CALL FOR PAPERS
Physical Archives in the Digital Age:
A conference at Chawton House Library

13 April 2015

Keynote speaker: Caroline Franklin, Swansea University

The number of digital resources devoted to British women’s writing continues to expand at a staggering rate, with access to digitized textual material by women, and great stores of biographical and bibliographical data about them and their publications, growing by the day. This conference provides an opportunity to explore the transformation our relation to books and physical archives in an increasingly digital age.

Papers are invited that explore questions such as the following:

•Are we interacting with textual material on the screen more than on the (manuscript or printed) page, and if so, how are our research practices changing?
•Are our embodied and affective relationships to our objects of study shifting in a digital age?
•Do digitized materials supplant our need to view the physical originals, or enhance the necessity of and desire for archival work? •Do digital surrogates of material texts highlight physical elements of texts that might otherwise pass unremarked?
•What sources of knowledge and serendipitous discovery can be provided only in the physical archive? The digital archive?
•Is there a developing consensus about best practices for digitizing and editing archival material?
•Are there ways to create online reading interfaces that can more closely approximate the experience of reading physical materials?
•Do women’s archival materials present unique challenges in their transformation to digital forms?
•What new pedagogical opportunities do open-source and free digitized materials offer, and how are post-graduate students using them?

We encourage papers that will engage in a vigorous debate about the merits and limitations of encountering texts and archives in material and digital forms.

The conference is co-hosted by Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCECS). Please send abstracts of 200-500 words to the attention of the conference organisers Gillian Dow and Michelle Levy, to Sandy White: sw17@soton.ac.uk.

Proposals can be for 20-minute papers; for complete panels (of three papers); or for roundtables, featuring 4-6 speakers giving short (10 minute) presentations on a focused topic. The deadline for abstracts is the 30th of January 2015.