Project Summary

“Visualizing European Crime Fiction: New Digital Tools and Approaches to the Study of Transnational Popular Culture” is a international, interdisciplinary and collaborative project awarded in 2013 with a generous grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s in the frame of the Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities scheme.

Promoted by Queen’s University Belfast (Dr. Dominique Jeannerod, Dr. Federico Pagello, Dr. Andrew Pepper) in collaboration with the universities of Limoges (Dr. Loïc Artiaga, Dr. Natacha Levet) and Debrecen (Dr. Sandor Kalai), it aims to develop new digital instruments to rethink the significance of popular culture and their dissemination in a globalised world,  using of new methods and technologies to reconsider the role of crime fiction in a transnational cultural and literary context.

Thanks to the networks and collaborations created by the Popular Literature and Media Culture association (LPCM), and the partnership with the Bibliothèque des Littératures policières (BILIPO) and the European Library, the research team will be engaged in populating, utilising, and further developing an online participatory database designed by LPCM in the last few years. By testing and improving an innovative tool to investigate a subject often neglected by academic scholars, the proposed project is aimed at conducting original research based on the method of “distant reading,” first theorised by Franco Moretti.