Vol. 4 No. 1 (2016): Digital Literary Studies 1

The thematic section of MATLIT 4.1 consists of a selection of articles based on the papers presented at the international conference “Estudos Literários Digitais | Digital Literary Studies”, which took place on May 14-15, 2015, at School of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra. Jointly organized by the PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature, the LdoD Archive, and the Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra, the conference was sponsored by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). This event brought together sixty researchers from seventeen countries representing forty-two research and teaching institutions. This is the first of two issues based on the conference (Vols. 4.1 and 4.2).  

The digitization of artifacts and literary practices, the adoption of computational methods for modelling, editing and analyzing text as well as the development of collaborative forms of research and teaching through networking and communication platforms are three dimensions of the ongoing relocation of literature and literary studies in the digital medium. The aim of volume 4 is to contribute to the mapping of material practices and interpretative processes of literary studies in a changing media ecology. Among the procedures explored in this issue, readers will find computational literary analysis (computational narratology, corpora and translation, macroanalysis and visualization) and computational writing (automatic generation of text, as well as hypertext and intermedia narrative on different platforms). The limits of the digital processing and datafication of artistic forms are also analyzed from the perspective of the history of informational aesthetics. This issue contains a sample of current methods, tools, objects and digital practices in the field of literary studies.

Manuel Portela (CLP, University of Coimbra)
António Rito Silva (INESC-ID, University of Lisbon)