Digital Humanities and Computer Assisted Literary Criticism with Case Studies

TOPIC : Digital Humanities and Computer Assisted Literary Criticism with Case Studies

PAPER 7 : Literary Theory & Criticism

STUDENT'S NAME : Gohil Yashpalsinh B.

CLASS : M.A., Sem-2

ROLL NO. : 16

YEAR : 2013

 

          What is (or are) the “digital humanities,” aka “humanities computing”? It’s tempting to say that whoever asks the question has not gone looking very hard for an answer. “What is digital humanities?” essays like this one are already genre pieces. Willard McCarty has been contributing papers on the subject for years (a monograph too). Under the earlier appellation, John Unsworth has advised us “what is humanities computing and what is it not.” Most recently Patrik Svensson has been publishing a series of well- documented articles on multiple aspects of the topic, including the lexical shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. Moreover, as Cynthia Selfe in an ADE Bulletin from 1988 reminds us, computers have been part of our disciplinary lives for well over two decades now. During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in En glish than any other departmental home.

               

The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are
used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing.

At its core, then, digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies.

1. Literary Studies and Humanities Computing:Modeling, 

    Points of Intersection :-

          Perhaps the best historical model for documenting the accepted points of intersection shared by literary studies and humanities computing is that expressed several decades ago by John Smith in his seminal article, “Computer Criticism.” Within, one finds computing applications for language and literary studies divided into two groups based on their resultant products: one consisting of those “in which
the computer was used to produce through textual manipulation conventional aids for future research (dictionaries, concordances, etc.),” and the other made up of
“those in which the computer was used in the actual analysis of specific works of literature (thematic analyses, stylistic studies, etc.)”. Escaping my quotation above, but clearly evident in Smith’s larger argument, is the founding of each in and on the literary text in electronic form.2 Indeed, and as the humanities computing community has reminded itself a number of times, literary studies is largely defined by its reliance on and its attention to the literary text, broadly construed: the textual artefact and its intellectual contents.3 Not surprisingly, the literary text in the computing-enabled form that our community has explored it has, for some time,
been accepted as the central point in the relationship between literary studies and computing.

          While such a focus has remained constant, not all has been static. Of note is that the idea of the literary text in its ultimate electronic scholarly form – the electronic scholarly edition of historical texts and what we might call the “electronic literature” of contemporary texts – has undergone considerable change, invention, and reinvention since Smith’s work of the late 1970s. Equally significant is the
considerable rise in acceptance of computing approaches within the literary studies community since that time.4 And yet, even with such change in the electronicallycast object of our focus and the increasing acceptance of computing enhanced approaches, a model with the widespread application and utility of that expressed by Smith, a model that might best assist us in broad scoped consideration of
the changing and increasingly positive relationship between literary studies and humanities computing, has rarely been articulated since Smith’s expression over two decades ago; the several exceptional literary-computing theories that have seen expression of late – such as those that have treated hypertext and its embodiment of literary theoretical principles, narrative studies as it relates to the electronic
medium, and other aspects of electronic literary textuality – focus on points of intersection shared by literary studies and computing that are of the utmost importance, to be sure, but operate with a scope considerably less than that of Smith’s
work.

2. Computing Tools and Computer Criticism / High and
    Low Criticism :-

          It is well worth establishing something as basic, and essential, as the foundation of a general model that allows us to examine the intersection of humanities computing
techniques and the pursuits of those in literary studies in a broad way, in an environment typified by changing notions of the literary text and, perhaps, with reference to changing levels of acceptance of computing-influenced work. Such a foundation is most clearly informed by Smith’s work, but that model does not explicitly take into account the relationship among the many types of work carried out in the literary studies community. For this purpose in particular, a model worth presenting alongside Smith’s is one more recently articulated by literary/textual scholar Tim William Machan.

In the introduction to his Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, Machan succinctly expresses a division of literary critical and scholarly work into two chief categories: what he terms “Lower Criticism,” which is chiefly textual and
bibliographical in nature, and “Higher Criticism,” which is typified by interpretive studies. Lower criticism, Machan notes, is most “commonly viewed as the more factual or ‘scientific’; it provides numerical, analytical, and categorical information which is used to define . . . realities” ; higher criticism is often seen as “the spirit which gives life to the letters established by the Lower Criticism; it is the intellectual
and aesthetic activity which, depending on one’s critical viewpoint, reveals, constitutes, or disassembles the meanings of a text” . As one might expect – and as one who works with either knows – the relationship between the two is
mutually influential, for “without the traditional Lower Criticism’s constructing of texts, there can be no focus for the theorizing of Higher Criticism, just as without the traditional Higher Criticism’s interpretation of texts there can be no contexts within which Lower Criticism can identify facts” . In short, each is somewhat distinct, but each also necessarily assists in the definition and development of the
other.

          Recalling the central role of the electronic literary text in the intersection of computing and literary studies, it is important also to note that one such embodiment of that text, the electronic scholarly edition, occupies an important place when we think about that which both Machan and Smith address: respectively, the influence of lower criticism on higher criticism and, further, the influence of
humanities computing tools on higher literary critical concerns in the form of what Smith calls “computer criticism.” In addition to being a flagship of sorts
today for the work of humanities computing in the field of literary studies, electronic editions of several sorts – primarily dynamic (which combine electronic text and text-analysis software such that the text indexes and concords itself) and
hypertextual7 (which use links to facilitate a reader’s interaction with the apparatus that traditionally accompanies scholarly editions) – represent the culmination of decades of humanities computing work that has both supported and directly participated in interpretive studies. Dynamic interaction with a text – a process which is, essentially, enacting accepted lower critical practices upon a text – is a critical process that duplicates the sorts of tasks that Smith outlined as making up much of computer criticism; restated, such interaction is, itself, part of an interpretative process, with the computer enabling the lower-critical tasks to be carried out swiftly and seamlessly

          Truly, it is through the electronic scholarly edition that, today, one can most easily witness the influence of that which is chiefly textual and bibliographical in nature upon that which is more interpretive by nature – as well as the concomitant influence that schools of interpretation exert upon that which is bibliographic in nature; this latter point is best evinced by Schreibman’s paper, second in this collection, and the former given considerable support by Best. Such a meeting and mutual information of high and low critical endeavours in the electronic literary text is implicit in most papers in this collection – as is the observation that the electronic scholarly edition is only one type of such a text; truly, as Schreibman and Best both note in their consideration of aspects of the edition, even this type of electronic literary text is undergoing considerable change, reflecting intended or possible applications well-beyond those of earlier-generation editions. At their very essence, Winder suggests, recent literary critical schools and methodologies have combined with computing technology to force us to reconsider aspects of the literary text and its textuality – aspects not as disparate as one might think, Van Pelt convinces us, from the meaning that we are able to construct from its contents. Indeed, and as treated most directly by the contributions of Soules, Rockwell, and Grigar, new forms of textual narrative and communicative interaction in new electronic literary texts have themselves opened up previously unavailable points of intersection between the humanities computing and literary studies communities.


3. Papers Towards a New Computer-Assisted Literary 

    Criticism :-

          The papers of this collection demonstrate well the broad range of new work in computing-influenced areas of literary criticism. They suggest a number of things both positive and valuable: that trends within the literary studies community at large have expanded that community’s notion of how computing relates to it – both explicitly and implicitly; that, while at times disputed, there is a strong sense of continuity among past work in humanities computing that addresses literary studies and similar work being carried out a present; and that there is a strong sense of continued promise for, and easily apparent value in, work taking place at the intersection of literary studies and computing.

           Expounding and exemplifying the benefits of the electronic edition, Michael Best’s “The Text of Performance and the Performance of Text in the ElectronicEdition” explores the notion of the “performance crux” – a moment, puzzling to the director and actors, that calls for some kind of stage business to justify or explain action – in the surviving texts of many of Shakespeare’s plays. Using the example of such a crux in Romeo and Juliet, he suggests how a modern, multimedia electronic edition can provide tools for the reader or actor to explore the possibilities both of the basic text and the performance that grows from it, ultimately treating the mutual illumination of text and performance in the dramatic electronic scholarly edition.

         In her article, “Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality: Theory and Practice,” Susan Schreibman continues concern with the scholarly electronic edition, beginning  

with the observation that the majority of literary archives in electronic form within have been conceived more as digital libraries than disquisitions that utilise the medium as a site of interpretation – tracing this situation to the underlying
philosophy of texts and textuality implicit in TEI-SGML. In her treatment of electronic textual theory, she urges that our understanding of electronic texts and textuality deepens as advances in technology allow for the realization of presentations and readings of electronic textual materials that could not, previously, be implemented in HTML or SGML. We can, therefore, expect advances in technology
to bring about changes in guiding critical theoretical modes, particularly those that lend themselves to richer expression in a digital environment: reception theory and versioning.

  

          Beginning with the observation that one high literary critical mode, French neostructuralism, is built directly on the achievements of structuralism using electronic means,WilliamWinder’s “Industrial Text and French Neo-structuralism” discusses that mode in the context of its origins in reaction to French post-structuralist theorization and examines a number of exemplary approaches to text analysis in this vein. Further, he considers how computer-assisted accumulation of text-based expertise in the world at large complements this approach, ultimately concluding
that we can anticipate the direction of critical studies to be radically altered by the sheer size of the economic stakes implied by a new kind of text, the industrial text which lies at the centre of an information society.

          Exploring further the cross-fertilization of theoretical approaches and computing is Tamise Van Pelt’s “The Question Concerning Theory: Humanism, Subjectivity, and Computing.” Within, Van Pelt surveys the shift from humanist, to anti-humanist, to posthumanist assumptions in literary critical circles and questions whether today’s computing environments can still be approached through late twentieth century anti-humanist theories or whether electronic texts demand new, media-specific analyses. Current work in new media, she asserts, suggests that
the dominant discourse on the subject – the rational individual of the humanistic enlightenment, which gave way to the constructed subject of the mid-twentieth century (the discourse underlying much contemporary critical theory) – is being challenged by an emergent discourse of the posthuman.

          Marshall Soules, in his “Animating the Language Machine: Computers and Performance,” explores how we consider a recently-emergent type of text – the computer-mediated writing space – as a unique performance medium with characteristic protocols. Drawing on contemporary performance theory, literary criticism, and communication theory, Soules proposes that technologists, academics, and
artists are developing idiomatic rhetorics to explore the technical and expressive properties of the new “language machines” and their hypertextual environments. The role of improvisation, and its cross-disciplinary protocols, provides a further focus in the discussion of computing practice and performance.

          In “Gore Galore: Literary Theory and Computer Games,” Geoffrey Rockwell provides a brief history of another recently-emergent type of text, the computer
game, and asserts that they have not been adequately theorized. Rockwell develops a topology of computer games and a theory, based on Bakhtin’s poetics of the novel, that views them as rhetorical artifacts well-suited for critical study.

          Bookend to this introduction is Dene Grigar’s examination of the genre of adaptive narrative. In her “Mutability, Medium, and Character,” Grigar explores the future of literature created for and with computer technology, focusing primarily on the trope of mutability as it is played out with the new media. In its speculation about the possibilities of this new genre, it explores ways in which we may want to think when developing future theories about literature – and all types of writing – generated by and for electronic environment.