Perhaps of interest to SIGCIS folks? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following call for papers (viewble at http://bit.ly/H79K6q) may be of interest to readers with inclinations to literary studies. "Little Data and the Big Picture: What Everyday Literature Can Do for Comparison" a seminar to be held at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association New York University 20-23 March 2014 Abstract deadline: 15 November 2013 The broad claims of Big Data hide the continued importance of the specific, individual, and random. This seminar examines the contributions that Comparative Literature has made and can make for understanding the stories that are written and read against the background of “digital humanities,” “new media,” and the “information society.” Prospective participants are invited to problematize these key terms and explore how textual cultures have evolved alongside, been shaped by, and resisted successive fantasies of a data-driven society. There has always been an everyday literature of letters, memos, telegrams, and notes. How are the forms of today’s everyday literature analogous repetitions of past forms and how do they represent something qualitatively different? How do we judge? In some fashion, the papers in this seminar will explore ways that the specific, the particular, the analog, and the banal persist in the face of the general, the aggregate, the digital, and the grand arc. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): Histories and counter-histories of the information society; everyday digital textuality; computer and human languages; networked social media; Tweet poetics; posting addiction; life writing; comparative media and textual cultures; reception; censorship; quantitative historiography; textual geographies; platforms (computer and otherwise); analog/digital tensions; political action; lacunae; interface; objects (virtual and/or tangible); participation and/or non-participation; material and immaterial conditions of reading and writing. Submit a paper proposal at http://www.acla.org/submit (be sure to select "Little Data..." in the Seminar drop-down menu). Learn more about the meeting and its "distinctive structure" at http://www.acla.org/acla2014. Any questions about the seminar, inquiries about topic suitability, or nominations of possible participants may be directed to scott.kushner@gmail.com. ___________________________