December 2016
Invited Lecture
Dallas, Texas
Southern Methodist University
In this talk, the Semperes will present a case study of the Summer of Darkness iOS app, a digital humanities project that tells the story of "The Year without Summer" through real-time notifications, weather animations, and excerpts of letters, journals, and literary works by Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori. Using techniques borrowed from theater, performance, and fiction, they examine how computation can be used to transcend "big data" and analytics to add an experiential aspect to digital humanities, turning an archive of material into a performance and facilitating a direct encounter with history.