Literary Studies in the Digital Age

[...] some imaginative and thoughtful attempts to negotiate such an approach, by such scholars as Liu, Julia Flanders, and others. (I’ve listed just a few in “References,” below.) This post, and a [...]

[...] using the tools of social computing made possible by web 2.0 technologies. In their Introduction, Introduction, Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens make the following [...]

Thank you for the fine work, Stéfan, Stan, and Milena! A great entry for an exciting new publication venue, as is the whole anthology.

When it comes to reading and writing in the contemporary times, the social network is having greater influence when it comes to the way people read and the way they write (especially their spelling) and also the way they speak! I believe that it is the job of the social linguists to study this and I am aware that the University of Nigeria Nsukka http://arts.unn.edu.ng has scholars devoted to this.

Hi Steven — Thanks for your comment / question!

As we note in our introduction, we are pleased to consider building on this foundation of articles over time, adding to its breadth and depth of address in response to our field’s engagement with the digital.

Please join the group DLS Anthology, upload your draft, and invite the community to comment. The draft will become part of the collection’s expanding archive. Essays deemed to be of especially high quality and of interest to a sufficient number of people will be chosen for inclusion in subsequent evolutions of Literary Studies in the Digital Age: with the author’s permission, a selected essay will be copyedited and added to the collection. (Authors are free to submit their essays elsewhere for publication at any time, but please be advised that the draft uploaded to MLA Commons will remain part of the collection’s public archive.)

All best

Ray

my comment — that is, question — is whether the editors would be interested in an article about digital humanities, the study of literature AND the publishing of scholarship online, an area that — if discussed at all — does not happen in digital humanities

i am looking forward to receiving your reply, thanks and best,

[...] anthology project, Literary Studies in the Digital Age (another good place to start exploring), “From Reading to Social Computing.” This conceptual model gave me the handle I needed to grasp social computing from a critical [...]

[...] As far as the LRG’s opinion on what to call our project, our consensus seems to be to stay away from the word “archive” if at all possible. “Archive” connotes a certain amount of broader inclusion and extensiveness that reaches beyond the scope of the BeardStair project, especially because our “list” of entries is literally three items that somebody decided they didn’t want anymore. That seems a little random to be called an archive; “collection” seems more fitting, especially in regards to some of the categories of classification Susan Schreibman outlines in her article “Digital Scholarly Editing.” [...]

“Where does the knowledge and experience of literature occur? It occurs distributed through combinations of authors, documents, readers, and scholar-critics—that is, in the social networks of all the above.” In Out of Our Heads, Alva Noë asks much the same question – and reaches much the same conclusion – about consciousness. He refutes the proposition that consciousness is located in the brain, contending that it lies, instead, at the interface, and in the interactions, between the whole organism and its environment. If we think that thinking takes place inside the brain, we miss the social and relational dimensions of not only consciousness but selfhood. Much speculation about “meaning” in literature makes the same mistake. We conceive it as “in” the head of the author (in the form of an “intention”) or “in” the head of the reader (in the form of a “construction”); or we suppose it to reside in both places independently, and worry about how to determine whether the two meanings, “author’s” and “reader’s”, are aligned; or (with more nuance, but still missing the point) we conceive it as occupying some mysterious space between author and reader, or as a kind of dance between the two. However, social computing points us towards a way of understanding  meaning that gets us out of our heads and away from mysterious, ethereal interstices; it leads us to think of meaning as an effect of networked bodies and as embodied in the multidimensional relations among people, documents, and conversations.

Although an excellent paper, I think that one of the issues with this formulation is that it is not clear about the kinds of scale the author is suggesting in relation to these “research portfolios”. That is, is “expressive sociality”, bounded in some sense by a limit. If not, it seems to me that the research programme would become rapidly impossible to manage. I wondered whether three analytical versions of this might help in relation to the textual “seed” for the research:

1. Short-form: where the size of the text(s) under computational study is relatively short and localized. This could be a short book(s), blog-post(s) and so forth.

2. Long-form: A larger entity such as a monograph(s), blog (including a number of blogs), or so on. See http://stunlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-author-signal-nietzsches-typewriter.html

3. Big Data: Where it is a larger collection of textual entities or “chunks” of text.

Additionally, some sense of the “proper” or “correct” level of network analysis would also help to both scope the network analysis (e.g. three degrees, six degrees?), and also give an insight into the kind of complexity that you envision as a research project under this programme.

An exploratory example of these thoughts can be found here,

https://sites.google.com/site/whatisdigitalhumanities/

where we document an attempt to use similar techniques to map the digital humanities. This was a “short-form” datasprint, which limited our source to books, but also the depth or degree of the searches. It was also in as much as we formulated the notion of “seed” books that started the search for the “expressive sociality” we wanted to map, and which was limited algorithmically to a certain number of degrees (and which were later cropped/filtered in Gephi).