The ICLA DCL Committee is organizing a mini-conference at DH2025 (Lisbon, July 14-18, 2025), in collaboration with the ADHO Special Interest Group in Digital Literary Studies (SIG-DLS) and the Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS-INFRA). If you are interested in submitting a proposal, you can find the Call here below.
Comparative Literature Goes Digital
In September 2024, a new Research Committee on “Digital Comparative Literature” (DCL) was formed as part of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). In September 2025, the Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS-INFRA), part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, will conclude its activities.
To celebrate the concurrent creation and conclusion of these two sister projects, the SIG-DLS (now renamed “Digital Literary Studies”) organizes a mini-conference at DH2025 in Lisbon, dedicated to all applications of digital and computational methods in the study of literature.
The program (planned on Monday 14 July, 13:30-17:00 WET) will include a series of lightning talks and demos, welcoming contributions on (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies when applied in a comparative perspective;
- Multilingual literary archives and the digitization of texts in different languages and writing systems;
- The transformation of the book, reading in the post-digital age, and born-digital literature;
- Geographic information systems, data visualization, and comparative literary studies;
Machine translation, artificial intelligence;
- Language models and comparative literature.
To submit a contribution for a lightning talk or a demo, please send a brief abstract via the submission form by 25 April 2025. A lightning talk is intended as a short presentation (max 5 minutes) of an ongoing or finished project, or even of an idea for possible research (if you choose this format, please submit an abstract of max 250 words–excluding any bibliographic references). A demo is intended as a longer, interactive presentation (max 15 minutes) of a tool or workflow for digital/computational literary studies (if you choose this format, please submit an abstract of max 500 words excl. references–you can also add links to supporting materials like notebooks and/or videos). All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the programme committee and notifications of acceptance will be sent by 2 May 2025.
Organising & programme committee
Simone Rebora (SIG-DLS and ICLA DCL)
Joanna Byszuk (SIG-DLS and CLS-INFRA)
Yina Cao (ICLA DCL)
Maciej Eder (CLS-INFRA)
J. Berenike Herrmann (SIG-DLS)
Youngmin Kim (ICLA DCL)
Suzanne Mpouli (SIG-DLS)
Federico Pianzola (ICLA DCL)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (SIG-DLS)