Organized as part of the Fall 2022 seminar “Building Translation Networks in the Midwest with HathiTrust,” coordinated by Christi Merrill, the December 7 hybrid panel brought together cutting-edge scholars, translators, and designers to explore the intersection of translation, gaming, and the digital humanities.
The event began with the opening remarks by Yopie Prins, who contextualized the panel in relation to previous and upcoming events of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest.”
The first panel started with Christi Merrill’s opening presentation, in which she discussed the promises and challenges of multilingual research in HathiTrust by exploring the trajectories of vetala/baital storytelling cycle in the digital library.
The first panel, moderated by Benjamin Paloff, included invited speakers Carolyn Shread and Nathan Langston. In her presentation, Carolyn Shread reflected on her experience translating Catherine Malabou’s work from French into English, focusing on the themes of “anarchy” and “plasticity” that offer new understandings of both the terms themselves and translation more generally. Nathan Langston described his work on Telephone Game, a collaborative project in which painters, poets, sculptures, film-makers and musicians (including the Ann Arbor artist Judith Banker who attended in person) were invited to respond creatively to each other’s interpretations of other artist’s interpretations, each branch of artistic responses extending out from the same source: an aerial-propagating banyan tree. The panel concluded with a lively session of questions and comments from in-person participants.
Watch the Zoom recording of our first panel here!
The second panel was opened by Christi Merill’s presentation on using HathiTrust to create translation networks between world literary personalities, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Francis Bacon, and Montaigne. Moderated by Maya Barzilai, the second panel included invited speakers Chris Warren and Rini Bhattacharya Mehta. Joining virtually, Chris Warren told the story of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, a collective project that digitally and visually maps early modern social networks in Europe. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta then shared her ongoing research combining narrative analysis and computer technologies to archive and classify the music of Tagore. The panel was concluded with remarks from in-person and virtual attendees.
Watch the Zoom recording of the second panel here!
The December 7 panel was a follow-up event on the February 18 launch of “Building Translation Networks in the Midwest with HathiTrust,” which you can watch here.
