Cultural Historiography: Emergent Theories and Methods

Organized by the TransCanada Institute & Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

Macdonald Stewart Art Centre
358 Gordon St.
University of Guelph
March 1-3, 2012

An interdisciplinary conference jointly sponsored by the TransCanada Institute and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory /Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada to foster debate on new modes of history as engaged by cultural historians, literary historians, and critics in the era of digital scholarship and the larger troubling of historical endeavours.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012
For conference registration, click here

Conference Program

Keynote Speakers

Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara): "Remembering Networks: Agrippa, RoSE, and Network Archaeology"

Alan Liu is Chair and Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published three books: Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989); The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004); and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008). Liu directs the University of California Transliteracies Project on online reading. He is the instigator and co-founded of 4Humanities.

Steven High (Concordia University): "From Collection to Curation: Oral History in a Time of Multi-Media Authorship and Collaborative Practice."

Steven High is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Oral History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. He is the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and is principal investigator of the Montreal Life Stories Project (www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca), a five-year community-university research alliance investigating the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations. He has been awarded several national and international prizes for his books and has directed an online memoryscape (http://storytelling.concordia.ca/sturgeon/ ), a digital toolbox (http://storytelling.concordia.ca/oralhistorianstoolbox), and an open-source oral history database tool called Stories Matter (http://storytelling.concordia.ca/storiesmatter/ )

For more information, go to http://www.cwrc.ca or email transcan@uoguelph.ca. Preferential registration rates for University of Guelph students.

Conference funding and support generously provided by the University of Guelph's Office of the Vice-President Research, the Dean's Office, the College of Arts, the School of English and Theatre Studies, the Department of History, and the TransCanada Institute.

Program

Thursday March 1

MacDonald Stewart Art Centre, 358 Gordon St. (at College Ave.), Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1

4:30                         

Opening Remarks

5:00-6:00

Keynote: Alan Liu, “Remembering Networks: Agrippa, RoSE, and Network Archaeology"

6:00-7:30

Reception

 

Dinner on your own

Friday
March 2

All sessions at MacDonald Stewart Art Centre

9:00-10:30

Methods after the Digital Turn
Ian Milligan, “Embracing the ‘Big History’ Shift: Social Historians and Digital History (or ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the n-gram’)” (York University)
Chantal Savoie and Olivier Lapointe, “Writers, Trajectories, Database: Dealing with a Quantitative and a Qualitative Shift in the French-Canadian Literary Field” (Université Laval & Université de Montréal)
Jennifer Roberts-Smith, “Performing the Archive: Visualizing Performance Reconstruction in the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)” (University of Waterloo)

10:30-11:00

Nutrition break

11:00-12:30

Politics of the Digital “Archive”
Marc André Fortin, “Preserving Culture | Sharing Knowledge: The Politics of the Digital Indigenous Archive” (Queen’s University)
Marjorie Stone and Keith Lawson, "Digital Archives, Systemic Digital Lags, and Nineteenth-Century Cultural History" (Dalhousie University)
Anne-Marie Kinahan, “Analyzing The Image In The Archive: Methodological Issues In Researching Women’s Magazines” (Wilfrid Laurier University)

12:30-1:30

Lunch

1:30-3:00

Media Constructions / interventions
Brian Fauteux, “Pre-FM Broadcasting at Three Canadian Campus Radio Stations” (Concordia University)
Paul Fontaine, “South Asian Diaspora In A Time Of Media Hybridization: The Empowering Of A Counterpublic” (Concordia University)
Bart Vautour, “Remediating Modernist Journalism and the Politics of Proximity” (Mount Allison University)

3:00-3:15

Nutrition Break

 

3:15-5:15

Evidence, Evanescence, Materiality
Sean Graham, “Recording History: The 1939 Royal Tour Broadcasts” (University of Ottawa)
Sandra Gabriele: "'The Fragility of Evidence': from Front Page to Microfilm to Database" (Concordia University)
Jane Nicholas, “A Debt to the Dead?  Ethics, Photography, History and the Study of Freakery” (Lakehead University)
Aaron Mauro, “This Book and the Book: Contemporary Print Publishing in a Digital Context” (Queen’s University)

5:30

Keynote: Steven High, "From Collection to Curation: Oral History in a Time of Multi-Media Authorship and Collaborative Practice" (Concordia University)

7:00

Banquet, PJ’s Restaurant in the Atrium, Macdonald Stewart Hall, University of Guelph

Saturday
March 3

All sessions at MacDonald Stewart Art Centre

9:00-10:30

Agency, Voice, Intervention
Megan Webber, “Finding the Foundling: The Ongoing Mission to Discover the Poor” (University of Guelph)
Dean Irvine, “Digital Aboriginalities” (Dalhousie University/Yale University)
Erin Wunker, “Rebuild: Sachiko Murakami’s Architectural Insurgency” (Dalhousie University)

10:30-10:45

Nutrition Break

10:45-12:15

Modernist Re-mediations
Graham Lyons, “’I needn’t say anything. Only show’: Reading Benjamin’s Dialectical Image” (Simon Fraser University)
Zailig Pollock and Catherine Hobbs, “Two Kinds of Web: Double Reflection of Paper Archives and Digital Edition” (Trent University), (Literary Archivist (English-language), Library and Archives Canada)
Darren Wershler, "Front Page Poetics" (Concordia University)

12:15-1:45

Lunch

1:45-3:15

Challenging Canadian Historiographies
Vincent Bruyere, “Of a Survivalist Tone Adopted in Cultural History” (Pennsylvania State University)
Shannon Maguire, “Born-Digital?: Embarking on a Genealogical History of Digital Poetics In Canada” (Brock University)
Asha Varadharajan, “Transplanting the Slave Narrative: Ishmael Reed, Lawrence Hill, Afua Cooper, and Dionne Brand” (Queen’s University)

3:15-3:30

Nutrition Break

3:30-5:00

Space, Displacement, Historiography
Brandon McFarlane, “Space, History, and Canada’s (Lost) Urban Fiction of the Modern Period, 1896-1950” (University of Toronto)
Steve, Asselin,  “(Sub)Alternate Histories: The Novels of Provincialized Europe” (Queen’s University)
Karl Jirgens, “Analog Lost/ Digital Found: The Re-emergence of Individual Accounts of Martial Horror” (University of Windsor)

5:00-6:00

Closing panel.
Chairs: Smaro Kamboureli and Susan Brown