I found the liminal space between digital communities and contemporary literary culture that Simone Murray identifies a really productive and generative place for discussion; lots of members of the class brought in examples from other areas of study or from other areas of culture which identified other actors in the relationship between these two phenomena. It also seems to me that quite a lot of the articles we’ve read so far are grounded in more ‘real’-feeling, current social or political issues and come from quite an advocatory perspective, proposing more workable and concrete changes in DH working practices or policy, rather than the more intangible conclusions I often come away from after reading conventional literary criticism. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein identify increasingly prevalent intentions of those working in the field to ‘[connect] their work with social justice imperatives’ in their introduction to DDH 2023.

Katherine Hayles’ article in particular also made me think about modalities, in particular audio ‘reading’ (audiobooks, podcasts) and how this might affect comprehension and retention of information. I consume quite a lot of information via this medium, and haven’t really thought much about the specificities of how I engage with it compared to sight reading (whether print or digital). It definitely allows more engagement with different texts in a lot of ways (infomaxxing while I’m walking or doing the washing up), but I’m never sure how this affects my retention of content. I suspect that this maybe echoes the distinction Hayles makes between short-term working memory and long-term memory? Like hyperreading, I wonder if listening engages short-term memory more than the deeper comprehension associated with typical print reading, hopefully I can do a bit of reading around this in the future!

The word ‘disintermediation’ came up in Murray’s article too, and I found it to be an interesting way of expanding the ways we think about literary and digital ecosystems. Her matrix neatly details the ways in which the role of traditional literary middle-people (publishers) have been impacted amidst writers’ ability to communicate to readers. I think that discussing the processes which are now engaged in these discourses (other media which elevates authors to the status of celebrity and literary communities which grow on social media platforms, for example) allows us to investigate how the functionality of these processes might impact readership and how texts are received, as well as the interests of the people and organisations developing and maintaining digital platforms. As a funny side note, this expansive consideration of literary ecosystems also made me think about the internet trends of ‘performative reading’, and how pre-existing cultural ideas around certain texts or writers can be used signal intelligence or a particular worldview. Hopefully walking around 50GS with my printed out Debates in the Digital Humanities makes me look very high brow, or low brow, or no brows – I don’t know!