Name: Divya Sheta
Roll No.:06
Paper Name: Paper 208: Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
Paper Code no.: 22415
Topic Name: Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner
Enrollment No.:4069206420210033
Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com
Batch:2020-23
MA SEM-IV
Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University.
Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner
We are currently experiencing another watershed event in human history that is comparable to the development of the printing press or maybe the discovery of the New World, after five hundred years of print and the enormous social and cultural changes it sparked. The printing press revolutionised communication, literacy, and knowledge, creating the preconditions for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of humanism, and the emergence of modern media.
As Nicholas Negroponte once claimed in his overly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995), these networking and connection technologies do not necessarily lead to the ever-greater liberation of humankind because they are inherently flawed. Mobile phones, social networking technologies, and possibly even the $100 computer, will not only be used to improve education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will also likely be used to peddle hate.
Or, as Paul Gilroy hypothesised in his investigation into "the fatal intersection of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture" along the "Black Atlantic," voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and development also implied, at any given time, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and devastation. Indeed, for this reason, any discussion of technology is inextricably linked to a consideration of structures of power and centralised 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 the future of Comparative Literature can be explored through electronic literature, there are a number of other issues that have emerged in the "Digital Humanities" over the past ten years that I want to situate the literary transformation in relation to.
The humanities are comprised of anthropology, archaeology, information studies, literary and cultural studies, history and art history, as well as the humanistic social sciences. A fundamental rethinking of how knowledge is created, what it looks like (or sounds like, or feels like, or tastes like), who gets to create it, when it is "done" or published, how it gets authorised and disseminated, and how it involves and is accessible to a significantly wider (and potentially global) audience is actually required in order to address these issues, which are brought to the forefront in the digital world.
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.
It is crucial for humanists to declare themselves in the twenty-first century cultural battles, which are mostly being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests, as Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp stated in several iterations of the "Digital Humanities Manifesto."
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?
The environments and technologies that support this research, render this world as a world (and make it variously porous), and generate knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means must be actively engaged with, designed, created, critiqued, and finally hacked.
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 hypermedia and hypertextual by default. The visionary media theorist Theodor Nelson first used both of the aforementioned phrases in his early formulations of the conceptual framework for the World Wide Web in 1965.
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.
A variety of media formats are used in aggregate systems in hypertextual or hypermedia publications to enable annotation, infinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. Comparative studies examine all media as information and knowledge systems that are intertwined with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory agencies that legitimise and authorise some utterances while filtering out and dismissing others.
Additionally, comparative media studies suggests that the scholarly "work" is not mono-medial and may not even be textual. It highlights the layout and connections between each logical component, whether it be a page, folio, database field, XML information, map, movie still, or something else. With the help of comparative media studies, we may urgently revisit some of our field's most fundamental problems: 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
The discipline of "cultural analytics" has evolved over the past five years as a result of the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin to use advanced computational analysis and data visualisation techniques to analyse huge cultural datasets.
By building models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too enormous for unassisted human faculties to read or grasp, Comparative Data Studies enables us to apply the computational tools of cultural analytics to advance literary research precisely. Comparative Data Studies perform " close " and " distant " studies of data, dramatically expanding the canon of artefacts and cultural material.
The differences between the codex and electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, show that the electronic OED is "a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganised it at a higher level," adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies, as Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of "radiant textuality."
Comparative Authorship and Platform studies
While the web and information technology' dramatically " democratising " claims should undoubtedly be scrutinised rigorously. Thanks to the open-source movement, we are actively involved in the development, annotation, and review of digital media and software rather than just " browsing" and passively consuming predigested stuff.
Not illegal file sharing but "failed sharing" as a result of restrictions placed on the creative commons world is the true threat.The curation of knowledge—the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedial constellations—cannot simply be "handed off" to technicians, publishers, and librarians. This would imply that literary scholars have no place in the creation of knowledge platforms. Through threaded discussion boards and annotation tools, the publication platform prioritises collaborative authoring and public comment while maintaining the authority of peer review.
The emphasis on transparency and teamwork is, of course, nowhere more evident than with Wikipedia, a ground-breaking platform for knowledge production and editing. Even if it is simple to mock Wikipedia for being amateurish and untrustworthy or to point out that it lacks scholarly rigour.
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.
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.
Work Cited
Presner, Todd. “Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline.” Edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas. A Comparative Literature, 2011.
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