Digital Literary Studies (Journal)
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Big Data and the Search for Balanced Insight in the Digital Humanities: Macroscopic and Microscopic Reading of Citation Strategies in the Encyclopédie of Diderot (and Jaucourt), 1751-1772
No full textConsisting of seventeen folio volumes and eleven volumes of engraved illustrations - over seventy-four thousand articles and twenty-one million words - the Encyclopédie (1751-1772) remains a monumental contribution to Western literature for its promotion of free inquiry into all areas of knowledge and human endeavor. At least one hundred and forty contributors produced this massive corpus, but (perhaps due in part to the pressures under which they worked) passages borrowed from other texts are occasionally included in Encyclopédie articles without attribution to their true authors or even acknowledment as quotation. This is a major shortcoming for which the Encyclopédie has been criticized since its very inception. Even so, its accessible framing of philosophical and political ideas with lasting importance make the Encyclopédie a work of enduring interest for cultural historians and literary scholars, some of whom are now utilizing digital technology to develop new insights on the colossal text.This paper builds upon the groundbreaking work of scholars Dan Edelstein, Robert Morrissey, and Glenn Roe in the burgeoning field of the digital humanities. By utilizing the search capabilities offered with a digitized version of Diderot\u27s Encyclopédie, I find that the "macroscopic" methodology of Edelstein et al. must be tempered by ongoing "microscopic" analysis of digitzed source material. The use of sequence alignment programs and massive online databases can yield important new insights in literary studies, but these findings must be balanced by "close" reading of documents relevant to the research question(s) at hand
Gaming the Edition: Modelling Scholarly Editions through Videogame Frameworks
No full textThis paper offers a unique model for collaborative digital scholarly edition environments that features functions and possibilities associated with game-related play, challenge, achievement, and narrativity. These proposed environments can and should encourage two types of technical education simultaneously: the use of the scholarly edition software, and an increasing mastery of scholarly editing practice. Further, successful models of collaboration found in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games can be effectively used to facilitate the operation of collaborative, dynamic editing environments, and achievement "badges" along with other ways of acknowledging user contributions are effective ways to validate the gaming "levels" and "achievements" that various contributors have reached within the editing environment. Functionally incorporating these recognizable game elements into the development of digital scholarly editions generates an apprenticeship space that continually demands a performative understanding of the kinds of work that go into scholarly editing, encourages collaborative edition development, and clearly establishes who exactly has accomplished that work (and to which level)
Preservation Paths. A Review of Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop
No full textA Review of Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthro
Digital Humanities Masterplots
No full textDigital humanities research has frequently been characterized by a high degree of recursivity, that is to say, by attempts to use digital humanities tools and techniques to reflect back on the structures and history of the field. Digital Humanities Masterplots is intended as a contribution to this ongoing project of self-analysis, but one that shifts attention away from actors, institutions, and research agendas and toward what Matthew Kirschenbaum refers to as the digital humanities as a "discursive construction." My aim is not to offer a survey of or an opinion piece on work in an emerging field, not least because a critical mass of such essays already exists. Rather, my primary material will comprise a series of second-order reflections on the field, and, more specifically, how they tend to emplot the rise of the digital humanities in order to render it intelligible within a range of intellectual, institutional, and societal contexts. Inspired by the narratologist Mieke Bal\u27s assertion that "the shape of the story you tell determines what knowledge you produce," my claim is that the shapes of these digital humanities stories derive from certain basic assumptions about the aims of humanistic inquiry, and that by attending to them we can better understand an emerging set of positions regarding the role of the humanities as such
Encoding the Edge: Manuscript Marginalia and the TEI
No full text<additions>, <label>, <head>, <note>: with over five hundred elements, why can\u27t I find the one I need? By tracing the different TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) elements and attributes available to describe and record marginalia, this paper reveals how the placement and purpose of early modern marginalia require careful consideration by digital editors. Each element that an encoder might consider using for in-text marginalia, and the customization that proscribes that use, carries different semantic weight. This essay considers the options for encoding marginalia using TEI, details practices of existing projects, and then turns to manuscripts written by Archbishop William Sancroft (1617-1693) as test cases. Ultimately, encoding marginalia is a data-modeling question that asks us to rethink the nature and function of our texts and paratexts, questioning where one ends and the other begins
The Biopolitics of Electronic Literature: On the Writings of Mez Breeze
No full textoai:journals.psu.edu:article/59648Biopolitics identifies a shift in how government operates, specifically at the level of managing the bodies of citizens. The critical thinkers I discuss in this paper––Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri––explore biopolitics and the topic of "life": what is life, how is it defined, and whom has the power to control it? In this paper, I argue that the presence of language in electronic literature not only points to the role of language in biopolitical power (or biopower), but also affords electronic literature the ability to act as a site of aesthetic resistance (following Hardt and Negri) operating within and against biopolitical regimes. In particular, I illustrate how \u27codework,\u27 a form of electronic literature which integrates natural and programming languages to create its surface-level language, provides a tool from which to think through and work against biopower. For this, I turn to the writings of Mez Breeze, an electronic author working primarily with codework to explore questions of subjectivity, embodiment, and power in electronic literature