Digital Humanities Symposium brings together top stylometry experts

Thursday, 5 December 2019

A three-day symposium called ‘Digital research across the humanities’, at New Space was held on 28 to 30 November 2019, and was highly successful.

Digital humanities symposiums speakers

The event and attracted scholars from different disciplines and was organised by Dr Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (French Studies), Dr Rebecca Beirne (Film and Media Studies) and Dr Erin McCarthy (English and Creative Writing), all from the School of Humanities and Social Science at UoN.

On Thursday 28th November, Professor Jan Rybicki, renowned scholar from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and one of the creators of the leading stylometry tool Stylo presented a beginners workshop on this package that humanists can easily use to perform advanced quantitative analyses of texts.

On Friday 29th November, scholars from UoN and other universities presented current and exciting digital humanities projects. Emeritus Professor of English John Burrows, now 90, for whom the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing was established at UoN in 1989, made a special trip from Sydney to meet some of the scholars who got their inspiration from him and have been following his path in the area of computer-assisted text analysis.

On Saturday 30th November Professor Ray Siemens from the University of Victoria, Canada, and Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Newcastle, discussed the reasons of the success of Wikipedia worldwide. Professor Jan Rybicki spoke about new tools to study translated texts, and our colleague Dr Gillian Arrighi, a researcher in Creative and Performing Arts, presented the fascinating recreation of Newcastle’s Victoria Theatre via Virtual Reality technology as it was in 1891.

Dr Vuaille-Barcan said “It was a rare opportunity to meet colleagues from diverse fields of research in humanities who have in common the creative use of digital resources, as well as the analysis of their applications.”


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