February 24th, 2016
4:30-6:00 P.M.
Hillcrest 103

DLA Postdoc Alicia Peaker will be sharing her digital work in progress as part of the Carol Rifelj lecture series on February 24th at 4:30 P.M., in Hillcrest 103. Her talk, “Digital Readings and ‘Ferny, Mossy Discoveries’: Visualizing the Natural Worlds of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth,” emerges at the intersections of environmental humanities, digital humanities, and ecocriticism, and considers alternative ways of engaging the fictional natural worlds of novels through digital forms.

How might the ecosystems and biospheres of novels be represented digitally? Can we develop useful digital models for contextualizing human characters within the fictional natural worlds they inhabit? And what impacts might such models have on the ways we read and understand literatures of the environment? Beginning with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth (1917), this project uses digital humanities methods to situate humans and nonhuman others within the ecosystems of the novels they inhabit.