Third time's the charm!

Mark March 31, 2011 on your calendar!  Professor Michael Witmore from the Department of English here at UW will be giving a lecture, titled "Data-Mining Early English Dramatic Texts from the Text Creation Partnership," from 4:00 to 5:00PM in the SLIS Commons.  This lecture is sponsored the by Center for the History of Print Culture.

In this talk, Professor Witmore will discuss his work on digitized versions of early modern printed texts using multivariate statistics and a text-analysis tool called Docuscope.  His presentation will focus on the following question:  what can we learn from data-mining large numbers of early modern texts that we couldn’t learn by simply reading a representative sample of them?  Witmore is organizer of the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a research collective that is mapping the prose genres of Early English Books online using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics. Results of this research can be found on his website, www.winedarksea.org, and an online edition of Shakespeare Quarterly: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/hope-witmore-the-hundredth-psalm/.  In this research, he is interested in the ways in which literary critical terms such as genre—which we apply to texts on the basis of plot, character and action—are visible linguistically at the level of the sentence. When working in this area, he collaborates with Jonathan Hope, Robin Valenza, Franco Moretti, and Susan Bernstein.


Professor Witmore also is the author of Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001), which was co-winner of the Perkins Prize for the Study of Narrative in 2003 and, more recently, Shakespearean Metaphysics (Continuum 2008) and Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 2007).  In addition to serving as textual editor for the Comedy of Errors with the new Norton Shakespeare, he has just completed a collaborative study of Shakespearean scenes, characters and objects with the photographer Rosamond Purcell, to be published in fall of 2010 under the title, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections From Shakespeare.  He also co-edited, with Andreea Immel, of Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 (Routledge, 2006).

We hope you can make it!

This week at SLIS

We have some exciting events coming up this week at SLIS! Clear your schedule for this Thursday, February 17! Come to a workshop on LibGuides at the SLIS Computer Lab from 11:30-1pm, or if workshops aren't your style, attend the Print Culture Colloquium with Professor Michael Whitmore "Data-Mining Early English Dramatic Texts from the Text Creation Partnerships" at the SLIS Commons from 12-1pm. Stick around later in the day (4:30-5:30) to hear a talk from Faith Chao, titled "Bringing information literacy to rural China" in the SLIS Commons.

We hope to see you!

Why Do Straight Women Read and Create Boys’ Love Stories?

If you are free this coming Thursday, October 28, from 12-1PM, there will be a presentation in the SLIS Commons that may interest you!  The Print Culture Colloquium is offering a lecture on why straight women read and create boys' love stories, presented by Chi-Shiou Lin,Assistant Professor, Department of Library & Information Science at National Taiwan University. 

From the press release:

 In recent years, Boys’ Love (BL) stories have become a popular genre of pleasure reading among women readers in the Asian countries especially in Japan, China, and Taiwan.  BL stories are love stories of two or more male characters created predominantly by women for women; most of them identified themselves as heterosexual.  This blooming genre of texts, images, and other forms of creation is also known as Danmei (“indulgence in beauty”) in the Chinese and Japanese speaking regions. It is also known as YAOI or “slash fiction” in the Western world.  The genre names of Danmei and YAOI which originated from the Chinese/Japanese languages express a sense that its women readers see love between males as beautiful and romantic.  Interestingly, many BL readers see this genre as different from gay literatures.  For them, BL stories are purely fantasies created by and for women, which is different from literary works that describe and reflect on the real-world homosexual relationships.

Why do the women readers find BL stories beautiful – so beautiful that many are deeply addicted to the genre?  What pleasure do women get from reading and creating BL stories?  Informal theories have been speculated by BL readers themselves or by outsiders who tend to pathologize the phenomenon of BL reading.  But systematic investigation of the BL readership is rarely seen.  This exploratory study thus employs interpretive qualitative methodologies to empirically analyze the reading experiences, motivations, and types of pleasures of 26 adult female readers in Taiwan, aged between 18 years old and 40s.  Their occupations ranged from university students, office workers, teachers and college professors.  Some are married women with children.  Most of them are also engaged in some forms of BL story creation.  In this presentation, I will report initial findings on the motivations and types of pleasures experienced by the interviewees from reading Boys’ Love.

Chi-Shiou Lin is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Library & Information Science in the National Taiwan University.  He got his Ph.D. from SLIS, UW-Madison in 2007.  His research interests are diverse.  His current research areas include social informatics, government information, and the practices of pleasure reading and genre reading.

Supported by the Center for the History of Print Culture, the School of Library and Information Studies, Wisconsin Historical Society, UW-Madison Libraries, and the Wisconsin Print Culture Society.