BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:CANCELLED: Do a Billion Documents Change the First World War? - Sh
 elley Hulan\, Associate Professor\, Department of English\, University of 
 Waterloo
DTSTART:20120221T143000Z
DTEND:20120221T153000Z
UID:TALK36541@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr. David Evans
DESCRIPTION:*Talk cancelled due to illness of the speaker.*\n\nHumanities 
 scholars have historically examined World War I through a limited number o
 f exceptional texts comprised of literary works\, personal diaries\, and s
 elect correspondence that represent a tiny fraction of the billions of doc
 uments that the conflict generated and through which military administrati
 ons tracked millions of troop and civilian activities. These "exceptional"
  texts are also frequently regarded as facilitating the early twentieth-ce
 ntury turn to contemporary modernity\, an intellectual and cultural moveme
 nt that embraced the notion that the language most descriptive of the time
 s was dense\, difficult\, and dubious about the possibility that the war h
 ad any meaning whatsoever. This presentation looks at the ways in which da
 ta mining the mountain of other\, "non-exceptional" wartime records challe
 nges popular notions of the language that most accurately represents the w
 ar.\n\n*Bio*: Shelley Hulan is an associate professor in the Department of
  English at the University of Waterloo. She is interested in the implicati
 ons that data mining large text corpora have for humanities research. With
  Rob Warren (of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at Waterl
 oo) she looks at ways of searching these corpora beyond the word search. H
 er research interests include late imperial nostalgia in fin-de-siècle Ca
 nadian writing and nineteenth-century First Nations rhetoric.\n
LOCATION:Room FW11\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR