Dartmouth Events

Annual Zantop Lecture

The Prism-House of Language: Translation in the Era of Digital Humanities, Emily Apter, Professor of French, Comparative Literature, New York University.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015
4:15pm – 5:30pm
Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Conferences, Lectures & Seminars

The lecture will explore new practices and possibilities in translation studies that emerge from data-mining programs and the digital humanities more generally.  Exploring the notion of "prismatic translation," which emphasizes the process of translation over and against the finished translated text, the paper will move on to the impact on language study of data-mining in negative as well as positive terms.  Questions to be addressed will include:  To what extent is the language of data-mining with its glossaries borrowed from the extractive industries, metaphorical?  To what extent have “data” or “mining” or the two words hyphenated, translated a reigning paradigm of computational research increasingly predominant in the human sciences today and occupying the same position “language” did at the height of the linguistic turn?  Is “data-mining” a language  which the digital humanities speaks, and if so, does it speak in monolingual code, which in turn inscribes a monolingual drive on its research functionalism? 

 

Sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program, the Leslie Center for the Humanities & the Dean of Faculty Office

For more information, contact:
Therese Perin-Deville

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.