The ICLA DCL Committee is organizing a panel at the next ICLA Congress (Seoul, 28th July - 1st August, 2025). If you are interested in submitting a proposal, you can find the panel Call here below and the instructions to submit a proposal at the following link: https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en/abstract-submissions/abstract-submissions
Submission deadline is February 14th, 2025.
ICLA Research Committees Session 12 - Digital Comparative Literature
Simone Rebora, Roxana Patras, Christof Schöch, Gabriele Vezzani, Pieter Francois, Yina Cao, Alexandra Huang-Kokina, Youngmin Kim, and Marko Juvan
In his 2015 article published in Comparative Literature, Matthew Wilkens notes that comparative literature is quite reticent about the growing field of digital humanities. He suggests overcoming this reluctance by testing computer tools for the needs of comparative literature: text mining, network analysis, sociology of literature, clustering, and mapping. Recently, various applications of computational analysis of text corpora and big data (on publication, translation, media resonance, etc.) have been gaining ground in comparative literature.
Following the relatively sparse responses to the challenges posed to the humanities by the advent of the Internet and digital media voiced by early birds of our discipline (e.g. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek’s work since 1995), comparative literature needs to rethink its methods and ask itself whether computer-assisted methods can be a viable alternative or a welcome complement to the methods that characterize the disciplinary tradition. Finally, the recent explosion of computer-generated texts, translations and other achievements of artificial intelligence once again raises the question of the role of the author and other actors in the literary field.
Artificial intelligence is not only a problem or a literary topic that should be studied in a comparative perspective, but can also serve as a tool for comparative literary studies with its language models, word embedding, or algorithmic modeling. One may count among the challenges for such endeavors that multilingual materials still represent a considerable hurdle for computational methods, and that modeling multiple cultural contexts and their influence on meaning and the meaning of form is equally difficult, but both are paramount in the context of comparative literature.
To face such challenges, the ICLA Research Committee on Digital Comparative Literature (DCL) organizes a group session at the ICLA 2025 Congress, 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.