Margins: Rhetoric and Place in the Digital Now

Clemson University English Department

February 25-26, 2016

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sidney I. Dobrin, University of Florida

Margins is seeking conference submissions that explore the ways in which humanistic inquiry is being reimagined or otherwise influenced by the onset of the age of the network. While our conference is constructed around a digital humanities approach to research, we highly encourage non-traditional proposals and projects across all disciplines. We are excited by the ideas that have fallen through the cracks, ones that openly dispute the dogmatic narratives of place and presence in the contemporary digital atmosphere, where space often becomes a point of fierce contestation. As Steven Jones argues in The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, the digital has been, and always will be, physical, an idea that reveals a landscape of margins that are oftentimes imaginary, in constant flux or otherwise ontologically troublesome. The DH community is often one that is marginalized for a variety of reasons, and our response is a designed space where a skeptical reverence for traditional media combines with an approach to digital studies that risks the eclectic for a chance to reconfigure the way we approach humanities research.

Our goal is for Margins to be a place of non-place, where work can expand upon tradition but not be confined by its historical borders. The DH discussion is often referred to in terms of “big tent” vs. “little tent,” where a select few are given access to an exclusive group (little tent) where the majority of the resources are located. We are certainly not that tent, but rather more like a tent for DH outcasts, a place where the marginalized are given a democratic space for a burgeoning discourse. This is as much about the scholarly analysis of networked person and place as it is an in-between; the non-definition of the margin(al) is freeing in its ability to bring together disparate methodologies, subjects, pathologies and disciplines.

Sid Dobrin is Professor and Chair in the Department of English, where for ten years he directed the writing program and for three years served as the Graduate Coordinator. In addition, he serves as the director of TRACE Innovation Initiative, a research endeavor developed and maintained by the University of Florida’s Department of English that works at the intersection of ecology, posthumanism, and writing studies. He is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Postcomposition, which won the 2011 W. Ross Winterowd award for best book in composition theory. He is currently completing a book about the future of the world’s oceans to be published by Texas A&M University Press and is completing a co-authored book called Big Data and the Humanities, which is under review at Palgrave.

There is no registration fee for this conference. In the spirit of THATCamp we are accepting traditional panels and conference papers, as well as all types of non-traditional proposals. The goal is an inexpensive, collaborative and open source approach to digital and technological inquiry, where content takes precedent over form.

Deadline for submissions is December 1st. Applicants will be notified of their approval status by December 15th.

Please email submissions or questions to digitalmargins@gmail.com. Our forthcoming website can be found at www.digitalmargins.com.