‘To Bring Them into Dialog’: A Conversation about Life Narrative and the Digital

Caitríona Ní Dhúill; Anna Spitzbart; Christian  Wachter; Florian Windhager; Sandra Mayer

doi:10.21827/ejlw.14.42760

Authors

Caitríona Ní Dhúill Paris Lodron University of Salzburg https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4997-516X
Anna Spitzbart Austrian Academy of Sciences https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1389-896X
Christian Wachter Bielefeld University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2937-0868
Florian Windhager University for Continuing Education Krems https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5170-2243
Sandra Mayer Austrian Academy of Sciences https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2915-5888

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.14.42760

Keywords:

life narrative, history, auto/biography, digital humanities

Abstract

This conversation, which originally formed part of the two-day workshop-and-conference “Life Narrative and the Digital 2023” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, brings together historians, literary and auto/biography scholars, and digital humanists to address the intersections of life-narrative scholarship and digital humanities. They offer different disciplinary perspectives on the possibilities and challenges posed by the increasing prevalence of digital tools and methods in auto/biographical research and practice and jointly explore the following questions: How will digital technologies and methods shape the future of auto/biography studies as a field? How can theoretical concepts from traditional life-narrative research enrich the field of digital humanities? How can the divide between traditional and digital humanities be overcome? Pointing out opportunities as well as problem areas, the exchange opens up new pathways towards a fruitful, critical, and, ultimately, mutually enriching disciplinary dialogue between life-narrative research ad digital humanities.

Author Biographies

Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg

Caitríona Ní Dhúill was born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, where she gained a PhD in German Studies in 2005. She has worked at the universities of St Andrews, Durham, Vienna, and Cork. Her publications include Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010); Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (2020); and Anthropocene Austria (co-edited with Nicola Thomas, 2022). She founded the Centre for Culture and Ecology at Durham University in 2016 and the Eco-Humanities Research Group at University College Cork in 2020. In 2023 she became professor of modern German literature at the University of Salzburg, where she focuses on developing ecologically conscious practices of research and teaching, including screen-free and outdoor pedagogy, embodiment-friendly and decelerated modes of working, and the 'rewilding' of reading. She is co-editing a special issue of the journal German Life and Letters, 'Rewilding German Studies', which will appear in 2025.

Anna Spitzbart, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Anna Spitzbart holds an MA degree in History from the Paris Lodron University Salzburg and specializes in the field of digital editing and text markup. From 2019 to 2021 she was an editorial member of the e-journal historioPLUS. From March 2020 to September 2022 she was a team member of the FWF-funded project “The Mediality of Diplomatic Communication - Habsburg Envoys in Constantinople in the Mid-17th Century” based at the University of Salzburg. She is currently a PhD researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (IHB) and a member of the FWF-funded research project “Family Matters: Female Dynastic Agency in the Correspondence of Empress Eleonora Magdalena of Pfalz-Neuburg (1655-1720)” (FWF P 34651), based at the IHB. She is a regular contributor to Kaiserin und Reich: Zeremoniell, Medien und Herrschaft 1550 bis 1740/45 (https://kaiserin.hypotheses.org/).

Christian Wachter , Bielefeld University

Christian Wachter is a research associate in the Digital History Working Group and a member of the Center for Uncertainty Studies (CeUS) at Bielefeld University. His research interests include hypertext as a digital publication format in the humanities, theories and methods of digital humanities, theories and methods of history, and European history of political culture in the early twentieth century. In 2021, his book Geschichte digital schreiben was published by Transcript. Currently, he is investigating political discourse in the Weimar Republic using digital methods and technologies.

Florian Windhager, University for Continuing Education Krems

Florian Windhager (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5170-2243) is a research associate in the Department for Arts and Cultural Studies at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. He received his PhD in Digital Humanities with a focus on the visualization of artwork and artist biography data from the University of Vienna, Austria. Florian coordinates research projects at the intersection of digital humanities, cultural heritage, and visualization. Across these projects, he pursues the development of a spatiotemporal visualization framework to analyze and communicate complex, time-oriented subject matters in the arts and humanities from multiple visualization perspectives. Since his undergraduate studies of philosophy and sociology he has been fascinated by visualization as a means of supporting sense-making and reasoning within complex contemporary discourse environments.

Sandra Mayer, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on life writing, authorship and celebrity, transnational encounters, and digital editing. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna (2018) and has (co-)edited books and special issues on ‘The Author in the Popular Imagination’ (2018), Life Writing and Celebrity (2019), ‘Life Writing and the Transnational’ (2022), ‘Refugee Tales’ (2023), and Authorship, Activism and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature (2023). She is co-editor of the Auden Musulin Papers, a scholarly digital edition of letters and literary papers by W. H. Auden in the estate of Stella Musulin (https://amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at).