The three introductions to Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012, 2016, 2019) each outline the evolution of DH and its emergence into the literary and academic fields of study. As a digital practice, DH seeks to digitise subjects such as literature, art, history and philosophy, both qualitatively and quantitatively, essentially bridging a gap between the world of the “online” and history. DH is an interdisciplinary, humanist study that flourishes in its ability to collect a large scale of data together regarding a variety of topics and discover something revolutionary about our human history. With its roots in academia and University funded research projects, DH has run into criticism about its exclusivity and its predominantly western focused efforts, however, as the field has developed, new studies around subjects of race and gender discrimination over human history have come fruition.
The Shakespeare and Company Project is built upon three sources from the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University; lending library cards, address books and logbooks. The project has pieced together a large collection of artefacts that reveals the novels that the greatest readers of our time were reading during the prime years of their literary careers. With records of individuals such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the project gives invaluable insight into the practices of borrowship that occurred in the 1920s-1940s. Whilst the project is self proclaimed to be incomplete due to a few gaps in its logbook entries, the logbooks still provide a great amount of information on the lending library and its evolution from 1919 to 1941. The project also takes care to highlight the gender of the borrowers of the books and amalgamated lists for the top 10 books borrowed by men and women, which provides insight into the gender boundaries of the period and how they fed into literary choice. Overall, the project is very interesting in its content and offers a history of a library functioning away from the institutionalised practices that dominate the literary sphere.
Anouk Lang
Thanks, Rachel! As well as the intriguing data the Shakespeare and Company project presents – library borrowing records from a bookstore that is quite significant for our understandings of modernism – I must say I love the design and the aesthetics of the site, which evokes print culture artefacts with little touches of humour here and there. As I’ve said in comments to others, do put links to the projects and sites you discuss, so others can readily find them (it’s a form of citation, too). And, just a note about something that I hope will make doing blog posts like this quicker (and dare I say, more enjoyable …?) – I’d encourage people to use a less formal register for these posts, so that they are less like essays and more like the kind of engaging and intelligent but quite friendly style of writing you may have encountered in some of the DH projects we looked at. I hope this will free people up not just to type without feeling like they have to strenuously edit and polish, but also give people’s voices a chance to come through. One of my favourite things about this course is hearing students’ individual voices flourish as they adapt their writing to different genres and online spaces.
Shuqing Liu
Hi Rachel! I love your summary of the content, sources, and category of The Shakespeare and Company Project. After reading your post, I have a quick look at this project and I agree that it is really an interesting project and may contribute to the reflection on the borrowship in that special period between the two world wars. I wonder do you have any speculations of the most popular books according to those records? For example, why are James Joyce’s novels so popular, both among men and women? I also love your analysis of DH as a subject, especially about “its predominantly western focused efforts.” It seems that DH has attracted much attention in western universities, but in China, I only hear that just some top universities have set related projects but they seem more about cultural heritage, arts, museums, and VR. I don’t know how to go beyond the Western focus, but maybe DH practice in non-Western countries can display some concern beyond race and gender according to the local context and material. Although race and gender do deserve more attention in Western DH practice, these topics, especially race, may not be the key issue in some non-Western countries like China, at least not as significant as in the west. This is just my personal rough feeling. Maybe one day DH will set global projects covering differences of various regions?