European Association for Digital Humanities 2026
15-19 September 2026
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions on that day or at that location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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LP18: Off the Main Path: Finding Style, Seams, and Shifts Location: Room 505, al. Mickiewicza 9b Session Chair: Karina van Dalen-Oskam | |
| Presentation 1 | |
Beyond the Close/Distant Divide: Digital Humanities Approaches to Style and Point of View in Translation Roma Tre University, Italy This paper explores how Digital Humanities (DH) methods can be applied to the analysis of literary style in translation, with a focus on narrative point of view. Framed within DH debates on the relationship between computational analysis, interpretive practices, and analytical scale, it argues for an integrated approach in which close and distant reading function as complementary methodologies. By combining corpus stylistics and translation studies within a DH framework, the study demonstrates how digitally assisted methods can enhance interpretive analysis in the humanities. The case study examines Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway" (1925) and its most recent Italian translation, "La signora Dalloway" (2024). In Woolf’s modernist prose, point of view is a central stylistic category, realised through techniques such as Free Indirect Discourse, deictic shifts, parenthetical structures, and the blending of narrative and character voices. These features pose particular challenges for DH approaches, as they rely on subtle, distributed linguistic cues rather than easily isolable traits. Methodologically, the study adopts an interlingual parallel corpus model, aligning the source and target texts in Sketch Engine to investigate how linguistic markers of point of view – including deictic adverbs, demonstratives, reporting verbs, verba sentiendi, and the connectives but and for – are preserved or modified in translation. Quantitative frequency analysis is combined with close reading of parallel concordances to trace cumulative stylistic effects. To foreground DH tool diversity, the analysis is complemented by a comparison with Voyant Tools, whose visualisation oriented environment highlights differences in analytical scale, affordances, and interpretive workflow. The findings show that while many stylistic patterns are retained, cumulative micro level shifts – particularly in the translation of deixis – produce a gradual harmonisation of narrative perspective. Overall, the paper positions literary translation as a privileged site for DH research into style, variation, and interpretive choice. | |
