Big Data, Small Literatures

ʽBig Data, Small Literatures’ is an international conference to be held from 3–4 November 2023 at the Prešeren Hall of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Novi trg 4, Ljubljana). The conference aims to provide a platform for the presentation, exploration, and comparative analysis of the challenges encountered by scholars in the field of digital literary studies, particularly experts on literatures in minor languages as well as literatures that, though not inherently minor, nevertheless tend to be pushed to the periphery by Anglocentrism. The conference will foster cross-disciplinary exchange between and among scholars in literary studies and computer science, addressing shared challenges crucial to the advancement of global digital literary studies.

PROGRAMME

3 Nov. 2023

10.00–10.30 Welcome speeches

• Blaž Zabel, President, Slovenian Comparative Literature Association
• Ivana Zajc, Research Center for the Humanities, University of Nova Gorica
• Lucija Mandić, ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies

10.30–11.30 Session 1 (chair: Lucija Mandić)

• Oleg Sobchuk, Artjoms Šeļa: Computational Thematics: Comparing Algorithms for Clustering the Genres of Literary Fiction
• Silvie Cinková, Petr Plecháč: Rhymes and Syntax. Morpho-syntactic Analysis in a Czech 19th-Century Poetry Corpus
• Ranka Stanković, Cvetana Krstev, Duško Vitas: SrpELTeC: Serbian Literary Corpus for Distant Reading

11.30–12.00 Discussion

12.00–13.30 Lunch

13.30–14.30 Session 2 (chair: Katja Mihurko Poniž)

• Jan Rybicki: Between Textual Data and Metadata. Distant Reading 10,000 Books in Polish
• Ivana Zajc: Stylometric Analysis of the Works of Ivan Cankar and Ivan Tavčar: The Aspect of the Development of Literary Style
• Marko Pranjić, Andrejka Žejn, Senja Pollak: Comparison of Josip Jurčič and Ivan Cankar with Computational Semantic Change Detection Methods

14.30–15.00 Discussion

15.00–15.30 Coffee break

15.30–16.30 Session 3 (chair: Ivana Zajc)

• Dominika Werońska: Basking in Basque Prose: A Stylometric Glance at Novels in Euskara
• Andrei Terian: The Subgenres of the Romanian Novel (1845–1947): A Distant Reading Based on GDRN 2.0
• Vlad Pojoga: The Last Bastion of European Romanticism: A Quantitative Analysis of Poetry in Romania’s Convorbiri literare (1867–1944)

16.30–17.00 Discussion

19.00 Dinner

4 Nov. 2023

9.30–10.30 Session 4 (chair: Jernej Habjan)

• Mojca Šorli: Named Entities in Slovenian Modernist Literature: A Functional View
• Darko Ilin, Katja Mihurko Poniž, Ivana Zajc, Mila Marinković: Shaping Electronic Collection LETTERS: Discovering Epistolary Exchange and Navigating Correspondence Metadata
• Lucija Mandić: Exploring Social Institution Relationships in 19th-Century Slovenian Narrative Fiction through Word Embeddings

10.30–11.00 Discussion

11.00–11.30 Coffee break

11.30–12.30 Roundtable: Defining Small Literatures by Numbers (chair: Jernej Habjan)

• Marko Juvan

• Jeanne Glesener

• Benedikts Kalnačs 

12.30–13.00 Discussion and concluding remarks

13.00 Lunch

ʽBig Data, Small Literatures’ is an English-language conference hosted by the Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and co-organised by the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies and the Research Center for the Humanities at the University of Nova Gorica. Funding was provided by the co-organisers as well as the Slovenian Book Agency.