Willard L. McCarty,
Reader in Humanities Computing,
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London

Title: "Beyond the Word: Modeling Literary Context"

In this talk I will describe a research project for interactive, heuristic modeling of a literary-critical trope that is created in part by syntax and collocation, in part by a wide variety of verbal and non-verbal associations-i.e. by "context". I will show how the rather unhelpful notion of context can be deconstructed and significant progress made in systematizing it. Finally I will consider how modeling changes the nature of the questions we ask by doing this and by giving us new analogies with which to reason.

Biography

Willard McCarty (www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm) is Reader in Humanities Computing at King's College London. Trained in the United States as an undergraduate in physics, German and English at the University of California and at Reed College, he took his PhD in Milton studies at Toronto (Canada) and then went on to a research career in the emerging field of humanities computing, with strong interest in Ovidian studies. He is founding editor of the electronic seminar Humanist (1987--). He has lectured and published widely in Europe, North America and Australia. His recent book, Humanities Computing (Palgrave, 2005), examines the intellectual foundations and potential directions of the field from the perspective of the individual scholar. He is recipient of the 2005 Award for Outstanding Achievement, Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias, and the Richard W. Lyman Award for 2006.