15-20 Minute Paper
Aaron Mauro
Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Lecturer
University of Victoria
Biography
Aaron Mauro (PhD Queen’s University) is a SSHRC funded Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. His research areas include comparative media studies, digital humanities, 20th-Century U.S. fiction, philosophy, and literary theory. For more information, please see his website www.aaronmauro.com.
Abstract
With the support of data visualization tools like Many Eyes, Circos, and Tableau Public, this paper argues that the future of the digital humanities is made manifest in popular culture and contemporary literature. While digital humanities tools have been built to interpret and organize cultural history within the academy for many decades now, contemporary authors are now responding to the digital environment in which their literature is published by incorporating archival and interpretive tools into the thematic registers of their novels. By using digital humanities methodologies and tools, this paper describes how three contemporary novels are reacting to technology in the academy and popular culture.