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The readings this week were a lot of fun. Murray’s Charting the Literary Sphere introduced ideas of the twittersphere, hypertext and distant reading. I was especially interested in the author’s concern over interdisciplinary competitiveness in the digital literary sphere – under that umbrella term was the clash of print culture studies versus digital media studies versus digital literature studies… but why is everyone fighting?
I keep coming back to Bourdieu’s formulation of fields which, for me, reads as quite an aggressive culture battleground where social actors are competing for different positions. The whole concept of cultural prestige and intellectual property links back to my original thoughts on public scholarship, which you can find in my first post.
Watch out though, hyperlinks are cognitively loaded. Hayles talks about the information consumption that interacts with how we read, and argues that there should be a disciplinary shift to a broader sense of reading strategies and interpretations. Hypertext reading does not support an enriched reading, as scholars thought it might.
Thinking about the structures that exist around the reading we do for participation in class, leisure, for the approval of others etc.. creates an endless cycle of considerations for how we perceive what we read, particularly when we consider the influence of the digital, manifested in online book communities, reviewing sites, and the new ways book marketing can access its readership. More and more I have begun to ask myself, how much stock the average reader puts into a review, blog post, or critical introduction they have read before they encountered the text itself? When I am reading an article online, how far do I stray from the original text I intended to read by the time I am done reading? Sometimes I’ve clicked the embedded links so many times my original research question has lost all meaning.
I am particularly interested in what Murray has to say about the impact of the digital on literary culture, particularly how that culture has not only moved online (Murray cites blogs and book review sites, likely Goodreads specifically), but has ‘come into its own’ in a way. In hindsight, many of the claims Murray makes about online literary culture are accurate not only to the literary culture of the 2010s but to the one which would continue to develop on TikTok, Instagram, and twitter/X following the pandemic and into the 2020s, deeply entwined with the commercial publishing industry.
Wright seems particularly concerned with the idea of a mediating factor between publisher and reader in the form of lists. Wright particularly cites certain literary prizes, presumably awarded by those with the proper authority to decide what is as well as more ‘democratic’ lists such as the BBC’s The Big Read, and celebrity lists such as Oprah’s Book Club, which are widely perceived as having the overall net good of promoting public engagement with the practice of reading yet infuse commercial marketing, branding into that practice on a deeper level.
Particularly with the Hayles reading, I found myself examining how the highlighted manners of reading affected my own comprehension and reading style between various modes. Especially with hyperreading, I found myself exhibiting the ‘f pattern’ of reading in real time with the article itself, forcing me to confront how deeply I was actually comprehending the material, subsequently returning and re-reading sections I had not paid attention to. Similarly, the practice of following nested trees of hyperlinks is something I do often, particularly within self-contained communities of short stories that draw upon one another to flesh out and create a consistent world. This practice is at once frustrating as it can lead to forgetting the original text, but can also provide entirely new modes of reading in the digital landscape, similarly to the blocks of text being revealed in Hayles’ example of The Patchwork Girl to simulate a fractured nature. Close reading, meanwhile, is something that never really seems to leave my conception of what it means to read a text, being constantly reinforced as the literary ‘gold standard’ by wider academia. It finds its place as central to the digital sphere too dues to its close synergies with machne reading. This confluence of both machine and close reading can elevate our literary analysis within the modern age to include pattern recognition and highlight trends that may otherwise be entirely missed, representing the fusion of human and digital perspectives that so characterises Digital humanities.
Having limited knowledge on the Digital Humanities as a discipline, this week’s reading traced the key debates on the expanding field of the digital humanities, and the major forces it faces within this development. Gold and Klein’s writing in ‘moment to moment’ traced how the field must recalibrate to the ‘uncertainty brought by ruptures’ which exceed ‘any prior reference points’. In a rapidly changing field, which outpaces the rate of traditional academic literary development, which is largely collaborative in nature, the issues surrounding the digital humanities (the lack of specificity within the discipline ‘the big tent’, the lack of involvement from marginalised groups etc) have become more pronounced. The ‘public’ nature of these projects, and collaborative peer-to-peer publishing is particularly unique academically, but allows for this rapid, accountable development.
Moving DH from the academic field to the wider world, by ‘enabling communication across communities and networks’, by creating platforms that amplify the voices of those most in need of being heard’, realised in ‘mapping events in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria’, and aiding aid efforts in Puerto Rico, the humanitarian potential of the digital humanities can be realised. Special issues in the ‘American Quaterly, the Black Scholar’ etc, mark this expansion and innovation within the field. The ‘Moment to Moment’ introduction trace the ‘fusing go the personal and the historical’, detailing a ‘past characterised by unequal access and the pains of slavery’ which continue to affect academic institutions. Digital Humanities, seems to be a technological attempt to bring attention to these fissures, beyond the capabilities of traditional academia (without the restrictions of a singular field of study, encapsulating a broad variety of disciplines).
The changing attitudes towards DH from the first edition (2012) to the 2019 edition was equally interesting. In the 2019 introduction, the original over-arching optimism, while still there, was less prominent, and instead focused discussions on the major issues facing DH. Gold and Klein describe the field as remaining ‘very much Anglocentric’, expressing a desire to ‘ensure that the field can match the vitality and breadth of those who place themselves in it’. Looking at the digital in projects in class showed a snippet of this breadth, across disciplines, regions etc. Comparing the digitised Blake archive to the Geographical name-mapping website showed the ‘wide range of methods and practices’, as well as purposes, the field can capture. ‘Visualisations of large image sets, 3D modelling of historical artefacts’ encourage a re-interpretation of existing data sets, and the creation of new ones.
