of local, regional, organizational, institutional, or national factors have inflected the relationship between culture and technology in Canada? Are our diverse identities, histories, politics, and infrastructures reflected in how we read, write, and research digitally? What have digital approaches

contributed to our understanding of Canadian literature, culture, and identity categories?

CWRC is an online environment for scholarly research, bringing together Canadian and international researchers who work with online technologies to investigate writing and related cultural practices relevant to the Canadian context. CWRC supports the creating, uploading, sharing, enhancing and curating of research materials by interlinking the contents of individual projects and by supporting team-based collaboration. It brings together bibliographical, biographical, critical, and prosopographical work, scholarly transcription and editing, and multi-media collections, supporting scholars interested in exploring the potential of digital knowledge production to advance their research agendas.

For those interested in trying out the CWRC research space, free workshops will be offered on Tuesday September 20th and Thursday September 22nd.

We are interested in papers that take up digital literary or cultural research, broadly conceived, in Canada, including, for instance,

• digital humanities research in and on Canadian literature and culture: histories, trends, practices,

possibilities, resources

• reading and writing (about) Canadian literature inthe digital age
• Indigeneity and digital culture
• Canadian e-literature
• digital collaboration: working collectively in theacademic context
• online research and the academy: support,structures, protocols
• producing and reading digital texts
• technologies of image, text, and sound preservationand presentation
• intellectual property
• gender and marginalized identities in a digitalcontext
• invisible research and development: digitalresearcher as academic avatar
• reading and writing digital games
• interfaces: design, politics, subjectivities
• digital readership: identifying constituencies forresearch
• close and distant readings of digital texts
• digital self-publishing
• the borders and the shape of the digital nation
• area studies and digital scholarship in Canadiancontexts: who is digital and why?

• crossing disciplinary, institutional, and community divides; public facing digital humanities
• the contexts, challenges and discontents of collaboration
• new technologies and old scholarship: bibliography in the digital context
• the impact of digital humanities resources in and on Canada on literary and cultural study; anthologies and datasets
• Canadian innovations in text analysis and text miningPlease send 250-word proposals in English or French for 20-minute papers along with a 150-word biographical statement by email to cwrc.conference@gmail.com
  by March 30, 2016.