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ISSN 1938-4122
Announcements
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2013 7.1
The Literary
Editors: Lisa Swanstrom and Jessica Pressman
Front Matter
The Literary And/As the Digital Humanities
Jessica Pressman, ACLS Fellow; Lisa Swanstrom, Florida Atlantic University
Abstract
[en]
This essay introduces a special issue on The Literary.
Articles
“A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips”: Towards a Digital Ekphrasis
Cecilia Lindhé, Umeå University
Abstract
[en]
In this article, the significance of the rhetorical and modern definitions of ekphrasis will be discussed through the lens of digital literature and art. It attempts to reinscribe the body in ekphrastic practice by adding touch to the abstracted visualism of the eye, and emphasize defining features of the ancient usage: orality, immediacy and tactility. What I call the digital ekphrasis with its emphasis on enargeia, its strong connections with the ancient definition, and on the bodily interaction with the work of art, conveys an aesthetic of tactility; digitalis=finger. By tracing and elucidating a historical trajectory that takes the concept of ekphrasis in the ancient culture as a starting point, the intention is not to reject the theories of the late 1900s, but through a reinterpretation of ekphrasis put forward an example of how digital perspectives on classic concepts could challenge or revise more or less taken-for-granted assumptions in the humanities. In this context ‘the digital’ is not only a phenomenon that could be tied to certain digital objects or used as a digital tool, but as an approach to history, with strong critical potential. The aim is to show that one of the most important features of our digital culture is that it offers new perspectives – not only on current technology – but also on literary, cultural and aesthetic historical practices.
“Taken Possession of”: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne's “Celestial Railroad” in the Antebellum Religious Press
Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University
Abstract
[en]
In this article, Cordell demonstrates the transformative possibilities of large-scale digital archives for literary history and bibliography. Focusing on the recently-uncovered reprinting history of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Celestial Railroad”, in the nineteenth-century press, the article demonstrates the central, shaping influence of religious readers and editors on Hawthorne’s early career. Cordell shows how the best traditional bibliography of Hawthorne’s works could be dramatically altered after only a few weeks’ work in digital archives of newspapers, magazines, and books, and using relatively simple search tools. Such tools not only expanded the number of known witnesses of the text, but also uncovered numerous paratexts: introductions to the story, articles reviewing or referring to the story, sermons derived from the story, etc. This “social text” of “The Celestial Railroad,” Cordell argues, lay buried amidst millions of pages that accumulated in the nineteenth century and required modern tools to be uncovered. The article also discusses how digital interpretive tools can help make better sense of such enlarged bibliographies. By comparing multiple printings of “The Celestial Railroad” using the Juxta Collation tool from NINES, Cordell argues that textual fluidity can tell modern readers much about how texts were understood by their original publishers and readers. The many changes to and discussions of “The Celestial Railroad,” for instance, indicate that the tale was popular for its perceived anti-denominational message, but nonetheless deployed as a weapon in denominational debates.
Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and the
Networks of American Literary Imagination
Ed Finn, Arizona State University
Abstract
[en]
Junot Díaz’s writing actively questions the boundaries
between genre and “literary” fiction,
aesthetics and politics, and English and Spanish, using a
framework of multiple linguistic, formal and cultural
registers to establish an authorial presence that defies
critical categorization. Díaz arrived explosively on the
U.S. literary scene with his second book, the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao. The multi-generational story of a Dominican
American family overshadowed by a brutal dictatorship and
the challenges of forging a new life in the United States
earned many accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. I read
Díaz’s transgressive blending of genre and linguistic
registers as a “reverse colonization”
that calls into question the demarcations of American
ethnicity as well as the racial politics of nerds. My
argument uses Díaz as both an object of study and a paradigm
for the potential of a hybrid digital humanities
methodology. The complex cultural translation that Díaz asks
his readers to perform creates a middle ground where
Caribbean history, language politics and the class and
ethnic tensions of immigration collide with the nerdy core
of the mainstream American imagination.
Kindling, Disappearing, Reading
Yung-Hsing Wu, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Abstract
[en]
Where will all the books go? A version of that question has occupied commentary about Amazon’s Kindle since news of its release first made its way to public attention in September 2007. Posed out of curiosity, excitement, as well as trepidation, the question includes anxiety about the re-invention of reading embodied by new features and the intricacies of downloading policy. In this essay, I focus on disappearance for the ways in which it indexes concerns about the Kindle’s material impact on reading. Tracking these concerns, I turn to three major moments in the Kindle’s “biography” in order to emphasize Amazon’s investment in mimicking the transcendence associated with reading and the ways in which this investment is met, and at times exceeded, by readerly desires to possess that transcendence. That the very name “Kindle” should occasion parallels between e-reading and book burning, that Jeff Bezos should claim unobtrusiveness as the device’s exemplary feature, and that Amazon’s unannounced deletions of Orwell’s 1984 from thousands of Kindle libraries should meet with such ire, makes visible the two ideologies of reading — on the one hand, the invaluable (because ephemeral) force of reading and on the other, reading as a relation of ownership and agency — that stand in both an uneasy and profitable tension for Amazon and its reader-consumers.
A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica
Whitney Anne Trettien, Duke University
Abstract
[en]
Print-on-demand (POD) versions of out-of-copyright literary editions have recently flooded the digital marketplace, dragging the editorial work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries back into circulation. Often assembled by software as facsimile publications or OCR "plain text" editions, then printed and delivered before the text is seen by human eyes, these POD books are altering how the material weight of the past bears on the present. Through a case study of Milton's Areopagitica, this essay explores how POD's zombie-like revitalization of earlier texts challenges us to broaden our understanding of the nature of digital textuality, especially as it pertains to the work of electronic editing.
The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary
Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
Abstract
[en]
In 1995 in the midst of the first widespread wave of digitization, the Modern Language Association issued a Statement on the Significance of Primary Records in order to assert the importance of retaining books and other physical artifacts even after they have been microfilmed or scanned for general consumption. “A primary record,” the MLA told us then, “can appropriately be defined as a physical object produced or used at the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance” (27). Today, the conceit of a “primary record” can no longer be assumed to be coterminous with that of a “physical object.” Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records. In the specific domain of the literary, a writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, because the basic material evidence of their authorial activity — manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals — is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. This essay therefore seeks to locate and triangulate the emergence of a .txtual condition — I am of course remediating Jerome McGann’s influential notion of a “textual condition” — amid our contemporary constructions of the “literary”, along with the changing nature of literary archives, and lastly activities in the digital humanities as that enterprise is now construed. In particular, I will use the example of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland as a means of illustrating the kinds of resources and expertise a working digital humanities center can bring to the table when confronted with the range of materials that archives and manuscript repositories will increasingly be receiving.
cut to fit the tool-spun course
Nick Montfort, MIT; Stephanie Strickland, Independent scholar
Abstract
[en]
“cut to fit the toolspun course” includes a new gloss by the authors on the original JavaScript code. The code was originally published with some comments to assist those who might want to modify or re-use it; this version expands on those comments to explain more about the process of developing the generator and to reflect on the nature of comments and the glossing of code. This file, including comments both practical and reflective, is offered as one model for the criticism of literary works written in code.
Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames
Mark L. Sample, George Mason University
Abstract
[en]
“Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames” explores the code of two videogames, suggesting that reading game code is a fruitful way to enrich our understanding of videogames and the culture they represent. In particular, I show how the code of the open source version of SimCity and the controversial first person shooter JFK: Reloaded reveals elements of the games unavailable to the player and unaccounted for by other critical readings of those games.
Code as Ritualized Poetry: The Tactics of the Transborder Immigrant Tool
Mark C. Marino, University of Southern California
Abstract
[en]
The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a provocative mobile phone app by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) that provides sustenance to border crossers by leading them to water and guiding them with poetry. Although the tool can be applied to any border, the chief border it has been tied to and tested on is the US-Mexico border. The EDT present the project as an artistic disruption of the tired national political theater staged at that border. The piece refocuses attention on the basic human needs of those caught in the middle of the stale and stalemated divide. For the EDT, every part of the piece participates in this disruption not merely the finished app or the poetry but the code as well. In this paper, I ask, what would it mean for the code to poetic disruption? One set of poetry for the project created by Amy Sara Carroll offers instructions for desert survival. By presenting instructions as poems, she offers one entre into reading the source code of the app as poetry. Using the methods of Critical Code Studies, I read the code of TBT in light of and as part of the poetic intervention of this complex performance.
The End of Literature: Machine Reading and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
Mike Frangos, University of Umeå
Abstract
[en]
Digital humanities discussions of distant reading, machine reading or not-reading have often turned on a depiction of the field of literary production in which individual texts and authors recede in importance as units of analysis. At the same time, the question of what is specific to the literary in discussions of electronic textuality, or the digital literary, has been under-analyzed. This article contributes to theorizing the digital literary by way of an analysis (or close reading) of the role of machine reading in a postcolonial science fiction novel by Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome. This novel participates in the imagination of electronic textuality and digital forensics at a moment when the imagined possibilities of the digital archive were of intense interest to both cultural critics and literary writers. The figure of the writer of vernacular literature in the novel, I argue, brings together the text's interest in both electronic textuality and the subaltern archive, thus establishing the stakes of the digital precisely on a revamped role for the literary in the context of globalization. As such, Ghosh's novel provides a useful opportunity for re-considering proposals for distant reading in relation to world literary studies and postcolonial criticism.
Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives
Jacqueline Wernimont, Scripps College
Abstract
[en]
This essay is a meditation on the possibility of a feminist assessment of digital literary archives and the interdisciplinary tools needed to do such work. Using the Women Writers Project and The Orlando Project as exemplary instances of digital literary scholarship, I discuss possible sites of feminist intervention (content, technological politics, labor structures,etc) and the kinds of theoretical paradigms one might use in such work. I also argue that such assessments are essential to recognizing the ways in which feminist digital literary studies have impacted the field of digital humanities.
Drawing on recent work in technology studies and feminist theory, the essay problematizes simplistic celebratory claims and troubles the idea that simply saving women’s work in digital form is enough. I conclude with a set of reflections on the impact of shifting ideas about the value of feminist work and theory in both public and scholarly contexts. This includes a proposal that more established scholars proactively highlight the feminist interventions that they make and that all digital literary scholars consider increasing access to not only the work of women, but to the technologies that are integral to that access as well.
Digital Humanities, Copyright Law, and the Literary
Robin Wharton, Independent Scholar
Abstract
[en]
Embedded in the rich textual record of international copyright law, we often encounter a quaint, and perhaps
naïve definition of the “literary”
around which the law has crystallized and which has the potential to
influence the work of all digital humanists, whether they think of themselves as literary scholars or not.
The first part of this article explores how a relatively narrow definition of the “literary”
as a category of “high” or belletristic cultural production has informed the contours of U.S.
copyright law, in particular. Section 101, Title 17 of the United States Code expressly defines “literary works”
as any “works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia,
regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks,
or cards, in which they are embodied”
. US courts have, however, often employed a narrower,
more commonplace understanding of the “literary” as an aesthetic category when sorting artifacts or content into other legally more significant
categories such as idea, expression, criticism, parody, and satire. The second section of the article considers some of the potential
implications and consequences of the current regulatory structure for the work of digital humanists. Judges engaging in a fair use analysis
more often than not expect scholarship to come packaged in print monographs written in academic language aimed at an audience of disciplinary
specialists. When they encounter scholarly artifacts that depart from those formal expectations and draw from pre-existing work, judges are
less likely to find the use of pre-existing work is fair and therefore non-infringing. Finally, the article examines whether the literary
as a category should be abandoned altogether, or whether digital humanists might productively redefine the literary as part of a strategy
for re-imagining the institutional and legal regulations that govern academic work.
The Idiocy of the Digital Literary (and what does it have to do with digital humanities)?
Sandy Baldwin, West Virginia University
Abstract
[en]
What does the category of the literary give to digital humanities?
Nothing and everything. This essay considers the "idiocy" of the
literary: its unaccountable singularity, which guarantees that we
continue to return to it as a source, inspiration, and challenge. As a
consequence, digital humanities is inspired and irritated by the
literary.
My essay shows this in three ways. First, through a speculative
exploration of the relation between digital humanities and the category
of "the literary." Second, through a quick survey of the use of
literature in digital humanities project. Thirdly, through a specific
examination of TEI and character rendering as digital humanities
concerns that necessarily engage with the literary. Once again, the
literary remains singular and not abstract, literal in a way that
challenges and provokes us towards new digital humanities work.
Articles
Sounding for Meaning: Using Theories of Knowledge Representation to Analyze Aural Patterns in Texts
Tanya Clement, University of Texas, Austin; David Tcheng, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Loretta Auvil, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Boris Capitanu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Megan Monroe, University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
[en]
Computational literary analytics that include frequency trends and collocation, topic modeling, and network analysis have relied on rapid and large-scale analysis of the word or strings of words. This essay shows that there are many other features of literary texts by which humanists make meaning other than the word, such as prosody and sound, and how computational methods allow us to do what has historically been a more difficult method of analysis — trying to understand how literary texts make meaning with these features. This paper will discuss a case study that uses theories of knowledge representation and research on phonetic and prosodic symbolism to develop analytics and visualizations that help readers discover aural and prosodic patterns in literary texts. To this end, this paper has two parts: (I) We describe the theories of knowledge representation and research into phonetic and prosodic symbolism that underpin the logics and ontologies of aurality incorporated in our project. This basic theory of aurality is reflected in our use of OpenMary, a text-to-speech application tool for extracting aural features; in the “flow” we coordinated to pre-process texts in SEASR’s Meandre, a data flow environment; in the instance-based predictive modeling procedure that we developed for the project; and in ProseVis, the reader interface that we created to allow readers to discover aural features across literary texts. And (II), we discuss readings of several works by Gertrude Stein (the portraits “Matisse” and “Picasso” and the prose poem Tender Buttons) that were facilitated by this work.
The Boundless Book: A Conversation between the Pre-modern and Posthuman
Alison Tara Walker, Saint Louis University
Abstract
[en]
Digital humanities and medieval studies share a long history, beginning with one of the first large-scale digital humanities projects, which was carried by Father Roberto Busa using IBM’s Literary Data Processing Center. Why then, do many scholars of historically-minded fields consider digital humanities to be a “helping discipline” instead of a full-fledged area of study in itself? Beginning with the above question, this paper explores the ways in which scholars need not use the digital humanities to update historical disciplines or vice versa. By examining the pre- and post-print histories of the book, and interrogating the ways in which reading technologies and interfaces link the past and future of the book together, the past and present histories of reading coalesce and offer scholars novel ways of approaching many different disciplines that engage with the digital humanities.
An Agent-based Model for the Humanities
Belinda Roman, St. Mary's University
Abstract
[en]
The Humanities now confront a new era in cultural representations — the digital age. As a consequence, our approach to culture may be modified because technology allows us to now visualize our thoughts and theories using digital and computing techniques. This research focuses on merging humanities research with computational sciences to explore the processes involved in culture dynamics. We present an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, economics, and agent-based modeling (ABM) and give details of how literature maybe used as a data set that can be translated into a dynamic Java-based simulation of human interactions constructed around Game Theory. Our model of Cross-Cultural Cooperation is designed to study culture at various levels of granularity simultaneously in order to show how micro-behaviors might lead to macro outcomes such as cultural group formation. We present one experiment based on the literature of discovery and conquest in the U.S. Southwest translated into the language of ABM. Additionally, we explore the role of space, time, and population-size in this process and offer a discussion of possible future directions for this type of research. The creation of our simulator of cultural exchange between individuals of differing cultures allows researchers to experiment with ideas about first and ongoing contact and speculate with “What if?” scenarios.
Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface
Johanna Drucker, UCLA
Abstract
[en]
This article outlines a critical framework for a theory of performative materiality and its potential application to interface design from a humanistic perspective. Discussions of the materiality of digital media have become richer and more complex in the last decade, calling the literal, physical, and networked qualities of digital artifacts and systems to attention. This article extends those discussions by reconnecting them to a longer history of investigations of materiality and the specificity of media in critical theory and aesthetics. In addition, it introduces the concept of performative materiality, the enacted and event-based character of digital activity supported by those literal, physical conditions, and introduces the theoretical concerns that attach to that rubric. Performative materiality is based on the conviction that a system should be understood by what it does, not only how it is structured. As digital humanities matures, it can benefit from a re-engagement with the mainstream principles of critical theory on which a model of performative materiality is based. The article takes these ideas into a more focused look at how we might move towards integrating this model and critical principles into a model of humanistic interface design.
Modeling Afro-Latin American Artistic Representations in Topic Maps: Cuba’s Prominence in Latin American Discourse
Eduard A. Arriaga, University of Western Ontario; Fernando Sancho Caparrini, University of Sevilla; Juan Luis Suárez, University of Western Ontario
Abstract
[en]
Artistic representations of African-descendant cultures in Latin America, the Hispanic Caribbean, and the Hispanic World have emerged as the outcome of multiple exchanges, inventions, and cultural coexistences. Such representations take part of a network where cultural, ethnic, social, artistic, literary, and racial information circulates, giving shape to centers with multiple connections at different scales. In accordance with this, the main aim of this article is to demonstrate how Cuba’s predominance for the representation of such cultural pattern is not only based on the significance of particular artistic figures, but also on the connectivity that the island as a cultural node has with respect to the ‘global’ network of African and African-descendant representations. In order to achieve this aim, we carry out two main tasks: a) network analysis looking at related concepts such as centrality, connectivity, betweenness, modularity, etc., through a methodology that takes into account topic-map analysis and the use of Page Ranking Algorithm [the algorithm used by good part of search engines such as Google] as the basic formula to filter and organize information; b) local analysis of two nodes that take part of Cuba’s cluster in order to compare the results of the analysis of networks with a more socio-literary analysis that focuses on detailed reading of some of their messages (works, paratexts, prologues, interviews, etc): Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier. As matter of conclusions, we evaluate not only our findings with regards to Cuba but also the methodology as a contribution to the field of the Digital humanities and its practices of analysis.
Developing Academic Capacity in Digital Humanities: Thoughts from
the Canadian Community
Lynne Siemens, University of Victoria
Abstract
[en]
Despite DH’s long history, it is still perceived as a relatively emergent academic
discipline which has several implications for its ongoing development and acceptance.
In order to understand its role in supporting the field’s development and acceptance,
SSHRC commissioned a survey of the larger Humanities and Social Science’s community
to understand the issues related to DH’s development and acceptance and the types of
activities that should be funded. The survey results suggest there is reason for
optimism regarding the growing acceptance of digital methods, resources and tools and
electronic dissemination as instructors, researchers, and students are using and
publishing in digital outlets and creating and employing digital recourses, methods
and tools andventuring into new research fields. This trend is likely to continue as
students and younger scholars continue to embrace the digital in all aspects of their
personal and professional lives. However, this optimism should be tempered to some
extent as students and junior faculty are still less likely than associate professors
to present and publish their digital-oriented research for a variety of reasons. The
field’s more senior faculty can mentor their junior colleagues and students to this
end and shape salary, tenure and promotion policies to recognize and reward these
efforts. Finally, issues remain around the amount of funding required for the initial
development and ongoing sustainability and relevance of digital resources and may
become more critical over time. Granting agencies will need to evaluate their funding
role in this regard.
Author Biographies
URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/index.html
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.