Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Two articles, 1) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993, and 2) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207.
Article - 1
Article - 2
Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.
About Todd Presner
Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and serves as Special Advisor to Vice Chancellor Roger Wakimoto in the Office of Research and Creative Activities (2018-present). Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. From 2018-21, he was Associate Dean of Digital Innovation. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities.From 2005-2015, Presner was director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. It was awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008. Click to read more.
Video recording of Article explanation.
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. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for producing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientific knowledge. Analogously, with the opening up of the New World, not only were the profound limitations of conventional knowledge and epistemologies exposed, but the “discovery ” reconfigured for better and for worse the entire surface of the earth, enabled the ascendancy of rationality (and it's deep link to barbarism), gave rise to new economies, provided the seedbed for colonialism, and was the prerequisite of the modern nation - state.Both the impact of print and the “ discovery ” of the New World were predicated on networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge into new cultural and social spheres, but also brought together people, nations, cul tures, and languages that were previously separated.
Nicholas Negroponte in his Wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995) asserted These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever - greater liberation of humankind.For they always have an underbelly : Mobile phones, Social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollars 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 much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century.
Paul Gilroy analysed 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.
N. Katherine Hayles ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the "somnolence five hundred years of print".There is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print ; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conception of authorship and scholarly research.
While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been print, the burgeoning field of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of “materiality as the interplay between a text ’s physical characteristics and its signifying practices.” Hayles argues, for permission to consider texts as "embodied entities"and still foreground interpretative practices.
Walter Benjamin in The Arcades project (1928-40; 1999) it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.
Electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature. 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, including 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, necessitated 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 authorised and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience. The Humanities of twenty - First century, has potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never engaged in a global knowledge - creation enterprise.
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.Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of humanistic inquiry. The roll pf 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.humanists that we should turn to help us to understand, critique, compare, and historicize, and evaluate the explosion of "born digital" publications.
According to Jeffery Schnapp and Todd presner in “ 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.
Robert Darnton (2008) points out, represents the beginning of the fourth information age not the first. Far from the providing the right answers, the Manifesto was an attempt to examine the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge, largely inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to imagine creative possibilities and futures that are built on long - standing humanistic traditions.Robert Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind. Although the Internet is barely forty years old and the World Wide Web is barely two decades old, it is striking to ponder the sheer volume of “ data ” already produced. It is evident that we are producing, sharing, consuming, and archiving exponentially more cultural material, particularly textual and visual data, than ever before in the history of our species. While much of this data is not “ literature ” and may not be studied under the conventional academic rubric of “ Comparative Literature, ” it brings into stark relief the constitution of the tiny canon of print artifacts with which the field currently engages.
The central issue is the fact that the artifacts constituted by the world of print are comparatively different – in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning - making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity – from those artifacts constituted by digital technologies and which “ live ” in various digital environments.
It is to insist on the multiplicity of media and the varied processes of mediation and remediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and the idea of the literary. Just “ studying ” the technologies and their impact, Presner believes that 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 produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.We will have to design and employ new tools to thoughtfully sift through, analyze, map, and evaluate the unfathomably large deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has already unleashed.
Franco Moretti ’ s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” (not a canon of objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium) that “ asks for a new critical method ” (Moretti, 2000 : p. 55) to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post - print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to fi gure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production. Digital media are always hypermedia and hypertextual.
Hayles points out in her recent study on the transforming power of digital humanities, even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, the upper end of the number of books that can be read is about twenty - five thousand, and this does not even take into consideration the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.
Presner discusses the three futures for “Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age.
1] Comparative Media Studies
The forgoing 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.'
Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds 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 broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It 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 other.
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?
2) Comparative Data Studies
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.
Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality,” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The “data” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
3) Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
While the radically “democratizing” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, might it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. 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.
James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “commons of the mind."
Conclusion
Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association (qtd. in Stothart)
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.This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author.
I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.
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