CfP: Romanistentag 2021, Section Digital, global, transdisciplinary: Impulses for a transdisciplinary Digital Romance Studies

Conception of the section: WG Digital Romance Studies

Section organizers: Jan Rohden (rohden@maxweberstiftung.de), Nanette Rißler-Pipka (rissler-pipka@sub.uni-goettingen.de), José Calvo Tello (calvotello@sub.uni-goettingen.de)

Globalisation is considered as one central buzzwords of recent decades. The term refers to the increasing international networking of various actors in different fields, which in recent years has led to an unprecedented mobility of individuals, objects, but also ideas.

The latter aspect in particular has a significant influence on the creation and transfer of knowledge and thus affects the very core of research. The fact that scientific communication has always been globally oriented is not a new phenomenon, especially for interdisciplinary and internationally oriented subjects like Romance Studies. However, recently ‚digitisation‘ was combined with ‚globalisation‘ in the debate and together they imply major changes in scientific communication and methodology. 

In the Humanities, the ongoing developments produced an entire new discipline: the Digital Humanities (Jannidis/Kohle/Rehbein 2017), but ultimately affect all areas of research:

• For example, digital data enable new approaches, for example with digital tools. Accordingly, there is now a broad spectrum of digital research approaches that complement the traditional methodological canon of the various disciplines (Schöch 2017; Vacano 2020).
• Moreover, digital tools often produce research results in digital form that can be regarded as research data. This raises the question of what is meant by research data in detail (Schöch 2013). On the other hand, it requires a clarification for the subsequent usage scenarios for research data (AG Digitale Romanistik 2017; Erben/Grüter/Rohden 2018).
• Finally, the communication of research processes and products is also becoming increasingly digital. This begins with collaborative procedures for designing research processes and culminates in new types of publication formats (DHd Working Group Digital Publishing 2016).

Digital approaches the daily work of researches in the Humantities and strengthen its global character. They can also create new synergies, both between different fields (transdisciplinary) and within the sub-disciplines of a field (intradisciplinary). For Romance Studies, the effects and potential of digitisation have already been demonstrated for various sub-disciplines. Thomas Krefeld has used lexicography as an example to show how digitisation can also form a link for cross-disciplinary research into Romance Studies and has outlined two main guidelines: First, to make digital data freely and permanently accessible in structured form. Second, to sustain technical interfaces to ensure sustainable data access and exchange (Krefeld 2019).

The so-called FAIR principles, which define four requirements for digital research data, are suitable for implementing these guidelines: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (Wilkinson/Dumontier/Aalbersberg et al. 2016; Kraft 2017). In this way, the FAIR principles provide a sound basis for digital research and science communication both for Romance Studies and beyond (Krefeld/Lücke 2020).

In order to further establish transdisciplinary scientific research with a Romance character in the digital sphere, however, further questions need to be discussed on the basis of the FAIR principles:

• What demands are made on digital data and tools when working digitally across disciplines in Romance Studies?
• What methodological approaches and tools can unfold the potential of transdisciplinary digital work?
• What epistemological consequences do digital data and tools have, for example, with regard to the concept of empiricism or the role of quantitative approaches?
• What effects does transdisciplinary digital work have on the (self-)understanding of Romance Studies as a subject?

The aim of the planned section is to make an initial contribution to the establishment of a transdisciplinary Digital Romance Studies, taking up the four questions listed above. To this end, we would ask you to submit contributions with, among other things, the following focus(s):

• Theoretical reflections on digital transdisciplinary Romance Studies approaches
• Contributions dealing with research data related to Romance Studies (such as corpora, digital editions, catalogues, linguistic annotation, text collections, dictionaries)
• Contributions to the application of digital approaches from a Romance Studies perspective
• Contributions to freely usable forms of digital scientific communication
• Contributions that examine digital resources with a view to transdisciplinary issues
• Contributions from digital research practice, for example: Computational Literary Studies, digital image-text annotation, digital language learning research, intertextuality, corpus-linguistic studies, stylometry.

Details on the submission

Abstracts (max. 500 words plus selected references) in Word or PDF format in one of the languages of presentation (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, English) are requested to be sent to the section organizers by 29.01.2021 at the latest:

• Jan Rohden: Rohden@MaxWeberStiftung.de
• Nanette Rißler-Pipka: rissler-pipka@sub.uni-goettingen.de
• José Calvo Tello: calvotello@sub.uni-goettingen.de

References

• AG Digitale Romanistik (2017): Open Access und Forschungsdaten. Ein Positionspapier der AG Digitale Romanistik. https://zenodo.org/record/3834227.
• DHd-Arbeitsgruppe Digitales Publizieren (2016): Working Paper „Digitales Publizieren“. http://diglib.hab.de/ejournals/ed000008/startx.htm.
• Erben, Maria/Grüter, Doris/Rohden, Jan (2018): Forschungsdatenmanagement in der Romanistik: Aktuelle Situation und zukünftige Perspektiven. Bonn: Fachinformationsdienst Romanistik. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11811/1178.
• Jannidis, Fotis/Kohle, Hubertus/Rehbein, Malte (Hg.) (2017): Digital Humanities: eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler.
• Kraft, Angelina (2017): Die FAIR Data Prinzipien für Forschungsdaten. In: TIB Blog. https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/2017/09/12/die-fair-data-prinzipien-fuer-forschungsdaten/.
• Krefeld, Thomas: Eine neue (digitale) Einheit für ein altes (philologisches) Fach – DromH, Version 10 (04.01.2019, 10:19). In: Korpus im Text, Serie A (8564). http://www.kit.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/?p=8564&v=10 
• Krefeld, Thomas/Lücke, Stephan (2020): FAIRness: ein contrat social für die Wissenschaftskommunikation im Internet. In: Romanistik-Blog. Das Blog des Fachinformationsdienstes. https://blog.fid-romanistik.de/2020/05/16/fairness-ein-contrat-social-fuer-die-wissenschaftskommunikation-im-internet/.
• Schöch, Christof (2013): Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities. In: Journal of the Digital Humanities 3, S. 2–13.
• Schöch, Christof (2017): Quantitative Analyse. In: Jannidis, Fotis/Kohle, Hubertus/Rehbein, Malte (Hg.): Digital Humanities: eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler. S. 279–298.
• Vacano, Johannes von (2020): Tools. In: https://www.fid-romanistik.de/startseite/. https://www.fid-romanistik.de/forschungsdaten/suche-nach-forschungsdaten/fid-internetressourcen/tools/.
• Wilkinson, M./Dumontier, M./Aalbersberg et al. (2016): The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. In: Sci Data 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.