Wednesday, January 27, 2016

CFP: What Results Can We Expect from Digital Humanities?

We have the following call for papers from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.]

The project "The School of Salamanca: A Digital Collection of Sources and a Dictionary of its Juridical-Political Language" invites all interested scholars to submit contributions to the forum
“With the Eyes of a Humanities Scholar: What Results Can We Expect from Digital Humanities?" [That is, "Die geisteswissenschaftliche Perspektive: Welche Forschungsergebnisse lassen Digital Humanities erwarten?”]

Contributions should adopt the perspective of the humanities and focus on the experiences scholars made in their research work with DH instruments. Therefore, the interaction between research interests in the humanities and digital tools is going to be of crucial importance: how do digital possibilities impact on research methods and questions? What new research questions arise from the digital availability of data and from the implied possibility of mass analysis? Do the DH instruments with their presumed "objective" results restrict the range of research questions and limit the scope of interpretation?

Contributions to the Forum are to be published in the journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt: RG Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History 24 (2016). The forum gathers short, incisive contributions (no detailed research papers) treating a common topic. Contributions should not be longer than 8,000 characters (including blanks). To keep the essayistic character of the texts, footnotes should be used sparingly, if at all.

Contributions will be accepted in English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese.  Deadline is April 1, 2016.  Contact person: Dr. Christiane Birr.  Further information and submission of manuscripts: birr@rg.mpg.de