This blog is on a paper on comparative literature and translation studies assignment.
Topic: Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline
What is Comparative literature?
Definition
The study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other. (Merriam-Webster)
Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline
Digital humanities scholarship has grown significantly at Anglosphere universities over the last ten years. But, there isn't much interest in this scholarship yet abroad, as in the Chinese mainland. Digital humanities researchers have made receptive and inspiring commitments and accomplishments, despite ongoing disagreements on its methodology and philosophy and the fact that it is yet too early to forecast its future. By intersecting with and integrating techno-humanities, the humanities can safeguard themselves against further marginalization, which is consistent with the innovation's well-established value and the pervasive need for societal progress. The author of this article argues that digital humanities scholarship can benefit the humanities as a whole by enhancing comparative literature studies with data-based empiricism from both a macro and micro perspective. Digital humanities, however, as a novel approach to comparative literature.
The digital humanities are currently not only positioned as a hot topic in academia but also flourish in the higher education system, driven by the process of globalization and the wave of digitalization. We must investigate additional overlaps between comparative literature and the digital humanities because these two fields have a lot in common. American comparatist Franco Moretti's world literature studies with supplemental reading assisted by big data analysis provided a singular manifestation of the tight relationships between comparative literature and the digital humanities. His groundbreaking research, which remapped world literature using big data from theoretical and practical dimensions, created a connection between these two fields of study.
We are currently experiencing another watershed point in human history that is comparable to the invention of the printing press or even the discovery of the wheel after five hundred years of print and the enormous changes in society and culture that it unleashed. within the New World. As a result of the printing press's invention, communication, and literacy the conditions for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the period of humanism, and the emergence of modern science was totally altered, and media outlets.
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, cultures, and languages that were previously separated.
In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating the potential democratization of information and exchange, on the one hand, and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other. This networking and connecting technologies may not always result in the ever-greater emancipation of As Nicholas Negroponte previously claimed in his outrageously optimistic book Becoming Digital (Negroponte, 1995), human beings will always have a flaw: cell phones, social networking tools, and possibly even the $100 computer, will not always be perfect. only be used to improve education, expand democracy, and facilitate international communication but are more likely to be used to incite violence and even organize genocide similar to how the radio and the train changed during the last century.
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.
Humanities include the humanistic social sciences including anthropology, archaeology, and information studies as well as literary and cultural studies. Humanities also include history and art history. A fundamental rethinking of how knowledge is created, what it looks like (or sounds like, or feels like, or tastes like), who gets to create it, when it is "done" or published, how it gets authorized and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly wider (and potentially global) audience is actually required in order to address these issues, which have been brought to the forefront in the digital world. This paper makes the case that the humanities of the twenty-first century have the capacity to produce, legitimize, and spread knowledge in entirely new ways, on a scale never previously realized, integrating technology and communities that are rarely combined.
It is crucial that humanists assert and integrate themselves within digital humanities, as Jeffrey Schnapp and I stated in several iterations of the " Digital Humanities Manifesto " the cultural conflicts of the twenty-first century, which are largely defined, fought, and triumphed by corporate interests. Why, for instance, did humanists, foundations, and universities keep quiet when Google won its book search lawsuit and, in essence, gained the authority to transfer the copyright of orphaned works in a scandalous manner? on its own? Why did they remain mute while companies like Sony and Disney designed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which severely curtails intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is an appeal to Humanists for a much deeper involvement in the creation, publication, ownership, and access of digital culture.
The challenge from Franco Moretti is to view comparative literature as a "problem" rather than a canon of In order to examine both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post-print age, it is necessary to use a new critical methodology (which might be expressed as objects, a theoretical perspective, or a specific media; Moretti, 2000: p. 55). Figuring out how to take seriously the variety of new publishing, annotating, and sharing platforms that have altered global cultural production is the "challenge" of comparative literature.
Comparative Media studies
There is no denying that the so-called "visual shift" of the 20th century had a favourable impact on comparative literature scholarship, expanding its scope to include the fields of art history, photography, film, and, possibly to a lesser extent, television, digital media, and textual studies.provide a more basic challenge since they alter the scholarly contexts as well as the media assumptions embedded into the works we typically evaluate that we utilise to conduct our research, the analytical and technological tools we use, and the platforms on which we publish and share our work. Digital media have never just been another medium; they have always been hypermedial and hypertextual. The two aforementioned terms For Nelson, a hypertext is a:
Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could
not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow
indefi nitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.
(Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)
like the Web? Additionally, how can academics create approaches that specifically consider and assess the media representations of each literary and cultural product, including print? The formal material features of the surface structures that inscriptions are made on are highlighted in comparative literature as comparative media studies. made, the institutional mechanisms of distribution and authorization, the technical processes of replication and circulation, and the reading and navigation techniques by the media format and its wide-ranging cultural and societal effects on literacy and knowledge creation. It examines all media as connected information and knowledge systems.
Comparative Data Studies
More than ten million books have already been digitised and indexed by Google, enabling academics to do increasingly complicated searches, identify patterns, and even In order to investigate quantitative issues like statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as qualitative, hermeneutical inquiries, enormous datasets obtained from the digital book repository can be exported into other applications (like Geospatial Information Systems). The field of "culture analytics" has evolved over the past five years, inspired by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, to use the tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization to deconstruct large-scale cultural information. These databases could contain historical information that has every frame in the films of Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and articles of every magazine released in the United States during the twentieth century, the collected works of Milton, and even modern, real-time data flows like tweets, SMS messages, or search trends have all been digitalized. Comparative Data Studies enable us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. Meaning, argumentation, and interpretative work are not limited to the " insides " of texts or necessarily even require " close " readings.
The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers to voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print.
Notwithstanding the fact that comparative literature studies has not traditionally focused on The topics of Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies include design, interactivity, navigational techniques, and cooperation. It is not possible to simply "hand-off" the cutting-edge platforms to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the arranging of knowledge as an argument through multimedia constellations—the physical and virtual arrangement of information—were somehow outside the purview of literary scholars. Scholars would normally "pass off" the print model to another Before, authors would submit the layout, design, editing, printing, and distribution of their works to publishers; however, this effort is now taking centre stage chosen interface, interactivity, database design, navigation, access, and other aspects of digital humanities.
This emphasis on openness and collaboration is, of course, nowhere more apparent than with Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform.While it is easy to dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable or to scoff at its lack of scholarly rigor, they conclude by suggesting that it is actually a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities and at institutions of higher learning, which are all too often fixated on individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment. Far from a web-based encyclopedia for“ intellectual sluggards ” engaged in an “ flight from expertise, ” to quote Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association (qtd. in Stothart),
Wikipedia, I believe, represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge-generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing,and versioning knowledge.
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. (words-2077)
Work Cited
“Comparative literature.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comparative%20literature. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.
Li, Quan. "Comparative Literature and the Digital Humanities: Disciplinary Issues and Theoretical Construction." Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1-8, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01438-4. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.
Presner, T. (2011). Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline. In A Companion to Comparative Literature (eds A. Behdad and D. Thomas). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342789.ch13
Qinglong Peng; Digital Humanities Approach to Comparative Literature: Opportunities and Challenges. Comparative Literature Studies 1 December 2020; 57 (4): 595–610. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.57.4.0595
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