Digital Scholarship Seminar Series – Spring 2017

Véronique Montémont (Université de Lorraine)

‘Digital Humanities Applied to Literary Studies in France’

The Spring 2017 series of Digital Scholarship Seminar continues on Tuesday 21 February with a talk by Véronique Montémont of the Université de Lorraine on digital humanities and literary studies in France. Dr Montémont’s presentation takes a twofold approach, first sketching a brief history of the discipline in France, before focusing on pertinent projects and initiatives in the fields of literature and linguistics. As ever, all are welcome.

12pm | Tuesday 21 February 2017 | Room 1001 Hardiman Research Building (The Bridge) | Facebook event page

Véronique Montémont (Université de Lorraine)

Digital Humanities Applied to Literary Studies in France

This paper aims to present an overview of what is called Digital Humanities («Humanités numériques») in France. The concept itself designates two distinctive streams, and therefore covers various issues: the first, theoretical dimension, considers digital humanities as a new paradigm able to offer a completely novel way of studying literature, linguistics or history; the other stream, more pragmatic, focuses on the various ways of producing and exploiting data. I will first sketch a brief history of this discipline in France, through a description of some pioneering projects which appeared around the 70’s. Then, I will focus on the fields of literature and linguistics, both disciplines based on the core concept of corpora. Corpora has become so crucial that a large part of projects and initiatives of Digital Humanities now concentrates on it, neglecting sometimes interpretation and hermeneutics that should remain the ultimate purpose of researchers. The last point I will discuss is the issue of teaching: despite a strong interest among academics, it remains difficult to offer a cohesive teaching program and even, in some cases, to convince students of its relevance. That raises a question: can Digital Humanities be considered and recognized as an intrinsic and promising cross-cutting discipline with its own hermeneutical purposes; or does it simply designate a technical turning point, a “moment” of knowledge, intended to reintegrate distinct research fields?

Véronique Montémont is Maître de conférences HDR (Senior Lecturer) in French language and literature. Within ATILF (Nancy, France), she is the Research Manager for the Frantext database and leader of the ‘Resources, Normalisation, Annotation and Exploitation’ research team. She is active within numerous research networks in both Nancy and Paris, including ANR Difdepo (focussed on OULIPO) and the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM-CNRS, Paris). She was Junior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France from 2007 to 2012.

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