The IGEL 2018 Conference

Program

Wednesday July 25

0830- 0915	Registration, coffee
0915-0930	Opening: Welcome (in “Valhall)”
0930-1045Keynote 1	Prof. Philip Davis (Univ. of Liverpool, UK) & Dr. Jane Davis (The Reader, UK):Evaluating Shared Reading
1045-1100	Coffee break
1100-1300	Session 1 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1300-1415	Lunch
1415-1615	Session 2 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1615-1630	Coffee break
1630-1830	Session 3 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1830 RECEPTION

Thursday July 26

0900-1100	Session 4 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1100-1115	Coffee break
1115-1215Keynote 2	Prof. Lydia Kokkola (Luleå Univ of Technology, SE):What’s Special About Reading Literature? Adolescent Readings in English as a Foreign Language
1215-1330	Lunch
1330-1530	Session 5 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1545-1630Plenary	Old Norse Viking Poetry:Dr. Klaus Johan Myrvoll (Univ of Stavanger, NO): The Song of Harald
1630-1800	POSTER SESSION
1930 CONFERENCE DINNER, Bølgen & Moi (at the Oil Museum)

Friday July 27

0900-1100	Session 6 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes*
1100-1115	Coffee break
1115-1215Keynote 3	Dr. Raymond Mar (York Univ, CA):How to Evaluate Whether Stories Promote Social Cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) Framework
1215-1330	Lunch
1330-1430Keynote 4	Prof. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Univ of Amsterdam, NL):The Riddle of Literary Quality: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Perceptions of Literariness
1430-1445	Coffee break
1445-1545 IGEL GENERAL ASSEMBLY (for IGEL members)
1600-1800	Session 7 Symposia/paper presentations 4 X 30 minutes* and WORKSHOP on Shared Reading by Dr. Jane Davis (The Reader, UK) (registration required)
2000 STUDENT SOCIAL EVENT

Saturday July 28

0900-1100	Session 8 Symposia/paper presentations 3 X 30 minutes*
1100-1130	Coffee break
1130-1230Keynote 5	Dr. Frank Hakemulder (Utrecht Univ., NL):The Importance of Confounds in Research
1230 FAREWELL

Keynote speakers

Professor Lydia Kokkola
Lydia Kokkola is Head of English and Education at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. She is currently the Principle Investigator in a Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation funded project “Matching Reading Strategies with Purposes and Text Types”. This four year project investigates how adolescent EFL readers can learn to adjust their reading strategies to suit digital information texts and works of literature. The project includes small-scale studies of searching strategies, plagiarism and other forms of recycling language, assessing texts’ trustworthiness and the physical experience of reading.

What’s Special About Reading Literature?
Adolescent Readings in English as a Foreign Language

At IGEL’s conference in Paris last October, researchers strove to untangle the qualities that define “literariness”. David Miall’s keynote explored the embodied nature of our responses to literature, whilst other speakers focused on how particular features of literary texts evoke reactions from readers. Nigel Fabb, for instance, looked at the sensation of epiphany and Frank Hakemulder examined how readers responded to foregrounding. “Literariness” in these presentations was a quality of the text that could be understood through empirical studies of readers’ responses. Literariness comes into being when readers and texts meet; it is “special” and unlike meetings between readers and information texts. However, we all know that critical reading skills require maturation and education in order to develop, and that, sometimes, even fairly advanced readers respond to textual features that are considered “literary” in unexpected ways. Empirical studies of literature are perhaps at their most valuable when they capture these surprising responses.

In my presentation, I investigate the nature of literary responses to texts by contrasting it with other responses to texts, such as reading for information. Most of the studies I present are taken from a project examining Swedish teenagers’ readings of texts written in English. The educational context emphasizes language learning, although reading in the classroom may be presented as having quite different goals, such as evoking an aesthetic response or finding out information. I will focus on those findings that expose mismatches between the text type and the teenagers’ responses that empirical research can address, but conclude by asking about the place of other forms research. In this way, I hope to invite discussion on the methodological challenges of the field and the contribution empirical studies of literature have to make within language education.

Frank Hakemulder
Frank Hakemulder has a background in literary theory and comparative literature. He conducted his Ph.D.-research (1998) at the Department of Literary Studies at Utrecht University and the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He specializes in the psychology of literature, focusing on the effects of reading literary texts on outgroup attitudes and moral self-concept. On this subject he published several books and articles (e.g., The moral laboratory, 2000).

Currently he supervises two national research projects in the Netherlands: one pertaining to the experience of being absorbed in fictional worlds (Narrative Absorption, 2017), and the other on how such experiences affect social perception and self concepts (see www.finditinfiction.org). Since January 2018 he is affiliated full professor 2 at the Reading Center, Stavanger, Norway. He teaches Media Psychology and Communication at the Department of Media and Culture Studies (Utrecht University), and trains students in the Humanities in methods of the Social Sciences (Science and Humanities: New Research Methods, 2012). From 2012 to 2016 he was president of IGEL.

The importance of confounds in research

Much of what we do in the empirical study of literature is aimed at enhancing control. For example, in case we want to know how literary text features affect readers, there are a number of precautions to take that may enable us to draw causal conclusions. A common situation is that experimenters randomly assign participants to the reading of different versions of a literary text, assess their responses, and test for possible significant differences between the groups. In such set-ups, researchers might be well advised to avoid confounding their results by allowing contact among participants, (e.g., discussing their individual responses). Furthermore, it is considered good practice to keep certain information from the participants (e.g., the name of the author) so as to prevent biases in their responses (e.g., due to the status of the author). In addition, it is thought to be detrimental to research validity, to have participants guess or understand the purpose of the study. Finally, results are deemed worthless if there is a chance that responses were influenced by the measures that were used to assess them.

This keynote address focuses on how reading during experiments differs from reading outside the lab, and hence, what remains invisible to experimenters. It will be argued that for some of the research interests in IGEL these aspects may be exactly the type of responses that are essential for our understanding of the potential value of literary communication.

Philip Davis and Jane Davis

Professor Philip Davis is Director of CRILS, a centre for research into reading at the University of Liverpool which is research partner of The Reader. His publications include Memory and Writing; The Experience of Reading; Real Voices: On Reading; Shakespeare Thinking; Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life; The Transferred Life of George Eliot; Why Victorian Literature Still Matters; The Victorians 1830-1880; and Reading and The Reader for the Literary Agenda series on the importance of literature in the 21^st century (Oxford University Press) of which he is general editor. Editor of The Reader magazine, he has also published collaborative research articles on literature and brain-imaging, and literature and mental health.

Dr Jane Davis is Director of The Reader (www.thereader.org.uk), which she founded in 1997 while teaching English in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool. In 2011 Jane was elected as the UK’s 20th Ashoka Fellow and received an MBE for services to reading. The Reader sells Shared Reading to a wide range of commissioners in the NHS and across HM Prison Estate, as well as to local authorities, housing providers and employers. With sister projects developing across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, The Reader is currently building the International Centre for Shared Reading at Calderstones Mansion, in Calderstones Park, Liverpool.

Evaluating Shared Reading

Jane Davis and Philip Davis will speak about the difficulty of assessing the value of the session, the methods, possibilities and emotions involved.

They will show excerpts from a film of a shared reading group recently held in a drug and rehabilitation centre for men in Liverpool.

The group is reading, live and aloud, Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’, with space left for re-reading, questioning, thinking and personal comment. None has seen the poem before: they are not people who read much anyway, let alone a difficult Shakespeare sonnet. The group leader, a member of the charity The Reader which brings shared reading of serious literature to often hard-to-reach communities, is also filmed giving her comments after the session.

The film is part of a new series funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, to offer on-line training to those people who wish to volunteer to run shared reading groups in the UK and beyond. It will not have been shown in public before, and this occasion is consequently an informal launch of the initiative to show some of the empirical workings of a Shared Reading group as near first hand as possible.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam
Karina van Dalen-Oskam is head of the department of literary studies of Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and professor in computational literary studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research deals with the analysis of literary writing style and builds on her expertise in literary studies, medieval studies, onomastics and lexicography. She is an active member of the international digital humanities community, where she currently serves as chair of the steering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

The Riddle of Literary Quality: a mixed-methods approach to perceptions of literariness

Literary writing has been analyzed from many perspectives, but what literature is still eludes us. The project The Riddle of Literary Quality has approached this problem from a new perspective: that of stylometry. The Riddle is a research project of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Amsterdam) in collaboration with the Fryske Akademy (Leeuwarden) and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (University of Amsterdam). The Riddle officially started in January 2012 and will be finished in 2019. The project is funded by the Computational Humanities Programme of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Riddle combines computational analysis of writing style with the results of a large online survey of readers, completed by almost 14,000 participants. The respondents gave their opinions about books they read and did not read on a list of 400 best-selling novels. They provided us with some personal information such as age, gender, education, and replied to a set of statements asking them what kind of reader they are. I will give an overview of the main results of the project. One of the most significant results is the difference in evaluation of books written by female authors compared to books written by male authors. Do these different opinions relate to differences in writing style? Or is it genre and theme or topic that inform these differences? Does the fact that a novel is a translation or not play a role, and if so, does the source language play a role in the value that readers attribute to it, or the quality of the translation?

Raymond Mar
Raymond A. Mar is an associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. He employs the methods of personality psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience to research the real-world influence of imaginative experiences, including engagement with fictional narratives in various media (e.g., novels, films, videogames).

How to Evaluate Whether Stories Promote Social Cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) Framework

The idea that stories might promote empathy, mentalizing, or other forms of social cognition has long been theorized. Over the past two decades or so, empirical evidence in favour of this idea has steadily begun to accumulate. In this talk, I will present a research framework that aims to formalize the theorizing around the relationship between stories and social cognition. This framework describes two major avenues through which stories might promote social cognition, tied to a process versus content distinction. Stories could promote social cognition through the frequent engagement of social cognitive processes over prolonged periods of time. Or, stories could promote social cognition by presenting explicit content regarding the social world and social relationships. Importantly, these two avenues are not mutually exclusive and both may take place, perhaps even simultaneously. This framework, known as the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) framework, endeavors to describe exactly how, when, and why engagement with stories might result in improved social cognition. Moreover, it provides an organizing structure for evaluating the extant evidence that we currently have and point researchers towards the topics in need of further attention.

Meet the keynotes

In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Dr. Raymond Mar

Dr. Raymond A. Mar is an associate professor at York University.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

At IGEL I’m always sure to have plenty of fascinating conversations with my colleagues about a wide range of topics. But for my talk, I plan on discussing the possibility that our engagement with stories might help us to develop out capacity to understand other people, and how we might go about gathering evidence as to whether this is plausible or not.

In your keynote, you’ll be talking about literary reading and social cognition. Could you explain what “social cognition” entails?

Absolutely. Social cognition is a bit of an umbrella term, referring to a suite of cognitive processes that help us to successfully interact with our peers in the social world. This means everything from inferring what people are thinking and feeling, to building up models or representations of our close friends and their unique personalities.

In your keynote, you’ll be talking about literary reading and social cognition. Could you explain what “social cognition” entails?

Absolutely. Social cognition is a bit of an umbrella term, referring to a suite of cognitive processes that help us to successfully interact with our peers in the social world. This means everything from inferring what people are thinking and feeling, to building up models or representations of our close friends and their unique personalities.

What brought you to studying the links between reading narratives and social cognition?

I was an avid reader growing up, but it was only during the last year of my undergraduate degree in psychology that I came upon the psychology of reading. Unexpectedly, it was a course in the humanities–on rhetorical perspectives toward fiction–that really motivated me to explore what sort of psychological research had been done on reading. From there, I discovered the work of so many brilliant researchers who have inspired and influenced me to pursue this work (many of whom belong to IGEL).

What, in your perspective, is the importance of IGEL?

IGEL is near and dear to my heart because it was the first place where I felt there was an entire community of researchers interested in the same things that I was curious about.

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

I’m very much looking forward to seeing old friends and catching up with them on what they’ve been working on. And, of course, exploring all that Stavanger has to offer!

In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Dr. Jane Davis

Dr. Jane Davis is Director of The Reader.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

I’ll be talking about the development of Shared Reading practice in the UK and  beyond, and asking questions about what people think is happening when we read in this way.

What brought you to studying the associations between literary reading and mental health? 

I’m not a researcher, rather I’m involved in developing the practice of Shared Reading, which is a kind of literary reading where people read aloud, in real time, and share their real-time thoughts and responses. It’s live reading!

I began to be interested in the relation between Shared Reading and mental health when members of the very earliest groups began to tell me that (although I saw it as an educational programme) the reading group was having an effect on their physical and mental health.

More than a decade later, The Reader is commissioned to develop Shared Reading in many mental health settings both in hospitals and in community settings.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

I’ll be talking about the development of Shared Reading practice in the UK and  beyond, and asking questions about what people think is happening when we read in this way.

What, in your perspective, is the main importance of IGEL?

Bringing researchers and other interested parties such as myself together from across arrange of disciplines, which helps create further and unexpected collaboration –excellent!

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

I’m looking forward to presenting the work of The Reader and to hearing about what other people are doing and thinking. I’m hoping to meet some old colleagues, and to meet new potential  colleagues and collaborators. I hope to find people who will want to help me spread the theory and practice of Shared Reading.

Professor Philip Davis

Professor Philip Davis is Director of CRILS: Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society, University of Liverpool and editor of The Reader magazine.

What brought you to empirical research on literary reading in the first place?

I suppose ‘empirical’ wasn’t the first word that entered my head. I certainly didn’t want the ‘theoretical’ that has been so much in vogue in my working life since the seventies. I wanted what I would call ‘the individual’ and what I associate with that, ‘the real’. I found that when I was thinking about real individuals and their responses to a poem or short story or novel, then thinking about the literary work and its effect seemed less abstract, more urgent and exciting, humanly.

I then wanted also to think about the other dimension – the underlying mechanisms and processes going on secretly, mentally within serious literary reading: hence my interest in brain-imaging and physiological measures in an attempt to match the feelings with the spikes and lights that partly constituted them at another level. That is why I wanted to collaborate with scientists, psychologists and health professionals, taking my research out of a Department of English Literature, into an institute with interests in psychological wellbeing in the real world.  I wanted genuine experiments, not a mere semi-educated borrowing of the rhetoric of evolution or the vocabulary of brain science.

What brought you to studying the associations between literary reading and mental health?

History, in a sense. Reading serious works could have come under different headings in different times. Say, religion; say, ethics; say, education. I don’t know if I care about the heading, only the thing itself, resilient and defiant despite any context. But I don’t think the institutionalized study of literature in universities in my time has served the reading of literature very well. So here was this new, wider heading – health, wellbeing for people in the wider world. It is not the only name or the best name, and I hate the idea of being merely ‘healthy’ in some hygienic purity, but it is a useful category-framework for now, offering the chance to remember how important serious reading is for humans.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

Something of what I have outlined above. My means is this: I will want to show excerpts from a reading group session on film. That is what I mean by empirical: see the thing, as far as possible under these conditions, as it is first of all, in the reality of  the doing and the happening. I am not so interested in the talking about it instead of it, or in retrospective accounts of what people think they were doing. Let’s try to see something more than usual of what they actually did when they read. (But I am always a bit scared of the technology in a new venue: so I hope the films come across well and I don’t have any blips or disasters, mark you.)

What, in your perspective, is the main importance of IGEL?

To help transform the study of literature into what it should be in mental life, emotionally and in terms of unprogrammed thought and spontaneous imagination.

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

I am hoping to meet (and re-meet) people who care as I do, to have some effect on education and policy, to get further ideas/stimulation, and perhaps find friends and collaborators. I don’t much like conferences, to be frank, and I have never attended an IGEL event before, but I am hopeful about this one and don’t want to be disappointed (please, readers).

Professor Lydia Kokkola

Lydia Kokkola is professor and chaired professor at the Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology.

What brought you to empirical research in the first place, and to studying the role of literary reading in the classroom?

I was originally trained as a primary school teacher, although I began my career working in pre-school education in Finland. I was working in an immersion setting: the children (aged 4-7) were all Finnish speakers, but I spoke to them only in English. I soon noticed that the children used formulaic phrases accurately, but also creatively in unexpected contexts. The most popular phrases used by the children were instructions they had heard me utter (e.g. “wash your hands”), but they also used chunks taken from songs and stories (e.g. “come quick Ville is the wild rumpus in the playroom!”).

I wrote my licentiate on this phenomenon and then went on, in my PhD, to examine what happened when Finnish speaking children learned to read in English in these immersion classrooms. Again, I noticed that the support offered by literature clearly made the process of learning easier.

Throughout my post-graduate years, I was constantly in schools working with teachers, giving story-tellings, listening to the pupils and I fully intended to return to school life, but my plans changed and I went into literary studies, although I still consider myself to be a teacher first.

I left empirical research for about a decade, more for practical reasons than an ideological shift, although I strongly believe that empirical and more theoretical literary research complement one another and I’ll explain more about why I think this during my talk. I returned to empirical research just six years ago, and again my main concern is the ability to read critically in English as a foreign language. So much of the information people read today is in English, and we know how hard it is for non-native speakers to recognize features such as irony, let alone deliberate attempts at misinformation.

I believe that narrative literature provides the support learners need in order to develop vital critical reading skills, and our current research project, funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation, is testing this hypothesis.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

I want to examine the qualities of “literariness”. I’ll be using examples from the project to contrast “literary” responses to texts with other responses to texts, such as reading for information. I’m particularly interested in instances where there seems to be a mismatch between the text type and teenagers’ responses. Some of the mismatches arise directly form the teaching situation, but sometimes the readers come to these responses completely independently. These are places where empirical research can prevent us from becoming blinded by our pre-conceptions. I am hoping it will start a discussion on the methodological challenges of the field and the contribution empirical studies of literature have to make within language education.

What, from your perspective, is the main importance of IGEL?

IGEL creates a space where literary scholars who use empirical methodologies can come together and learn from one another. Until recently, these kinds of approaches have only been fully accepted within education studies, and researchers who presented empirical research at a literary conference were not always well received. I certainly received put-downs implying I wasn’t really capable of doing proper literary research in my early career when the fashion was to write “A Derridean/Kristevan/etc reading of____” paper. There has been a change, and the renewed interest in the reader has resulted in more acceptance of the need for empirical studies. I think IGEL can promote this type of research, but I also hope that IGEL members will publish and present their empirical studies in other contexts as well. Cross-fertilization really does produce the most robust research!

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

I have very high expectations! Every aspect of the planning has been thought though in great detail. I am looking forward to meeting people whose work I have read, and getting to know about new lines of research. On-line connections through email and so on are all very well, but there is nothing like the conversations over coffee at a good conference to spark the imagination!

In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam 

Karina van Dalen-Oskam is professor of Computational literary studies at the University of Amsterdam, and research leader of the department of Literary studies at the Huygens institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

At the 2018 IGEL conference I will talk about my project The Riddle of Literary Quality. In this project, which is nearly finished, we combine stylometric and sociological methods in trying to unlock the current conventions of literary quality in the Netherlands. I will explain the reasoning behind this combination and present the results of the reader experiments and the text analysis.

What brought you to computational literary studies in the first place, and to quantitatively studying stylistic differences in texts, but also in genres, and across time and languages?

My main interest has always been literary texts, especially prose fiction. But I also enjoyed the strict logic behind many linguistic methods, much more than the approaches I saw literary scholars use.

My first job was at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology, where I worked as a lexicographer on the Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch. Here I was introduced to corpus lexicography and corpus linguistics, and the empirical reasoning used in these disciplines perfectly agreed with me. Compiling dictionary entries gave me a lot of ideas on how to apply these methods to literary research questions. So in my own research, I started combining literary questions with corpus linguistic methodology.

To what extent would you say that this kind of computational research is empirical?

I’m a big fan of quantifying things. I see counting things and clearly describing what I count as the first necessary steps to get a clear idea of what I am studying and, next, to compare my own results with those of other scholars. So quantifying things for me is a way to help me see the bigger picture, for example the use and function of proper names in texts, oeuvres, genres, and so forth. I would call this a truly empirical approach, making my analyses verifyable and repeatable.

Your research uses computational methods for the comparative study of literary style across texts, genres, and time. To what extent does the cognitive-behavioral dimension of the reader play a role in your research?

I am very interested in adding a cognitive-behavioral dimension to my own research. I have done several reader experiments together with my team. I am unsure, however, if the IGEL-community would qualify them as thoroughly cognitive-behavioral.

What, in your perspective, is the main importance of IGEL?

Conferences such as IGEL are important to me as a researcher, on the one hand as a sounding board for my own ideas, hoping for useful comments on my presentation. On the other hand it provides me with new methods and new ideas, and possibly also with new connections leading to new collaborations. The bigger the question we are trying to answer, the more important sharing ideas and collaboration across research disciplines are. And conferences are all about sharing.

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

I am very happy to have been offered the opportunity to tell the IGEL members about my research. I am eager to hear their comments and to get an overview of the current research topics in the IGEL community. I am sure this will lead to interesting new connections. In the past, I have attended several conferences and meetings in Stavanger and always greatly enjoyed both the scholarly programme and the atmosphere of the city. I am looking forward to visit the city again.

Frank Hakemulder

Dr. Frank Hakemulder is an assistant professor at the Department for Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Hakemulder was President of IGEL from 2012-2016.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

I will present the results of the research projects that I am running in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of literature in enhancing self-knowledge and social perception.

What brought you to empirical research in the first place, and to studying the phenomenon of absorption in literary reading?

We know of no society, in history nor anywhere in the world, that does not have something that we can call ‘literature.’ That makes one wonder what it is for.

Scholarship has accumulated quite a number of theories and hypotheses about this – since ancient times philosophers, writers, and educators have speculated about all sorts of explanations. Often the assumed effects of literature on readers (or listeners) seem rather crucial; for instance: learning about the lives of others, gaining insights into the human condition and who we are.

As a student of Literary Theory, I thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to know whether these theories are true, for, well … a better world? Since then, in my research, I did indeed find that we do know something about these salutatory effects of reading literature, and in my own work I am trying to add to this evidence, and attempt to discover ways to use this knowledge to improve our lives.

A workable metaphor to understand the effects of literature, is, I think, that of reading as a moral laboratory: the readers experiments with certain roles – those of characters – and thus experiences how it might be to be in the shoes of someone else, learning about the causes and consequences of certain behaviors, discovering whether some roles would suit them, or not.

It seems that this metaphor also helps us to understand what the importance of absorption could be: the more you are involved in the ‘experiments’ the deeper the impact might be. That is what I’d like to know, whether this is the way it works.

What, in your perspective, is the importance of IGEL?

IGEL combines two groups of researchers, bringing two types of expertise together, sometimes even united in one researcher: First, a high sensitivity for ‘texts’, for how stories are written, for ways to analyze movies, to understand how style works. That is the Humanities side of IGEL.

Second, there is the Social Sciences side, that you recognize in a certain rigor or systematicity in research methods, transparency in operationalizations, testing hypotheses in an attempt to falsify them, rather than arguing they are ‘self-evident’.

I find that combination ideal: it leads to beautiful research that can enrich the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Moreover, it can lead to insights that may have an ‘impact factor’ beyond the confined world of scientific journals, in the sense that they might actually be usable for people outside academia.

What are your expectations for the IGEL Conference 2018?

Well, exactly that. I think that the combination of topics that we are preparing for this conference might reveal what IGEL can do in these respects.