CODAH Symposium 2023: On the Horizon: Digital Humanities, Digital Culture and the Looming Metaverse

CODAH Symposium 2023

May 19^th, 2023 (provisional)

On the Horizon: Digital Humanities, Digital Culture and the Looming Metaverse

CODAH is hosting a one-day symposium on current issues is digital humanities and digital culture considering the next major development in digital media – extended reality and the ‘metaverse’. The Metaverse will be an all-encompassing virtual world that is persistent and combines virtual spaces for unrelated tasks into the same platform. This will enable people to perform many of the activities currently performed in the physical world in this interconnected virtual space (Evans, Frith and Saker, 2022: 5). As a medium, the metaverse will converge many of the mediums and activities that we use today into a persistent, immersive environment people can enter and exit at will. That persistent virtual world will include a wide variety of activities, ranging from commerce to theatre to exercise to gaming.

Against that looming backdrop, there is a need to understand the key contemporary issues in digital culture before the mass remediation of culture into this computational milieu. This symposium invites contributions for short, impact papers of 15-20 minutes on contemporary issues in digital culture and digital humanities. The metaverse does not have to be the focus of these issues; a roundtable discussion following paper presentations will contextualise these issues within the challenges of the metaverse.

This symposium is intended to promote and make visible the work of colleagues in CODAH and the wider University. Colleagues are invited to send a short outline (50-100 words) for a presentation on a key issue. This can come from any area of the humanities or fields relevant to the humanities. We encourage submissions from postgraduate students at all stages of their studies. Please share this information with any colleagues or students that you feel will find this relevant.

Of particular interest, but by no means exhaustive, colleagues are invited to contribute on:

• Digital literacy
• Translation and linguistic barriers
• Education and virtual teaching
• Gaming and games culture
• Avatars and avatar design
• Emotion and emotional expression virtually
• PR and strategic communications
• Heritage and virtual preservation
• Art and virtual creativity
• Cinema, television, and virtual worlds
• Live performance, theatre, and music in virtual worlds
• User generated content and the exploitation of such content.
• The political economy of virtual spaces
• Politics and political expression in digital worlds
• Behavioural norms, trolling and abuse.
• Intimacy and relationships
• Social media and social interaction

Please send all ideas and short outlines to Leighton Evans (l.evans@swansea.ac.uk) by 4pm on 1^st March 2023. Colleagues will be informed of decisions on submissions by 14^th March. The symposium programme will be released at the end of March with the final date, times, and location. The symposium will be in hybrid format, so there is not a necessity to attend or present in person.