Categorised in 'Conferences'

American Name Society, Jan 3-5 2019 New York

Jan. 15, 2019 | james | Conferences

James was fortunate enough to attend the 2019 meeting of the American Name Society – which had a special focal panel on literary names – held in conjunction with the American Linguistic Society, at the Sheraton in Times Square, New York. The organisers, Sue Behrens and society president Dorothy Robbins, brought together a series of fascinating speakers and projects that showed just how versatile a field onomastics can be. From an opening address by Sue that demonstrated just how many works can be seen to engage with naming creativity (even when it is not a direct theme of a text) – adding to the ever-growing interest in the specialised field. From there, the programme went from strength to strength, spanning Pokemonastics (comparing translated names for the fictional creatures), through examining how names feature in online click-bait; and a keynote of aesthetic naming in Poe and Longfellow from Andrew Higgins completed the first day.

The role of names in Chronotropic Cartographies’ spatial schema was the focus of our talk (titled: The Intent, Content, and Context Narratives of Literary Namescapes) – along with a dedicated breakdown of how traditional NER techniques that treat all names equally are insufficient tools for literary markup and analysis. Rather, the case for our disambiguation between active and passive place referents (along with a few other means of denoting the role of place-based reference) formed the central argument – which was extremely well-received. The audience made it clear that our approach is unlike any other work being conducted in the field, and bringing innovative techniques to a domain that has (perhaps necessarily) not featured as strongly in DH work as others. It is our sincerest hope that our codification model for applied name roles will hopefully bring the field of literary onomastics to the forefront of DH work – particularly given its recent renewed surged in scholarly interest.

The paper was kindly complimented as ‘a conference highlight’ by a number of the international cohort in attendance, with many members keen to be updated on further innovations we have planned.