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Author: Eilidh

The Digital Literary Sphere and The Death of The Author

This week’s readings put me in the mind of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept, which argues that meaning does not originate in authorial intention and is instead found entirely through reader reception and interpretation. And where else could you possibly find more readerly intervention than the Internet? Murray’s account in particular extends Barthes’ implication for me through her discussion of the digital literary sphere, where authorship is increasingly mediated by social platforms (both reader review sites such as Goodreads and the development of algorithmic systems which tailor what you watch and read according to your so-called ‘preferences’). I confess that I count myself guilty of reading a book or watching a film largely for the satisfaction of either singing its praises or tearing it to shreds in online reviews – an exercise that might solely achieve me a like from one of my three Goodreads followers (and only then if it’s a book they’ve actually heard of before).

But it is in this way that Murray proves how the contemporary author functions less as a sovereign source of meaning than as a performative and marketable identity which is shaped by social media visibility. I like her discussion of what Jodi Dean refers to as “communicative capitalism”, because it implies that not only does the author lose their literary identity by maintaining a public, online persona but it also implicates the reader whose “participation” in offering criticism, reviews and interpretations often benefit big corporations such as Amazon. It allows readers to feel empowered by seeing themselves as the ultimate arbiter of meaning in a text, which leaves the author effectively “dead” to their own work and simultaneously benefits corporations who can extract value from the readers unpaid work without them even being aware of doing so.

The idea of authorship operating as an institutional construct rather than the natural origin of textual meaning also put me in the mind of the Hayles article, which similarly destabilises the author by shifting attention away from the writer and towards the way we read texts, arguing that textual meaning emerges through practices of close reading, hyper reading and machine reading. At the same time, these readings expose a tension between humanistic values of interpretation and subjectivity, as I understand them through Drucker, and the logic of digital platforms that increasingly govern literary circulation (where ‘worth’ is increasingly determined by metrics and popularity rather than critical interpretation). And this online popularity contest has, ironically, the ability to ‘go-offline’. If you walk into a real-life bookstore, you will see rows and rows dedicated to ‘Book-Tok’ favourites. And as a bookshop enthusiast myself, I can attest that as much as I enjoyed The Song of Achilles five years ago when I first saw it on a ‘Book-Tok’ shelf, it would be nice to switch things up a little. The real risk here is reducing both authorship and reading to quantifiable forms of engagement, as it raises the question of what becomes of meaning, value and critique when interpretation is subsumed by an economy driven by platforms.

My Reflections on Digital Humanities

I have always understood digital humanities to be an interdisciplinary field, one in which we witness an intersection between digital technologies and the broader field of humanities disciplines in an effort to explore human society and culture. What this point of intersection actually looks like to me, however, has always appeared somewhat vague. Indeed, my understanding of humanities disciplines as a standalone concept has remained fairly black and white, having largely taken place within the frameworks of textual analysis and interpretation (the result of being an English Literature student). As such, I had primarily associated digital humanities with the use of digital tools within this existing framework, often to study literary texts through databases, digitised archives or computational methods of analysis.

Only recently, through a developing engagement with critical theory, has my understanding of humanities begun to feel more interdisciplinary, extending toward other fields of study and expression – this, of course, includes the digital world. As such, what is already becoming apparent to me is how strongly the field of digital humanities is shaped by ethical concerns and political realities. From my initial engagement with Debates in the Digital Humanities, DH appears less like a fixed discipline, and more like a set of ongoing conversations about the way that knowledge is acquired, the way it is shared and the way it is valued. In this way, DH feels inherently attuned to the present moment, constantly redefining itself through responsiveness (particularly to social and political pressures).

This reframing has complicated my earlier, more technical understanding of the field. What has stood out the most to me through the readings is how DH repeatedly returns to questions of accessibility and public engagement, which consequently opens up tensions surrounding authority and legitimacy. An example of this can be public writings, such as blog posts, which exist alongside traditional peer-reviewed scholarship, which caught my attention due to it’s particular relevence to my own field of academic study. Thus, the field of DH foregrounds responsibility above all; decisions about data organisation, access and privacy reflect underlying assumptions about whose knowledge matters and how it should circulate, meaning that engaging with humanities digitally also involves engaging with it politically. This is what I now consider to be an intersection point.

At this early stage, my understanding of digital humanities remains provisional. However, I now understand DH as a field with two distinct sides; one that uses digital tools and computational methods to ask humanities questions, and another side which involves the humanistic critique of the tools, technologies and platforms that make such work possible.

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