The objective of the Short-term Research Committee on Digital Comparative Literature (DCL) is that of addressing a double challenge: the one posed by the growing research field of Digital Humanities to the discipline of Comparative Literary Studies, together with the one—complementary and equally enriching—posed by Comparative Literature to Digital Humanities. In fact, while on the one hand the development of techniques like computer-assisted distant reading and the digitization of large textual archives have opened new perspectives for the study of literature, on the other hand the terrain of Comparative Literary Studies remains one of the roughest for digital research. Suffice it to mention the issue of multilingualism, as computational analysis tools are still mainly tailored for the English language and multilingual literary corpora are still hard to find.
To face this double challenge, DCL will leverage the complementary research paths of its members, all active in between comparative literary studies and digital humanities, focusing on different aspects of their intersection.
DCL organizes panels and workshops, publishes papers and special issues to explore the following topics:
- Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies
- Multilingual literary archives and the digitization of texts in different languages and writing systems
- The transformation of the book and reading in the post-digital age; born-digital literature
- Geographic information systems, data visualization and comparative literary studies
- Machine translation, artificial intelligence, language models and comparative literature
ICLA members can participate in all activities organized by the DCL Research Committee. The Committee shall consider any participant on a sponsored panel at ICLA, ACLA or ESCL conferences as a member of the Research Committee if they so wish. Additional members may join the Committee based on their profile, CV, references and letter of commitment. New memberships are approved by a majority vote of the existing members. Membership is valid until the end of the three-year term of the DCL Committee.
Since the development of research in the field of digital comparative literature relies particularly on the contribution of young and innovative scholars, students and early career researchers are warmly encouraged to join the DCL Research Committee.
