Collegium 2016: NetworkX

From June 8-10, 2016, Stanford Text Technologies will be hosting its second annual Collegium on the theme of "NetworkX".

Networks are chains, systems, interrelations, threads, wires, links, and connections arranged with crossovers, intersections, and interstices. This Collegium brings together a small group of internationally renowned scholars to explore networks, through intense discussion, as a way of conceptualizing and quantifying the transmission and reception of textual objects and words.

In textual studies, social networks form between correspondents; between scribes, manuscript compilers, audiences; authors, printers, and publishers; and between characters in a novel or play. Networks provide a model for the transmission of texts, concepts, and metaphors across time and space; they allow us to quantify influence and describe associations. We can also conceptualize as networks relationships that are not normally conceived of as such: between individual poems and miscellanies, or between dramatists and playhouses. But the question of methodology remains. How do we actually use networks? How can we integrate quantitative methods from the fields of mathematics and computer science? What is the role of visualization, and what does it add to our knowledge? How do such developments change the way we engage with primary texts, and how do they change the way we write and disseminate scholarship?

Participants include: Elaine Treharne (Stanford); Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London); Sebastian Ahnert (Cambridge); Max Schich (UT Dallas); Daniel Shore (Georgetown); Scott Weingart (Carnegie Mellon); Jayne Carroll (Nottingham); Greg Walker (Edinburgh); Blaine Greteman (Iowa); and the Stanford Literary Lab

  • Each presentation-slot will be seventy-five minutes long. Speakers will introduce their scholarly focus and research for up to 45 minutes with a critical statement on ‘Networks’. Thirty minutes of collegial critique and commentary will ensue.

NetworkX Program

NetworkX Poster