This blog is a response to a task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. The syllabus of the Department of English, MKBU includes paper no.- 208 Comparative Literature and Translation Studies which includes around 9 articles. We (students) are assigned a task of classroom presentation of assigned articles in a pair. In this blog, we are supposed to write abstracts, key points/arguments, and concluding remarks on all two articles of Unit 2 of the paper Comparative Literatures and Translation Studies. It also includes the recording of class presentations presented by respective students. Blogger and her partner have made a presentation on the third article, presentation and a video of a particular article are embedded (as per the task).
ARTICLE 2
Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities:
On Possible Futures for a Discipline
Todd Presner
The purpose of this chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out what Digital Humanities means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more specifically.
After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. The state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Humanism, and the rise of mass media. the opening up of the New World, Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for producing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientific knowledge.
Historicizing these technologies, one which spans the history of seafaring and voyages of discovery to the development of the “ new ” media of radio, film, and television, the construction of the infrastructure of the Internet, the posting of the first web pages, and the explosion of real-time social networking on handheld devices. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital- Internet. These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever-greater liberation of humankind. will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century.
Or as Paul Gilroy analyzed- voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.
We barely appreciate the profound disciplinary, methodological, and institutional shifts that are occurring as print culture is enhanced and also displaced by the emergence of natively digital culture as contemporary changes are happening rapidly.
N. Katherine Hayles pondering over possible futures for comparative studies wonders how to rouse ourselves from the ‘somnolence [of] five hundred years of print’ in the second decade of the 21st century. While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been print, the burgeoning field 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
Situating the transformation of the literary in relation to a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities” necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge, when it is “ done ” or published, how it gets authorized and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience.
The Humanities of the twenty-first century, have the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never before realized, involving technologies and communities that rarely (if ever) were engaged in a global knowledge-creation enterprise.
Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary practice for creating, applying, interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies. Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of humanistic inquiry. The role of the humanist is more critical at this historic moment than perhaps ever before, as our cultural legacy as a species migrates to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society at large is radical re - conceptualized. After all, it is to humanists that we should turn to help us to understand, critique, compare, and historicize.
Jeffrey Schnapp in “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ”- it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first-century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests. It questions humanists If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?
Taking Robert Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind. Although the Internet is barely forty years old and the World Wide Web is barely two decades old, it is striking to ponder the sheer volume of “ data ” already produced. It is evident that we are producing, sharing, consuming, and archiving exponentially more cultural material, particularly textual and visual data, than ever before in the history of our species. While much of this data is not “ literature ” and may not be studied under the conventional academic rubric of “ Comparative Literature, ” it brings into stark relief the constitution of the tiny canon of print artifacts with which the field currently engages.
Presner's point, following Franco Moretti’s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” that “ asks for a new critical method ” to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post-print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
The central issue is the fact that the artifacts constituted by the world of print are comparatively different – in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning-making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity – from those artifacts constituted by digital technologies and which “ live ” in various digital environments.
It is to insist on the multiplicity of media and the varied processes of mediation and remediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and the idea of the literary. Just “ studying ” the technologies and their impact, Presner believes that we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and finally hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research, render this world as a world, and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.
We will have to design and employ new tools to thoughtfully sift through, analyze, map, and evaluate the unfathomably large deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has already unleashed.
Moretti has already indicated one possible way of doing this in his articulation of “ distant reading, ” a specific form of analysis that focuses on larger units and fewer elements in order to reveal “ their overall interconnection [through] shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models. ”
Hayles points out in her recent study on the transforming power of digital humanities, even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, the upper end of the number of books that can be read is about twenty - five thousand, and this does not even take into consideration the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.
The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specificity of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kind of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, finally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power.
Presner discusses the three futures for “ Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age.
Comparative Media Studies
Digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual. Both of the foregoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the World Wide Web.
For Nelson, 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
indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s
written knowledge.
Hypertextual or hypermedia documents deploy a multiplicity of media forms in aggregate systems that allow for annotation, indefinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. comparative studies investigate all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances while screening out and dismissing others.
Comparative Media Studies also imply that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enable us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Comparative Data Studies
By the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets.
Comparative Data Studies allow 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. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broaden the canon of objects and cultural material.
As Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a meta book [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.
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. We no longer just “ browse ” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open-source movement.
The real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed to share” due to enclosures and
strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons. The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the curation of knowledge – the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedia constellations – is somehow not the domain of literary scholars. While preserving the authority of peer review, the publication platform foregrounds collaborative authorship and public feedback through threaded discussion forums and annotation features.
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.
Presner believes-
Wikipedia represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge - generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.
To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages.
Conclusion:
Presner concludes 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.
At this moment in its short life, 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.
Video recording of this article's presentation, presented by my classmates Vachchhalata Joshi and Hirva Pandya
Presentation of the article by Vachchhalata Joshi and Hirva Pandya
It is common to find it challenging to read original articles and summarize them. As a result, I have simplified this article through my understanding and with the help of ChatGPT. Simplifying articles is helpful in achieving a better and clearer understanding of the concept, which will make reading the original article easier. The main aim is to help students or readers understand the concept so that they can read the original article with ease. CLICK HERE FOR A LAYMANISED ARTICLE.
I hope this blog is useful.
[words- 2046]
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