Background
In the various sub-fields of digital humanities, agreements and disagreements are seen mostly as related to validation. The common premise is that agreement between different annotators, or between humans and machines, provides a solid foundation for computational research, while disagreement suggests a problem. Comparatively, computational literary studies have an established tradition of recognizing the issue's complexity. In this workshop, which expresses a continuation of fruitful collaboration between three institutions - the BGU Literary Lab, the forText Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, and the vis-à-vis project team of the Open University of Israel - we would like to explore how agreements and disagreements can be used as an intellectual resource; “A debate for the sake of heaven will endure” (Mishna Avot 5:17). Spanning from close to distant reading, from text annotating and network analysis to visualization, from professional readers to ordinary readers, from German literature to Hebrew literature, and from late-antique cultures to contemporary ones - in this workshop, we will examine different types of agreements and disagreements from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Additionally, we will devote time to computational ecocriticism, which has recently become one of our key joint-research themes.
The full program can be downloaded here.