CALLS FOR PROPOSALS
Calls for Proposals
CUADERNOS AISPI 26/2025
Deadline for submission of proposals and abstracts: 8 September 2024
Deadline for submission of manuscripts: 31 December 2024
Expected publication date: December 2025
Monograph: Valorisation of the Hispanic lexicographical heritage and retrodigitisation of dictionaries: methodological challenges and theoretical implications
Editors: Carmen Castillo Peña (Università degli Studi di Padova) and Alejandro Fajardo Aguirre (Universidad de La Laguna)
Dictionaries are complex metalinguistic texts, tools for the understanding and use of languages and, at the same time, expressions of the dominant ideology, culture and history of linguistic communities. A historical and historiographical approach to lexicographical texts allows us to observe the evolution of the lexicon, the history of the metalinguistic processes and resources used to represent language, the evolution of ideas about the target language and the trajectory of the ideological discourse that inexorably permeates the dictionary. We conceive the enormous bibliographic heritage constituted by lexicographical texts as an important part of the cultural heritage. A heritage that needs to be valorised and made accessible through digitisation. From this point of view, the process we call retrodigitisation of printed or manuscript dictionaries is not only a service activity for the scientific community dedicated to the history of lexicography, language and linguistics, but also forms part of the wide range of processes for the recovery of cultural heritage.
We understand a lexicographical product to be any text in which the lexical units of one or more languages are objectified in order to give an account of their meaning, whether in the form of defining statements, exemplifying statements or through intralinguistic or interlinguistic equivalences. This means that, in addition to prototypical texts such as the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual alphabetical dictionary, we also consider nomenclatures, conceptual dictionaries or any onomasiological lexical list, as well as word lists forming part of the metalinguistic paratexts of grammars and translations, to be part of the lexicographical heritage.
The retrodigitisation of dictionaries, as in other sectors of the digital humanities, requires a serious methodological reflection on the object of study, insofar as the process of transcription and codification demands a critical interpretation that encompasses the lexicographical fact itself, its purpose, its historical context and, finally, the recipients to whom it was addressed and continues to be addressed. In fact, the digitisation of printed dictionaries poses numerous challenges, technical as well as methodological and deontological. The transition from physical to digital format is not a mere scanning process: it involves complex decisions on how to preserve the integrity of the original texts and how to ensure their accessibility. The technical challenges in the digitisation of old dictionaries present themselves as formal problems - image quality, optical character recognition, preservation of typographical and formatting features -, critical ones - strategies for the resolution of linguistic and metalexicographical omissions and errors -, as well as functional ones - accessibility and usability of digitised dictionaries for heterogeneous audiences. Challenges that multiply when retrodigitisation aims to build a treasure trove, since the solutions adopted must be valid for all the texts that make up the corpus.
This monograph aims to bring together innovative research and case studies dealing with methodological aspects of the valorisation, preservation and digitisation of lexicographical heritage. The following topics are proposed:
- Theoretical frameworks for digitisation and retrodigitisation in theoretical, historical and functional lexicography.
- Evolution of lexicographic practices and traditions: their impact on retrodigitisation.
- Techniques, methodologies, challenges and solutions for the retrodigitisation of dictionaries.
- Strategies and challenges for the preservation of digital and non-digital lexicographic works.
- Case studies of digitisation projects.
- Interaction and usability studies of digital and backdigitised dictionaries.
CUADERNOS AISPI 25/2025
Deadline for submitting proposals and abstracts: 31st October 2023
Deadline for submitting manuscripts: 30th June 2024
Scheduled publication date: July 2025
Monograph: Carmen Martín Gaite and non-fiction
Editors: Maria Vittoria Calvi (Università degli Studi di Milano), José Teruel Benavente (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
The publication in 2002 of the first edition of Cuadernos de todo demonstrated that the work of Carmen Martín Gaite is a unitary text that unfolds in different genres and titles. Later, the annotated edition of her Obras completas in seven volumes (published between 2008 and 2019) confirmed the permeability among all the literary genres that the author from Salamanca cultivated. With a view to the forthcoming centenary of her birth in 2025, we want to present in this monograph a series of articles that shed new light on the analysis of her non-fiction texts. In the Obras completas, two volumes are devoted to her novels, a third to her short narrative, poetry, and theater, and the remaining four volumes to essays, notebooks, collages, and letters.
Therefore, Carmen Martín Gaite, traditionally considered a novelist, was also an essayist, and not only in quantitative, but also qualitative terms. We acknowledge that Martín Gaite, as an essayist, historian, literary critic, lecturer and practitioner of any other modality of her varied intellectual output, never ceased to be a narrator (she transformed any material into a narration), but we also propose to investigate how the search for and encounter with a more personal and distinctive voice ‒both within her generation and in contemporary Spanish culture‒ permeate her voluminous non-fiction production.
The contributions in this volume will be dedicated to topics related to the following titles, all collected in the Obras completas:
• Literary essays: La búsqueda de interlocutor (definitive edition of 2000), El cuento de nunca acabar (1983), Desde la ventana (1987), Agua pasada (1993), and Esperando el provenir (1994).
• Essays based on historical research: El proceso de Macanaz (1969), Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España (1972), El conde de Guadalhorce, su época y su labor (1977) and Usos amorosos de la postguerra española (1987).
• Articles of literary criticism and opinion; lectures and speeches; short essays (prologues, evocations and profiles).
• Writing about the self and more personal texts: Cuadernos de todo (2002; 2019), Vision of New York (2005), diaries, and epistolary correspondence.
CUADERNOS AISPI 24/2024
Proposal submission deadline: 31st July 2023
Manuscript submission deadline: 31st December 2023
Expected publication date: December 2024
Special issue: How do governments communicate? Government communication on the web
Editors: Laura Mariottini (Sapienza Università di Roma), Beatriz Gallardo-Paúls (Universidad de Valencia)
Political discourse analysis has mainly focused on considering the texts and speeches by political leaders and political parties. However, how do governmental political institutions communicate? This is the main subject we intend to address in this monographic issue focussing on the institutional political communication designed by governments at any levels.
The notion of “Institutional Political Communication” is not new within the disciplines that investigate
language and discourse. Indeed, there are numerous studies on “institutional and corporate communication” and there is also a vast literature on the language of public administration, mainly in terms of simplification and comprehensibility, and on the communicative styles of museums and universities. We necessarily start from the theoretical background developed in these disciplines, in order to shed light on a specifically discursive dimension (Gallardo, 2014 et seq.), i.e. how governments and their bodies (heads/presidents of government, parliaments, city councils, ministries, regional ministries, etc.) construct a non-personalistic voice that dispenses with the classic journalistic intermediation and directly interpellates the citizen ‒the governed‒, with the basic aim of involving them democratically in the management of the common good and, ultimately, obtaining their vote in a “permanent campaign” context as described by Brumenthal (1980). The network and the new public communicative dynamics, moreover, generate specific rhythms and communicative flows (“cascading model”, Entman 2003) affecting the way in which governments communicate with citizens, leading to cacophonous (Dahlgren 2004) and hyperbolic rhetoric (Gallardo 2018) whose linguistic-discursive description has not received sufficient attention and which should be investigated in terms of discursive structures, image activities, brand identity, argumentative, persuasive and interactive strategies, to name but a few.
Therefore, the topics on which contributions can be submitted are:
1) Governmental Political Communication (GPC): definitions and theoretical approaches
2) Methodological tools for GPC research
3) GPC genres: press releases, websites, social networks, newsletters and bulletins, campaigns, others
4) GPC and multilingualism
5) GPC and translation
6) GPC and image activities
7) GPC and multimodality
8) GPC and disinformation
CUADERNOS AISPI 23/2024
Deadline for submitting proposals and abstracts: 30 November 2022
Deadline for submitting manuscripts: 30 June 2023
Scheduled publication date: Spring 2024
Monograph: Medievalismo 2.0/ La actualidad de la literatura medieval [Medievalism 2.0: Medieval Literature in the Present Day]
Editors: Andrea Zinato (Università degli Studi di Verona)
Mariano de la Campa Gutiérrez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
The monograph issue on Medievalism aims to provide a joint vision of the fields of textual criticism, literary and cultural history in Castilian, Catalan and Galician-Portuguese, exploring the latest methodologies related to digital humanities.
The monograph will bring together a collection of papers covering the latest trends in research into medieval Spanish literature. Humanistic studies have undoubtedly been undergoing changes in methodological trends for a long time; however, there has recently been a true paradigm shift that has led and encouraged researchers to explore the new approaches in depth.
The papers will aim to provide as full a picture as possible of the tools now available to research the Middle Ages from a critical-textual and ecdotic perspective and also as a result of the new paths being forged in the field of medieval Hispanic literature.
Papers may address any practical or theoretical aspects of the following topic areas:
History of textual criticism
2. The transmission of medieval texts
3. Text-editing methodology
4. Digital medieval philology
5. History of language
6. The classical tradition in medieval literature
7. Translations
8. Metrics
CUADERNOS AISPI 22/2023
Deadline for submitting proposals and abstracts: 30 July 2022
Deadline for submitting manuscripts: 31 December 2022
Scheduled publication date: Autumn 2023
Monograph: Estudios del discurso y de traducción asistidos por corpus: exploraciones desde la lingüística hispánica [Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and Translation: Explorations from Hispanic Linguistics]
Editors:
Sara Piccioni (Università degli Studi “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara)
Jorge Leiva Rojo (Universidad de Málaga)
The dissemination of methods and tools developed in the field of corpus linguistics has led to the inclusion of empirical and quantitative perspectives in different branches of linguistics. These include discourse and translation studies, which have undergone significant development as a result of the empirical approach. With regard to the former, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) combine quantitative methods with qualitative observations to seek evidence of recurring discourse constructions, and they have been usefully applied to the study of the discursive representations of various groups that have suffered from discrimination — e.g., gender studies or representations of migrants — and analysis of the media’s discourse on socially relevant topics. In the field of translation studies, parallel, comparable corpuses have enabled evidence-based quality benchmarks to be established, as well is giving rise to new theories (e.g., the controversial debate about translation universals). Although these research methods have been disseminated beyond the English-speaking world where they originated, their application to Spanish has — with a few notable exceptions — been scant. This volume aims to bring together studies that apply the methodological approaches of CADS and corpus-based translation studies to the analysis of the Spanish language and Spanish texts.
Contributions should adopt corpus-assisted methods and may be related to the following topic areas/approaches:
- discourse in the media (incl. Social media) and political, biomedical, environmental and corporate discourse;
- representations of gender, religious and/or national identity, disabilities, etc.;
- discursive representations of war;
- terminology and lexicology;
- contrastive/translation studies;
- translation universals.
