Assignment - 3 - Comparative Literature in the Digital Age

TOPIC OF THE BLOG:- 

This blog is part of an assignment for Paper 208 - Comparative Literature & Translation Studies - Sem - 4, 2024.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Table of Contents:- 

• Personal Details
• Assignment Details
• Abstract
• Key Words
• Introduction
• The Emergence of Digital Humanities
• Comparative Media Studies
• Comparative Data Studies
• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Personal Details 

• Name:- Pooja Anilbhai Bhuva 
• Batch:- M.A. Sem 4 (2022-2024) 
• Enrollment Number:- 4069206420220005 
• E-mail:- poojabhuva2002@gmail.com 
• Roll Number:- 15

Assignment Details 

• Topic:- Comparative Literature in the Digital Age 
• Subject Code & Paper:- 22415 - Paper 208 - Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
• Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar 
• Date of Submission:- 26th April 2024 
• About Assignment:- In this assignment, I am going to discuss the Digital Age with the help of the article named "Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline" by Todd Presner.

Abstract 

Digital Humanities is a new area of study that combines traditional humanities subjects like literature and history with digital tools and technologies. Scholars from different backgrounds work together to analyze large amounts of cultural information using computers. This helps them understand complex issues, create digital archives of historical documents, and study how different media influence each other. Digital Humanities also explores how digital platforms are changing the way knowledge is created and shared. Overall, it's an exciting way to explore human culture in our digital age. 

Key Words 

Digital Age, Todd Presener, Future of Comparative study in Digital Age, Data Studies, Media Studies, Platform Studies, Authorship 

Introduction 

The field of Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary approach that combines the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry with the application of digital technologies. It encompasses a wide range of practices that create, interpret, and analyze information technologies, both new and old. These practices have transformed the way knowledge is produced, shared, and engaged with communities beyond academia. 

Digital Humanities brings together scholars from diverse backgrounds, such as the humanities, technology, libraries, social sciences, arts, architecture, and computer science. This collaboration is crucial for conceptualizing complex problems, designing user-friendly interfaces, analyzing large datasets, sharing findings, and connecting research to public audiences in ways that transcend traditional academic boundaries. 

While Digital Humanities emerges from and expands the scope of the humanities, it does not replace or reject traditional humanistic inquiry. Instead, it acknowledges the vital role of humanists as our cultural heritage and relationship to knowledge, culture, and society undergo profound transformations due to digitization. The field explores the dialectic between digital technologies' power to democratize information access and their ability to enable new forms of exclusion and control.

The Emergence of Digital Humanities 

"Digital humanities," according to Todd Presner, is "an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies." These practices impact every humanistic field by transforming how knowledge is produced, shared, and engaged with communities beyond the university.

Digital Humanities is an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies. These practices – whether conservative, subversive, or somewhere in between – are not limited to conventional Humanities departments and disciplines, but affect every humanistic field at the university and transform the ways in which humanistic knowledge reaches and engages with communities outside the university. (Presner)

Digital humanities endeavors are highly collaborative, bringing together scholars from diverse backgrounds like the humanities, technology, libraries, social sciences, arts, architecture, and computer science. This interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for conceptualizing complex problems, designing user-friendly interfaces, analyzing large datasets, sharing findings, and connecting research to public audiences in ways that transcend traditional academic boundaries. While emerging from and expanding the scope of the humanities, Presner emphasizes that "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 vital as our cultural heritage and relationship to knowledge, culture, and society undergo profound transformations due to digitization.

I firmly believe that 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 radically re-conceptualized. (Presner)

A central aspect Presner highlights is the dialectic between digital technologies' power to democratize information access and their ability to enable new forms of exclusion and control. He cautions that "every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating a potential democratization of information and exchange, on the one hand, and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other." On the democratizing side, digital networking tools like the internet, mobile devices, and social media platforms reduce barriers to creating, sharing, participating in, and accessing knowledge for diverse global populations. Phenomena like the open access movement, citizen journalism, crowdsourced resources like Wikipedia, and digital activist campaigns seem to empower more voices and challenge centralized gatekeepers of information and authority. 

On one hand, digital networking technologies like the internet, mobile devices, and social media seem to democratize information flow by lowering barriers to creation, sharing, participation and accessing knowledge for people across the globe. The open access movement, citizen journalism, crowdsourced knowledge projects like Wikipedia, and grassroots activism facilitated by digital tools seem to empower more voices and challenge centralized authority. However, Presner urges scrutiny of how these same technologies can be employed by governments and corporations for censorship, surveillance, violence, and controlling flows of information and culture. He cites examples like Google's controversial book scanning project privatizing "orphaned" books, and media giants like Disney shaping restrictive intellectual property laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 

Presner argues we must be attentive to how these technologies can also be employed for violence, censorship, surveillance, and control by governments and corporate interests. He points to examples like Google's controversial book scanning project essentially enabling privatization of "orphaned" books, as well as how media conglomerates like Disney lobbied for restrictive copyright laws through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 

Presner urges humanists to be wary of utopian techno-rhetoric, reminding that "like every technology from the printing press to the radio, digital networks are imbricated with formations of power and instrumentalized authority." While expanding access in some ways, digital networks also enable new modes of cultural commodification, socioeconomic stratification in utilization, and asymmetric information flows favoring powerful entities over individuals. The democratizing possibilities are significant - more people worldwide can educate themselves, voice perspectives, circumvent censorship, and self-publish than ever before. Yet digital networks also facilitate state surveillance, corporate monopolies over information and culture, unequal access divided by socioeconomics, and potentially ominous forms of centralized control humanity is just grasping. 

This dialectic tension, Presner argues, demands rigorous examination by humanists. While digital tools facilitate grassroots empowerment, we must simultaneously analyze how existing power structures remediate and entrench themselves through these technologies in new guises. Navigating and shaping the potentials and hazards of digital networks is a crucial responsibility for the digital humanities.

Comparative Media Studies 

Comparative Media Studies is an emerging field that examines the interplay between different media forms, including literature, art, photography, film, television, and digital media. This field acknowledges the significant impact of the "visual turn" in the 20th century, which opened the doors for literary and textual studies to incorporate visual arts. However, digital media poses a more profound challenge as it not only transforms the media assumptions inherent in traditional works but also reshapes the scholarly environments, analytical tools, and dissemination platforms. Digital media is inherently hypermedia and hypertextual, a concept first introduced by Theodor Nelson in 1965. He defined hypertext as,

"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". (Nelson)

Unlike traditional media, hypermedia documents employ a multiplicity of media forms in aggregate systems, allowing for annotation, indefinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. 

Comparative Media Studies raises important questions about how Comparative Literature can be practiced in a multimodal environment like the World Wide Web. It emphasizes the importance of examining 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, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broader cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. Comparative Media Studies suggests that scholarly output or "work" is not limited to a single medium or even textual form. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether it's a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. This approach interrogates the spatio-temporal elements of the layout, its visual organization, curatorial pathways, user interface, indexing and access systems, and the processes of enabling legibility through selection and assembly.

Delivery platforms, interface designs, layout and navigation systems, authoring processes, and mechanisms of reproduction, dissemination, and preservation all make arguments and assumptions, instantiate knowledge in particular ways, and betray certain worldviews. Prompted by digital media, Comparative Media Studies enables us to revisit some of the most fundamental questions of our field with renewed urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment where any text is potentially readable and writable by anyone? (Barthes)

Eg: The William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org) is a hypermedia archive that presents the writings, art, and multimedia compositions of William Blake. It combines facsimiles of Blake's illuminated books, paintings, drawings, and manuscripts with scholarly editions, introductions, and searchable databases, allowing multidimensional engagement with Blake's creative works.

Eg. The Voyager Company's "Criterion Collection" DVD editions of classic films are an excellent example of hypermedia/hypertextual scholarly works. These DVDs include the film itself, but also feature audio commentaries, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, galleries of production stills and marketing materials, and scholarly essays presented in text and video formats. The navigation interface and curated supplementary materials reframe the primary film text through different media forms.

Comparative Data Studies 

Comparative Data Studies is a field that explores the possibilities of analyzing large cultural datasets using computational tools and techniques. With the digitization of books, films, magazines, and other cultural artifacts, scholars now have access to vast repositories of data that can be searched, analyzed, and visualized in ways that were previously impossible. 

One notable example is Google's digitization of over ten million books, which allows researchers to perform complex searches, discover patterns, and even export data from the digital book repository into other applications, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This enables researchers to pursue quantitative questions, such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses, as well as qualitative, hermeneutical questions. 

The field of "cultural analytics," spurred by the work of scholars like Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, has emerged to apply advanced computational analysis and data visualization techniques to dissect large-scale cultural datasets. These datasets can include historical data that has been digitized, such as every shot in films by Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and content of every magazine published in the United States in the 20th century, or the collected works of Milton. Additionally, contemporary, real-time data flows like tweets, SMS messages, or search trends can also be analyzed. 

Comparative Data Studies allows researchers to create models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are too large to comprehend using traditional methods. The goal is not to replace close, hermeneutical readings but rather to complement them with a macrocosmic view, leveraging the synergies between localized, deep analysis and large-scale data mapping. Comparative Data Studies broadens the canon of objects and cultural materials under consideration, including both digitized physical objects and born-digital artifacts like blogs, videos, web pages, music, maps, photographs, and hypermedia artifacts that combine different media types. These diverse data sources provide new opportunities for analysis and knowledge creation. 

Eg. Lincoln Mullen's America's Public Bible project leveraged data from search engines and libraries to map the publishing and circulation of Bible editions across 19th century America, revealing insights about the Bible's influence on public culture.

Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies examines how digital technologies have lowered the barriers for creating, sharing, and collaborating on content. The participatory web, or Web 2.0, has enabled collaborative authorship, peer-to-peer sharing, and crowdsourced evaluation of data, challenging traditional notions of authorship and knowledge production. 

While traditional print publishing followed a model where scholars handed off their manuscripts to publishers for layout, design, and dissemination, digital platforms have brought these processes to the forefront. Scholars now must consider interface design, interactivity, database design, navigation, access, and dissemination as part of how arguments are presented digitally. Platforms like Vectors, Grand Text Auto, Scalar, and Connexions have explored collaborative authorship, public feedback, and the participatory dimensions of scholarship. Authors like McKenzie Wark and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have published early versions of their books online, allowing for crowd-sourced peer review before formal publication. According to Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association, 

"Wikipedia, I believe, represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge-generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge." (Stothart) 

Wikipedia, in particular, has revolutionized knowledge production and editing. With over 3 million content pages, 300 million edits, and 10 million registered users across 47 languages, it is a massive achievement in collaborative knowledge creation and distribution. Wikipedia's editing model and versioning system document every decision made by every contributing author, underscoring the emphasis on process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity.

Eg. HathiTrust is a cooperative digital library providing online access to millions of digitized books and publications from partner university libraries. Established in 2008, it preserves and shares the scholarly record by digitizing materials and making them available for research, teaching, and learning purposes through member institutions. Its mission is to contribute to the public good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

Eg. Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit open access publisher aiming to facilitate the open communication of research. It launched its first journal, PLOS Biology, in 2003 and now has seven peer-reviewed journals covering diverse disciplines. PLOS promotes innovative peer review models, making research freely available online without subscription charges or restricting reuse rights for researchers and the public.

Conclusion 

Digital Humanities is a field that combines traditional humanities disciplines like literature, history, and art with digital technologies. It allows scholars from various backgrounds to collaborate and tackle complex problems by using computers and digital tools to analyze vast cultural datasets, create digital archives, study media forms and their influences, examine authorship and online publishing platforms, and more. Instead of replacing traditional humanistic inquiry, Digital Humanities enhances and strengthens it with powerful new tools for understanding our increasingly digitized world and cultural heritage. 

Some key areas within Digital Humanities include Comparative Media Studies (examining how different media forms influence each other), Comparative Data Studies (analyzing large cultural datasets to find patterns and trends), and Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies (exploring how digital platforms are changing the concept of authorship and knowledge creation/sharing). While leveraging cutting-edge technologies, Digital Humanities still maintains the core values of humanities scholarship, making it an exciting frontier for scholarly exploration in the digital age. 

In conclusion, Digital Humanities is a dynamic field that is constantly evolving. It offers a powerful set of tools and approaches for exploring the complexities of human culture in our digital age. By combining the best of traditional humanities scholarship with the power of technology, Digital Humanities is helping us understand the world around us in new and exciting ways. As technology continues to advance, we can expect even more groundbreaking discoveries and innovations to emerge from this dynamic field.

Works Cited 

• Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1986, pp. 56-64. 
• "ChatGPT." Version 3.5, OpenAI, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024. 
• "Claude AI." ClaudeAI.com, Claude Technologies Inc., 2022, https://www.claudeai.com/  Accessed 26 Apr. 2024. 
• Davidson, Cathy, and David Theo Goldberg. The Future of Learning Institutions. MIT Press, 2009. 
• Nelson, Theodor H. "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate." The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, MIT Press, 2003, pp. 134-145. 
• Presner, Todd. “Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline.” Edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas. A Companion to Comparative Literature, 2011, pp. 193-207. 
• Stothart, Chloe. "Web Threatens Learning Ethos." Times Higher Education, 2007, www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=209408. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

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