21.096 cfp: Evidence of Reading, Reading the Evidence

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 96.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:19:20 +0100
         From: Hugh Houghton <h.a.g.houghton_at_BHAM.AC.UK>
         Subject: CFP: "Evidence of Reading, Reading the Evidence"

CALL FOR PAPERS

EVIDENCE OF READING, READING THE EVIDENCE

A major international conference to be held at
the Institute of English Studies, University of
London

   21-23 July 2008

Organised by the Open University and the Institute of English Studies

Keynote speakers: Kate Flint, Jonathan Rose, David Vincent

Studies centred on the history of reading have
proliferated in the last twenty years. They have
sprung from several different disciplines,
encompassed different periods and geographical
locations and chosen divergent methodologies, but
their common quest has been to recover and
understand the traces of a practice which is
central to our understanding of human history, yet
notoriously elusive.

One such approach is "The Reading Experience
Database 1450-1945" (RED), a project run by the
Open University and the University of London.
While RED is already proving its worth as a digital
resource, its methodological parameters are
necessarily limited and its vision therefore partial.
What is needed in order for the study of the
history of reading to progress beyond the boundaries
of specific institutions, disciplines,
methodologies, geographical locations and time periods is a
forum in which as many diverse approaches as
possible are brought into energetic debate.

This major 3-day conference, the first of its
type, seeks to provide such a forum. We invite 20-
minute papers from international students and
scholars of any discipline - both within and outside
the Humanities =AD who are interested in the
history and practice of reading in any period or
geographical location. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

_ Theories of reading _ Issues of literacy
_ National and transnational histories _ Reading and readers in fiction
_ Reading communities _ Quantitative versus qualitative methodologies
_ Genre reading _ Digital resources and their development
_ Visual representations of reading _ Reading across disciplines/languages
_ Using historical data in contemporary research fields
_ The sociology, psychology and neurology of reading experiences
_ Evidence of reading from private audio recordings and blogs
_ Finding, compiling, interpreting and preserving the evidence of reading

Paper titles, abstracts of no more than 300 words
and short biographies should be sent
electronically by 31 January 2008 to all three organisers: Dr Shaf Towheed
(S.S.Towheed_at_open.ac.uk); Dr Rosalind Crone
(r.h.crone_at_open.ac.uk); Dr Katie Halsey
(Katie.Halsey_at_sas.ac.uk).

Conference
  website: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2008/RED/index.htm
RED website: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/
Received on Wed Jun 13 2007 - 13:36:47 EDT