Digital Migrations: Diasporas, Transnational Circulations, and Border Crossings through the Lens of Digital Humanities

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Migration and global mobility as we know them today are barely thinkable without the Digital Revolution of the late 20th century. While the political and especially economic impacts of globalization in the digital era have been subject to public attention and substantial research, cultural mobility and its entanglement with the virtual realm can benefit from a more thorough conceptualization. At the same time, research in cultural and literary studies increasingly relies on digital methods, which generate new kinds of multi-directional border crossings between analogue and digital that parallel the transnational mobility of texts, ideas, cultural practices and communities. Conceived around the idea of digital migrations as an abstract and multi-layered concept, this roundtable brings together practitioners of digital humanities, librarians, and scholars of emigre literature and diasporic cultural communities. Our discussion will integrate approaches to the circulation of texts, concepts, archives, data, and communities across a variety of borders: geographical ones, as well as borders between media, technical platforms, data formats, and across the digital-analogue divide. How do these flows impact the success archival preservation and facilitate access? How do they contribute to processes of local and global meaning making? And how do digital refractions of cultural forms alter our understanding of cultural spaces - of home and abroad, East and West, exile and metropolis?

Sub Unit

• Digital Humanities

Chair

• Krista Goff, U of Miami

Roundtable Members

• Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U

• Natalia Ermolaev, Princeton U

• Philip Gleissner, Ohio State U

• Yasha Klots, CUNY Hunter College

• Jessie Labov, Central European U (Hungary)