We met on February 6, 2008, to discuss the debate on digitization in PMLA 122.5, including Ed Folsom's "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives," replies by Peter Stallybrass, Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman, and N. Katherine Hayles [for a posthuman cyberscholar, Hayles' web presence is spotty indeed--AG, ed.], and a further response by Folsom. Wai Chee Dimock led the session, and Gabriele Hayden took notes. I have transcribed GH's excellent notes below, and would be grateful to any participant who could help fill in missing bits; thanks to those (GH included) who have already helped there. And I very much hope that discussion can continue here; see the two discussion-question posts and the comments on them: CG's comments and AG's).
Present: Andrew Goldstone, Colin Gillis, Nathalie Wolfram, KC Harrison, Julia Fawcett, Adrienne Bernhard, Leslie Jamison, Anthony Domestico, Patrick Redding, Aleksandar Stevic, Susannah Hollister, Nicole Wright, Emily Setina, Sam Cross, Ryan Carr, Gabriele Hayden
Wai Chee Dimock: I am interested in three aspects of the database:
- Storage, retrieval, and access: once texts are digitized, our basic assumption that a text is what you find between the covers of a book evaporates. A text isn't an object; instead, it's more like a field. Furthermore the boundary between the textual and visual fields is blurred. Think of a text as something that resembles a database: a DB can answer many kinds of questions. A text is reconstituted every time we access it; like the DB, the text has multiple ontologies, depending on what kinds of questions we put to it. Thus the database asks us to think about levels of inquiry and modes of response.
- Interface: the main point in McGann's essay. Basically not different from reader-response criticism, which is also a theory of interface. Higlights the importance of the reader--who, in the twenty-first century, can be anyone. We shouldn't only think about Whitman's nineteenth-century readers, but also about contemporary ones. Whitman always had Latin American admirers, but now he has readers from all over the globe. So questions of interface are tied up with questions of translation, interlingual and intralingual. (Example of intralingual translation: Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.) Intellectually, English and Comp Lit belong together, even though for strategic reasons they should be administratively distinct.
- Remediation and kinship: Remediation is a mainstream phenomenon: think of Henry James novels being made into films. Kinship means both friendship between authors and relation of authors across time. A fruitful area of inquiry; we should loosen up period boundaries, if only to look at the reading of the writers we study. Focus on traceable kinship.
Susannah Hollister: Is inquiry into kinship in order to understand particular authors, or are kinships themselves the object of inquiry?
WCD: Kinships could be just context, or it could be the focus (a new thing to think about).
Andrew Goldstone: Isn't this a traditional kind of literary history?
WCD: Yes, and I'm not bothered by the resemblance to traditonal modes of criticism. What is new is the emphasis on new media and on genre.
WCD: Virginia Jackson objects to the use of "lyric" in analysis of poetry; she wants to substitute a finer-grained concept of genre. But genre itself could be made into a less rigid system--the motion of words leading to the migration of genres.
WCD: Danger: is literary study non-cumulative? In the sciences, paradigm shifts are very rare, and there's less of a star system.
AG: That's a utopian idea of science. They have stars. But yes, it's more cumulative.
WCD: We should have a sense that we're engaging in collective, cumulative, work.
KC Harrison: What about Moretti's concept of distant reading?
WCD: Moretti might ask, How any novels refer to 9/11? An attempt to get empirical data.
KCH: But that relies on systems of classification which are themselves always interpretive.
WCD: That's exactly my critique of moretti. We can't get away from interpretation. We should avoid too rigid classification.
Patrick Redding: The theme here seems to be how we should see relations between texts. Your model is more anthropological. But here's my question: it's one thing to think about searching a database for a few words, but how could you query it about genres?
WCD: You can be a creative searcher.
Nathalie Wolfram: What about teaching? How would you use digital databases constructively without leading students astray with an apparently cut-and-dried, "scientific" model of literary study?
WCD: Well, databases aren't so great in a seminar setting. I used some digital material, especially images, with mixed results in a lecture course.
Colin Gills: How has the database started to structure scholarship? It's already changed how we research. I've changed a paper title to make it more searchable.
Gabriele Hayden: Is the move from scroll to codex like the move from codex to database?
WCD: [?]
Leslie Jamison: What about authorship? Doesn't taking the database as a literary object imply thinking of it as authored?
WCD: But actually it would be okay if the collaborative editors of something like the Whitman Archive are forgotten. [But then why are their names prominently at the top of the home page? --AG, ed.] Anyway, the emphasis on kinship takes away the pressure to original; I agree with Stallybrass that the premium has been set too high on originality.
Emily Setina: to what degree is the premium on originality that we've been talking about particular to American scholarship? How does it compare to other models of literary scholarship?
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