Keynote lecture by prof. dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam: Distant Dreaming About European Literary History

In her talk prof. dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam will take stock of where we currently stand in Computational Literary Studies and explicitly dream of what we may want to be able to do in the future. What could be the next steps towards more knowledge about the language and function of literature in Europe in the past and the present? What kind of data and tools would we need? Which other research disciplines come into view when we want to answer bigger and bigger questions? And what is the impact our research could have on the multilingual European academic and literary landscape?

Prof. dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam is research group leader at Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and professor of Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on computational literary studies and the development of methods and techniques for the stylistic analysis of modern Dutch and English novels. She applies these methods to analyze stylistic differences in texts, oeuvres, genres, time periods, and cultures or languages. Proper names in literary texts have her special interest. She is also interested in canon formation. She was project leader of The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012-2019) and currently leads, among other projects, Track Changes: Textual scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing. At the University of Wolverhampton she is co-investigator in the project Novel Perceptions: Towards an inclusive canon in which the research done in the Dutch Riddle of Literary Quality project is being replicated in the United Kingdom.