Article 2 Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Future For a Discipline by Todd Presner.
Abstract
After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Humanism, and the rise of mass media. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for produc ing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientifi c knowledge. Analogously, with the opening up of the New World, not only were the profound limitations of conventional knowledge and epistemologies exposed, but the “ discovery ” reconfigured – for better and for worse – the entire surface of the earth, enabled the ascendancy of rationality (and it's deep link to barbarism), gave rise to new economies, provided the seedbed for colonialism, and was the prerequisite of the modern nation - state.
Both the impact of print and the “ discovery ” of the New World were predicated on networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge into new cultural and social spheres, but also brought together people, nations, cul tures, and languages that were previously separated.
Key Argument
In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating a potential democratization of information and exchange, on the one hand, and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other. This, I would suggest, is the persistent dialectic of any technology, ranging from communications technologies (print, radio, the telephone, television, the web) to technologies of mobility and exchange (ships, railways, highways, and the Internet). These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever - greater liberation of humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before)
Paul Gilroy analysed in his study of
“ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the
“ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumental authority.
N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the "somnolence [of] five hundred years of print"
While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been (and, to a large extent, still is) print, the burgeoning fi eld of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of “ materiality as the interplay between a text ’ s physical characteristics and its signifying practices, ” something that, as Hayles argues, allows us to consider texts as “ embodied entities ” and still foreground interpretative practices.
Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.
While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature, I want to examine the fi eld a bit more broadly by situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities. ”
the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital world, necessitate a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge, when it is “ done ” or published, how it gets authorised and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience.
Digital Humanities is an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting,interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies.
Digital Humanities projects are almost always collaborative, engaging humanists, technologists, librarians, social scientists, artists, architects, information scientists, and computer scientists in con ceptualizing problems, designing interfaces, analyzing data, sharing knowledge, and engaging with a signifi cantly broader public than traditional academic research in the Humanities.
Jeffrey Schnapp and I articulated in various instantiations of the “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ” it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - fi rst century cultural wars, which are largely being defi ned, fought, and won by corporate interests. Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engi needed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing?
Franco Moretti ’ s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” (not a canon of objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium) that “ asks for a new critical method ” (Moretti, 2000 : p. 55) to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post - print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to fi gure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
Digital media are always hypermedia and hypertextual.
How, then, might Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web?
Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mecha nisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing others.
some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is ready and writer by potentially anyone?
Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics' ' has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.
Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualization, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties.
The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
While Comparative Literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a deci sive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies. The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the curation of knowledge – the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedia constellations – is somehow not the domain of literary scholars.
Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform.
Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.
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