Call for Papers

Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs

“The Undiscovered Country”: Exploring People and Places through Digital Humanities

30 May - 1 June 2011

Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

Deadline for Submission: 1 March 2010 (delegates will be notified by 15 March in order to be able to register at the discount rate before 31 March)

The Society for Digital Humanities (SDH/SEMI) invites scholars and graduate students to submit proposals for papers and sessions for its annual meeting, which will be held at the 2011 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, in Fredericton, NB, from 30 May-1 June.

This year’s Congress theme is Coasts and Continents: Exploring People and Places, and our society’s annual meeting focuses that wider Congress theme upon the digital humanities. Although the digital age has arrived, replete with descriptions, counter-descriptions, and critical commentary on digital natives, digital immigrants, e-books, and e-readers, etc., the digital still represents something of an “undiscovered country,” even to those who work in the digital humanities community. As we continue to define and explore research projects that will lead us into the future of humanities scholarship, we also renegotiate our relationships to the people and

places both of the past and of the present. We encourage papers and panels likely to contribute to an understanding of how digital technologies are fostering digitally enabled inquiry into people, places, text, images, and data. Mindful of the politics of appropriation, we also encourage papers that explore the dynamics of “return” (that is to say, the notion of giving back to the community), which we see ranging widely across a series of issues: e.g. the ethical repatriation of cultural (especially digital) artifacts to indigenous communities, the scholarly return of open access to scholarship and data sets, the political and economic return of open source software.

Submissions informed in any way by these themes are especially encouraged, but we also encourage any submission relevant to the digital humanities. Of particular interest to those likely to attend would be papers on any of the following topics:

* GIS -- spatialization and mapping

* chronologies -- temporality and history

* communities -- virtual or real-world

* gaming studies

* multimedia arts

* 3D modeling

* simulations

* archival projects

* prosopographies

* textual analysis, editing or encoding

* database theory

* cyberculture

* postcolonialism and globalization

Graduate students are particularly welcomed to submit a proposal to present at, or even simply to attend,

SDH/SEMI’s annual meeting. The Society has some funding available to support a graduate student panel.

Interested applicants should inquire using the contact information listed below. In the recent past, papers presented at the annual meeting of SDH/SEMI have been revised and submitted for publication in the Society’s on-line journal Digital Studies/ Le champ numeriques.

Submissions

Paper and/or session proposals will be accepted until 1 March 2011 via the SDH-SEMI website at <http://www.sdh-semi.org/conftool/>. Please note that all presenters must be members of SDH/SEMI at the time of the conference. Abstracts of papers should be between 150 and 300 words long, and clearly indicate the paper's thesis, methodology, and conclusion.

Accepted Formats:

* Traditional Papers: 20 mins (3 per 1 ½ hour session)

* Panel Proposals: 3-6 speakers on a unified theme (1 panel per 1 ½ hour session)

* Roundtables: 4-8 people addressing each other’s work (1 per 1 ½ hour session)

* Posters