This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.
Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das
Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.
Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett
Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy
Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan
Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana
Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan
The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner presented by Vachchhalata Joshi and Hirva Pandya on 13 December 2022.
Article 5. 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner
Introduction/Key Points:
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. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and 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.
These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever-greater liberation of humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer, 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 in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, 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.
As Walter Benjamin did in 'The Arcades Project (1928–40; 1999), it is necessary, as Toddy believes, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture and society.
While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature, I want to examine the field a bit more broadly by situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities.
The Humanities, include history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital world, necessitate 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, as Prenser argues here, 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. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out what this means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more specifically.
Further Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp articulated in various instantiations of the “ 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.
- Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously–even scandalously –silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer the copyright of orphaned books to itself?
- Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing?
- 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?
These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer 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 make it variously porous), and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.
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.
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, a 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 investigates 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 implies 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 enables 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
Through 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 allows 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 broadens 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 metabook [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.
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 sharing ” 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 multimedial 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/Concluding remark:
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.
The “data” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
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