Zephyr Frank on 'Digital Humanities and Spatial History: Atlantic World Stories'

This talk explores the pathways taken in the analysis of the social space of Rio de Janeiro in literature.  It also explores the imprint of social space on literature and, if possible, the reciprocal imprint of the literary space on the social.  As such, the aim is to examine the way Digital Humanities (DH) methods and sensibilities may enter into long standing arguments about the relationship between urban social spaces (socially produced assemblages of material and mental constructs) and social identities typically represented in literature (in this case novels of growth and social integration).  The talk will focus on mapping social and spatial patterns found in three canonical Brazilian novels.

Zephyr Frank teaches Latin American and transnational history at Stanford University.  His research interests include studies of economic inequality, spatial history, the relation between literary and social history, environmental history, and the digital humanities.  His most recent book, Reading Rio de Janeiro: Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century was published in 2016 by Stanford University Press.  He is currently working on a related book on theater and society, as well as an NSF-sponsored study of land use in Latin American cities.

This event will be chaired by Laura Stokes, Associate Professor of History at Stanford. The Stanford respondent will be William Parish and the UCL respondent will be Madeline Tondi.

This is the third event in the Digital Humanities Long View, a joint seminar series co-hosted by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford and UCL's Centre for Digital Humanities that explores the history of DH and how this past informs the future of digital humanist methods.