Big Data
Digital Tools and Methods to study European Popular Culture
“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age”
University of Tampere, Finland, August 23-24, 2018
Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)
First Call for Papers
The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. These changes are readily visible in detectives’ digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as “Serial” to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in “Sherlock” and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Continue reading
DETECt – Horizon 2020
The International Crime Fiction Research Group is delighted to share the good news about the European funding secured for our project “DETECt -Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narrative-“, as part of the Horizon 2020 – Societal Challenge 6: “Understanding Europe: Promoting the European Public and Cultural Space” framework. The project is led by the University of Bologna and involves 18 institutions from 11 European Countries. DETECt addresses the formation of European cultural identity as continuing process of transformation fostered by the mobility of people, products and representations across the continent. Because of the extraordinary mobility of its products, popular culture plays a decisive role in circulating representations that constitute a shared cultural asset for large sectors of the European society. The project examines examples of crime fiction, film and TV dramas from 1989 to present, to learn how mobility strategies such as co-production, serialization, translation, adaptation, distribution, and more, have influenced the transnational dissemination of European popular culture. It also investigates how the treatment of specific ‘mobile signifiers’ – including representations of gender, ethnic and class identities – affect the ability of European narratives to migrate outside their place of origin, and be appropriated elsewhere in different and variegated ways. Researching the contemporary history of the crime genre in Europe, DETECt aims to identify the practices of production, distribution and consumption that are best suited to facilitate the emergence of engaging representations of Europe’s enormously rich, plural and cross-cultural identity. The knowledge acquired through a detailed research programme will be used in cultural, learning and public engagement initiatives designed to prompt the elaboration of new transnational formats for the European creative industries. These activities will profit from a set of experimental research and learning resources and innovative collaborative tools, aggregated and organized on DETECt Web portal which will be introduced here. A range of activities will be addressed to the general public and announced here. In particular, the development of a Web mobile app tools will allow users to contribute to the creation of a collaborative atlas of European crime narratives. Watch this space for updates.
Please visit The DETECt website
French Authors in the Série Noire
Few Crime series, if any, have developed such mystique as the French Série Noire, launched 72 years ago by former surrealist Marcel Duhamel for the éditions Gallimard. While ostensibly dedicated to introducing american hardboiled writers, and to a significant extent their imitators from elsewhere, the series also published an increasing amount of French authors. A simple data viz shows the respective quantitative contribution of the twenty most prolific French writers in the Série Noire.
New Approaches to Studying Crime Narratives
One-day Symposium: “New Approaches to Studying Crime Narratives”
October 14, 2016
University of Tampere, Finland
First Call for Papers
We invite proposals for paper presentations on new approaches to studying crime narratives. We want to encourage participants to introduce and discuss new methodological and theoretical perspectives on how to study literary, televisual and filmic crime narratives, and also to consider recent developments in the field of crime writing itself. The symposium understands crime narratives in a wide sense, as ranging from detective fiction, spy stories, and thrillers to true crime. The symposium also welcomes proposals focusing on crime narratives from various language areas and cultural spheres. We would like to welcome proposals which address the following topics (however, the list is by no means exhaustive):
Circulo del Crimen (Forum): A list of the 120 titles
(source :http://laflechanegrasigloxv.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/coleccion-circulo-del-crimen-editorial.html )
This is a list of the 120 titles published between 1982 and 1986 in the eclectic Spanish series Circulo del Crimen, by the Barcelona based publisher, Forum.
Using Ngrams for Comparing the Popularity of titles by Agatha Christie
(Click to enlarge)
The four graphs reproduced here represent Google Ngrams of the popularity of the title of pre-war novels by Agatha Christie in the Google books corpus for the period 1950-2000
Crime Fiction in Catalan: 1 The Origins
Dr Stewart King, Monash University
The Catalan capital Barcelona is indisputably the crime fiction centre of Spain. Anglophone readers will no doubt be familiar with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Carvalho novels, a series of over twenty novels and short story collections published between 1974 and 2004 that charted Spain’s transition from a dictatorship to a democracy and beyond. A city’s or a country’s crime fiction credentials, however, do not rest on one writer alone. Other writers who may be familiar to anglophone readers are Eduardo Mendoza, Andreu Martín, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Toni Hill, Teresa Solana, and Marc Pastor, among others. While these authors hail from or live in Barcelona, only Martín, Solana, and Pastor write in Catalan. Although less well known to English readers, there is nevertheless a strong, albeit at times uneven, tradition of crime fiction writing in Catalan.
The development of Catalan crime fiction has been shaped as much by politics as by literary concerns Continue reading
Yellow covers in Spain : The Biblioteca Oro
Sax Rohmer, El Diabolico Doctor (Biblioteca Oro, 35, 1935)
It was not long before a Spanish publisher introduced the 1920’s fashion of Yellow Crime Fiction booklets to Spain. Only a few years after Mondadori in Italy, the Barcelona publisher Molino proposed in 1933 (the year of the publishing house’s creation), a series of Crime Fiction pulps with yellow covers in its series Biblioteca Oro. Like the Italian series, this Spanish counterpart would become a landmark series, publishing the most representative authors in the genre. The books were on average some 100 pages long and cost 0,90 cts.
The first period of the series starts in 1933 and finishes in 1936, the year of the civil war. In its original period, the series published 25 authors, accounting for 68 books (see list below). The authors who saw the most of their books translated in the series were Oppenheim (8), Martyn (7), Christie (6) and Van Dine (5). Christie published there in that period the following books, whose translated title remain close to the original (this was not always the case in French) as can be see here : Continue reading
International Crime Fiction Research Group 