Life Narrative and the Digital 2023:
Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop

26-27 September 2023

Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage,
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna

Call for Papers

Submission open until 26 May 2023

This two-day conference-plus-workshop brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and different career stages to explore the possibilities, uses, and challenges of digital methods and technologies for auto/biographical research and practice. We are particularly interested in the following questions:

• In what ways can digital methods and technologies aid the study and analysis of biographical data?
• How can the digital help us devise innovative pathways to the representation of historical individuals’ lives (e.g. through digital platforms)?
• To what extent do digital formats of life narration tie in with new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice (such as metabiography, relational biography, persona studies, group biography, object biography, etc.)?
• How do we deal with uncertainty and the issue of data quality in the digital representation of biographical data?

We invite contributions that touch upon these and/or the following aspects, themes, and subject areas:

• historical individuals’ lives: ‘hidden’ figures and marginal lives vs well-known historical individuals
• narrating lives across countries, cultures, and languages
• networks, relations, and ‘group’ biographies
• participation of diverse audiences and user groups
• identity politics in digital representations and mediations
• constructive synthesis of close- and distant-reading methods as well as of digital and traditional humanities methods in biography scholarship
• linked open data and norm data (biographical, geographical, historical, object data)
• online vs physical archives: limitations and opportunities
• visualizing biographical and prosopographical data
• biographical data and (social/historical) network analysis
• collaborative crowdsourced biography
• biographical online dictionaries
• biographical data and/in game studies

The event will feature both a workshop and a conference track. The workshop (26 September) will be dedicated to short presentations of work-in-progress, with a strong focus on tools, technologies, software, and methods, and with an emphasis on feedback and exchange. The conference (27 September) follows a conventional format, with a mix of research papers and panel discussions, and will be open to the public. Participation in both formats is free of charge.

We invite proposals of 350-500 words via OpenReview for 15-minute (workshop) or 20-minute (conference) contributions by 26 May 2023. We aim for notification of acceptance by 23 June 2023.

We plan to publish selected contributions from both the conference and the workshop tracks in a special cluster of European Journal of Life Writing.