Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities
Todd Presner
[Reading and comprehending original articles by scholars can be a daunting task, and I found it especially challenging while preparing for my exam. To alleviate this stress, I have simplified the article based on my understanding and with the assistance of ChatGPT. I have attempted to present the information in simple and easy-to-understand language. This blog is geared toward exam preparation and aims to provide a clear understanding of the article's core ideas and concepts. However, it's important to note that if you want to gain a deep understanding of the topic, reading the original article is highly recommended. CLICK HERE FOR BLOG I (it has quotes in the language of the original article)]
Introduction
Throughout history, there have been moments of great change that have transformed society and culture. Two of these watershed moments were the invention of the printing press and the discovery of the New World. The printing press revolutionized communication, literacy, and knowledge, enabling the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of mass media. Similarly, the discovery of the New World exposed the limitations of conventional knowledge, reconfigured the earth's surface, enabled the rise of rationality and its connection to barbarism, and provided the seedbed for colonialism and the modern nation-state.
Both of these historical events were made possible by networking technologies that disseminated knowledge into new cultural and social spheres, bringing people, nations, cultures, and languages together. These technologies include seafaring, railways, the postal system, the electric telegraph, world standard time, colonization, the exploitation of the natural world, electrification, highways and car culture, transnational finance and technology, radio, film, television, the Internet, and real-time social networking on hand-held devices.
Every technology has both good and bad effects. It can help to share information and connect people, but it can also be used to control and exclude. This is true for all kinds of technology, like printing, radio, phones, TV, the internet, ships, trains, roads, and more. We cannot assume that technology will always make life better for everyone. For example, even though mobile phones and social media can be used to spread knowledge and democracy, they can also be used to spread hate and violence. In the same way, the radio and trains were used in the past to help people communicate and travel, but they were also used to hurt and conquer others.
When we talk about technology, we also need to think about how power and authority play a role. The way we use technology can help or harm people, depending on how it is used and who is in charge. We need to be aware of these issues and think carefully about how we use technology to make sure it helps everyone.
Today, we are experiencing rapid changes brought about by new communication technologies such as social networking, cloud computing, web-based media, digital archives, locative technologies, and mixed realities. These changes are so significant that they can be compared to the encounter with the New World and the dissemination of printing. However, the pace of these developments is much faster than the ones we experienced in the past, taking place over months and years rather than decades and centuries. Because of the speed of these changes, we have only just begun to develop the intellectual tools, methodologies, and disciplinary practices needed to respond to, engage with, and interpret these massive transformations.
Furthermore, we have yet to fully appreciate the profound disciplinary, methodological, and institutional shifts that are occurring as print culture is enhanced and displaced by the emergence of natively digital culture.
Rise of DH and related Issues
The author of this text is reflecting on the future of Comparative Literature in the 21st century and how to move away from the dominance of print media. The author draws inspiration from scholar N. Katherine Hayles, who challenges the field to consider the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its meaning-making practices. The author argues that we can no longer assume that the medium of literary artifacts or scholarship is exclusively print, as digital media have transformed the ways we produce and study literature.
The author invokes Walter Benjamin's work in The Arcades Project as an example of how scholars can transform their methodologies by interrogating the media they use to study literature, culture, and society. Similarly, the author suggests that digital media can enable scholars to focus on the media and methodologies of print culture in Comparative Literature. However, the author also cautions that we must consider the implications of moving away from print as the normative medium for producing literature and undertaking literary studies. The author is examining the future of Comparative Literature by looking at the issues that have emerged in the field of Digital Humanities over the past decade. These issues are not unique to Comparative Literature but rather affect a wide range of academic fields in the Humanities. They include questions of authorship, access, collaboration, dissemination, media, platform, and scholarly legitimacy.
The author argues that these issues require a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge is created, what it looks like, who creates it, when it is published, how it is authorized and disseminated, and how it can be made accessible to a broader audience. The Humanities have the potential to generate and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, involving technologies and communities that were previously not engaged in global knowledge creation. The purpose of the chapter is to provide some initial guidance for understanding what these changes mean for the Humanities and Comparative Literature in particular. The author is not alone in this line of thinking, as many scholars in the field of Digital Humanities have been exploring these issues for some time.
What is DH (Digital Humanities)?
The term 'Digital Humanities' refers to a wide range of practices that involve using new and old technologies to create, apply, interpret, and analyze information. These practices involve collaboration between people from different fields, such as humanists, technologists, librarians, and social scientists. Digital Humanities projects are often collaborative and engage with a wider audience than traditional academic research. The role of the humanist is critical in this historic moment as our cultural legacy moves to digital formats, and our relationship to knowledge, technology, and society changes. The Digital Humanities expand on traditional humanistic inquiry and help us understand, critique, compare, historicize, and evaluate digital publications and the platforms that support them.
Role of humanist
The 'Digital Humanities' refers to interdisciplinary practices that create and analyze new and old information technologies. These practices involve collaboration between humanists, technologists, librarians, social scientists, artists, architects, information scientists, and computer scientists. The projects are designed to reach a broader public than traditional academic research in the Humanities.
Humanists need to assert and insert themselves into the culture wars of the 21st century, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests. For example, when Google won the right to transfer the copyright of orphaned books to itself, why were humanists, foundations, and universities silent? Similarly, when Sony and Disney restricted intellectual property and copyright with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, why were they not more vocal?
The 'Digital Humanities Manifesto' calls on humanists to engage more deeply with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, it is important to ask who will render our cultural legacy in new media formats, and for whom? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer. Jeffrey Schnapp is a scholar who has written extensively on these issues.
The Digital Humanities Manifesto is a document that calls for humanists to be engaged in the digital revolution happening in the 21st century. The manifesto is not a systematic analysis of the state of humanities but rather a call to action and a provocation. It seeks to transform and debate ideas within the humanities. The manifesto is available in many forums online, with different versions and commentaries created by scholars, students, and the general public. The manifesto advocates for participatory humanities scholarship in the expanded public sphere. It calls for humanists to guide the reshaping of the university in creative ways that facilitate the responsible production, curation, and dissemination of knowledge. The manifesto does not provide answers, but rather it examines the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge and imagines creative possibilities and futures built on humanistic traditions. The manifesto argues that the work of the humanities is more necessary than ever for developing thoughtful responses, purposeful interpretations, trenchant critiques, and creative alternatives. However, this cannot be done while locked into restrictive disciplinary and institutional structures, singular media forms, and conventional expectations about the purview, function, and work of the Humanities. Robert Darnton points out that this is the beginning of the fourth information age, not the first.
Role of society in the Information age?
The author is saying that we are currently in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in human history. They believe that we need to understand the field of Comparative Literature and the Humanities from an information and media-specific perspective. They also suggest that we need to come to terms with the difference between our digital age and everything that came before it.
Although the Internet is only forty years old and the World Wide Web is only two decades old, there is already an incredible amount of data produced. There are more than twenty-one billion indexed web pages, over one trillion URLs indexed by Google, more than ten million books scanned and cataloged by Google, more than a hundred thirty million blogs indexed by Technorati, over six million articles on JSTOR, and more than twenty-five billion pieces of content on Facebook, including photos, videos, news stories, and blog posts. There are also billions of photographs on Flickr, and fifty-five million tweets per day on Twitter, which are now archived and cataloged by the Library of Congress. All of this content, particularly textual and visual data, is being produced, shared, consumed, and archived at an exponential rate compared to anything in the history of humanity. The author suggests that we need to understand this new reality and its impact on our understanding of culture and literature.
This passage discusses how the field of Comparative Literature has expanded in recent years to include a variety of perspectives, including transnational studies, mobility and translation studies, and postcolonial and diaspora studies. These perspectives have displaced the focus on high culture and have examined popular or vernacular literature, newspapers, and other media. The author acknowledges the importance of these efforts and suggests that Comparative Literature is a "problem" that requires a new critical method to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post-print age.
Several scholars are mentioned in the passage. Gayatri Spivak and Arjun Appadurai have contributed to transnational studies, while Edward Said and Ali Behdad have contributed to postcolonial and diaspora studies. Stephen Greenblatt and Emily Apter have contributed to mobility and translation studies, and Paul Gilroy has contributed to the study of cosmopolitanism. Franco Moretti and W.J.T. Mitchell have called for a new critical method to analyze literature in the digital age, and Todd Presner has made his own contributions to the field.
Or
The field of Comparative Literature has evolved to encompass a diverse range of perspectives, including transnational, mobility and translation, postcolonial, and diaspora studies. While traditional print artifacts remain an important focus of the field, scholars such as Spivak, Appadurai, and Thomas have expanded the scope to include digital culture and media, popular and vernacular literature, and changing notions of literacy, publishing, and knowledge systems. Franco Moretti suggests that Comparative Literature needs a new critical method to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post-print age. This means taking seriously the new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
Change in reading culture
The proliferation of cultural data through the internet highlights the interconnectedness of the world but also exposes inequalities and erasures that come with new technology. Print media and digital media differ in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning-making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity. It is important for literary scholars to apply rigorous, media-specific, social, cultural, and economic analyses to understand the specific affordances of digital culture. It is not enough to simply study the impact of technology; we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research to produce knowledge about ourselves and our world.
In today's digital age, the amount of data and cultural material available to us is vast and overwhelming. To make sense of it all, we need to use new tools that can analyze and evaluate this information. Humanists must consider using text-mining tools, machine reading, and algorithmic analyses to accomplish this task. One approach that has been suggested is 'distant reading,' which involves analyzing larger units of information to reveal their overall interconnection. According to Moretti, distant reading focuses on shapes, relations, structures, forms, and models, as opposed to deep hermeneutics, which involves extracting meaning from a text through close readings.
Another possibility is machine reading, which involves using computational methods to extract trends, correlations, and relationships from data. As Hayles points out, the sheer volume of data and cultural material available to us is far too great for us to process and make sense of without the help of a computer. Even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, we would only be able to read about twenty-five thousand books, which does not include the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.
The concept of 'literature' and 'culture' has been defined and studied in the humanistic tradition through the history of writing and inscription practices, which include various forms of media such as stone carving, parchment scrolls, printed books, and digital authoring environments. However, in the fourth information age, we need to confront the specificity of the digital medium compared to other media formats and the ways of analyzing cultural knowledge produced through it. To address these questions, there are three potential futures for Comparative Literature in the Digital Age, as suggested by Jerome McGann: "The first... involves a reconceptualization of what we mean by ‘literary culture’ and the role of the literary critic within it." The second "involves creating new archives of literary and cultural materials, archives that are organized in fundamentally different ways than the archives of print culture. 'The third' involves developing new ways to create and analyze multimedia works."
These three futures for Comparative Literature in the Digital Age are not separate but rather interrelated and complementary. By reconceptualizing the role of the literary critic, creating new archives, and developing new ways of analyzing multimedia works, we can better understand the specificity of the digital medium and its impact on cultural knowledge production and reception.
Comparative Media Studies
The field of Comparative Literature has traditionally focused on the study of literary and textual works, but in recent times, there has been a shift towards incorporating other media forms like art, photography, film, and television. However, with the advent of digital media, there is a need to re-evaluate the way we approach Comparative Literature. Digital media not only changes the works we study but also the scholarly environments, tools, and platforms we use. Digital media is hypermedia and hypertextual, meaning that it uses a variety of media forms in interconnected systems that allow for annotation, indefinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. This poses a challenge to Comparative Literature as it must now take into account the media-specificity of literary and cultural artifacts, including print.
Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies considers the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, and the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are intertwined with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies that legitimize and authorize certain utterances while disregarding others. Comparative Media Studies are concerned with studying every element of an argument, not just the text. This includes things like the design, layout, and delivery platforms of work. By examining these elements, we can better understand how knowledge is created, as well as the world views that are reflected in a work. With digital media, we are prompted to consider questions like who is an author, what is a work, and what constitutes a text, since anyone can potentially be a reader or writer. As Roland Barthes noted, in a digital environment, any text is both readerly and writerly.
Comparative Data Studies
Google has digitized and indexed over ten million books, which allows scholars to conduct more complex searches and analyze patterns in large-scale cultural datasets. The field of "cultural analytics" has emerged in the past five years, using high-end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect such datasets. This includes historical data that has been digitized, such as every shot in the films of Vertov or Eisenstein, or contemporary, real-time data flows such as tweets, SMS messaging, or search trends. Comparative Data Studies use computational tools to enhance literary scholarship by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. This method also broadens the canon of objects and cultural material under consideration, including cultural objects originally constituted as singular objects in one medium, now digitized, marked-up, accessible, and shareable in multiple formats and on a variety of platforms.
'Born digital' objects such as blogs, videos, web pages, music, maps, photographs, or hypermedia artifacts provide data for analysis and instantiate new forms of knowledge creation and curation. Scholars like Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have worked on cultural analytics to bring the tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets. Jerome McGann's analysis of "radiant textuality" argues that digital books exist in "N-Dimensional Space" since the archive of digital objects and exchanges can be expanded in both spatial and temporal terms. 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
The internet and advancements in technology have lowered barriers for people to participate in creating and sharing content, as well as developing software. This has led to a participatory web known as Web 2.0, where users are actively engaged in producing, annotating, and evaluating digital media and software through collaborative authorship, peer-to-peer sharing, and crowd-sourced evaluation. James Boyle, in his book "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind," warns about the danger of failed sharing due to restrictions and enclosures placed on the creative commons by corporate entities. This is a central argument of the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which aims to perform collaborative authorship using platforms such as the blogging engine, Commentpress.
In the domain of Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies, design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration are critical issues that literary scholars must consider. Scholars cannot simply hand off their content to publishers for layout, design, editing, printing, and dissemination in the digital world. Choices of the interface, interactivity, database design, navigation, access, and dissemination are all part of how arguments are staged in the digital world. Vectors is a multimodal, multimedia humanities journal that explores the complex interrelation between form and content, underscoring the immersive and experiential dimensions of emerging scholarly vernaculars across media platforms. Scholars work closely with designers, technologists, and the Vectors editorial staff to develop appropriate interfaces, database schemas, navigation features, and content types that instantiate an argument while preserving the authority of peer review. The publication platform foregrounds collaborative authorship and public feedback through threaded discussion forums and annotation features.
In summary, the internet and advancements in technology have democratized the ability to create and share content and develop software. However, corporate entities may seek to control the creative commons. Scholars must consider design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration in the digital world, and Vectors is an example of a publication platform that foregrounds collaborative authorship and public feedback. Scholars cannot simply hand off their content to publishers, and choices of the interface, interactivity, database design, navigation, access, and dissemination are all critical considerations in the digital world. James Boyle and the Digital Humanities Manifesto are two examples of scholars who have raised important issues in this area.
The article discusses the changing landscape of academic knowledge production and dissemination in the post-print era. It highlights various academic platforms, such as Grand Text Auto, Scalar, Connexions, and the Institute for the Future of the Book, which has explored the participatory dimensions of scholarship, re-examining authorship, design, peer review, and collaborative content generation and editing. The article also mentions scholars such as McKenzie Wark and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who have used Commentpress to publish early versions of their entire books, allowing them to receive immediate feedback from self-selecting peer reviewers before the book is sent to scholarly authorities in their field. The article also discusses the author's own work on HyperCities, a digital mapping platform for exploring and authoring complex layers of city spaces.
The article then focuses on Wikipedia, which it describes as a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the humanities and at institutions of higher learning. It acknowledges that while some may dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable, it is actually an innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge-generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge. The article notes that Wikipedia has more than three million content pages, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty-seven languages, making it the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. The scholars mentioned in the article include McKenzie Wark, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association. The article also references Davidson and Goldberg's work on rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the humanities.
I hope this blog is helpful if any queries please comment.
