While reading these texts, I was struck by the tension between the ubiquitous rhetoric of technological progress and the “actual” progressiveness of the databases, archives, and metatexts that the authors wrote about. Some of these databases, archives, and metatexts (I’ll just say “archives” from now on) focused on canonical writers or figures such as Walt Whitman, Rossetti, the founding fathers of the US, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc, or on widely-researched fields such as the Western 19th century (NINES). The idea, in these cases, seemed to be developing instruments (McGann uses this term) to allow scholars to approach these corpuses in new ways, or at least to make scholarly interpretations and literary texts by these authors more easily accessible and readily linked to each other. This is a laudable project, but I’m divided about its potential consequences for less canonical bodies of work.
McGann, Jewell, and Earhart seem more concerned with technological/intellectual innovation than social/political progress, while other authors mention archives that implicitly are oriented around some kind of praxis (the Shoah Foundation archive, the “Public Secrets” project, etc). It seems clear that digital archiving projects can do valuable work no matter their subject; however, I’m wary of projects that seek to uncritically increase the visibility of already-visible subjects. Do projects like the Walt Whitman archive pave the way for well-funded, technologically advanced projects that use the power of digital archives to increase the visibility of texts and artifacts that would otherwise be neglected? Or do they overshadow them– so that a scholar conducting online research might easily find all of Ben Franklin’s letters categorized by year, recipient, and subject, but next to nothing related to American women writers of the same century? An internet database may not have the limited space of a library, but will that lead to inclusiveness or canon-sprawl? The readings from last week brought up the fact that digital humanities projects are more likely to receive grants than traditional projects. It seems likely that these grants will often go to the safest bets: the projects that focus on already visible corpuses. If, as we read last week, many of these high-profile projects remain true to the promise of open-access and the “building” philosophy, will smaller projects focused on neglected corpuses have to settle with a trickle-down economy of dh innovation?
