Computational approaches to life writing and personal narratives

Digital Humanities Center dhc@lu.lv

This topic focuses on the study of life writing and personal narratives in digitised and digital contexts, including diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, and other first-person materials. It invites research that combines humanities-driven inquiry with digital and computational approaches to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and ethical handling of personal narrative sources originating both from historical archives and contemporary digital practices. The research focus is open. Possible directions include, but are not limited to:

• how digital and computational methods can support the analysis of large-scale corpora of digitised and born-digital life writing while retaining contextual and interpretative depth
• how personal narratives function as sources for social, cultural, and historical research across archival, digitised, and contemporary digital collections
• how ethical, participatory, and methodological challenges are addressed when working with digitised and born-digital personal narratives, including the use of computational and AI-assisted tools where relevant.