This week’s readings illuminated the problematic nature of generic categorization that is inherently involved with digitizing an archive of texts. Though the kind of generic pigeonholing that, as DHers describe as an inevitable aspect of archiving digitally, is necessitated by grand-scale digitization is not always bad necessarily, it is definitely something that calls for a kind of transparency, or at least awareness, in use. This is an example of Flanders’ position that DH is inherently a filed of tensions: though the digitization of an archive requires some degree of categorization (for example, the Whitman database’s division between poems essays, novels, and so forth); there is something immediately lost when we give something a genre unnecessarily (for example, categorizing Leaves of Grass as a “book” undermines the fact that it is “actually a group of numerous things – six books, three written before the Civil War and three after, each responding to different biographical, cultural, and historical moment”. This is a fascinating catch to me: the process of making an archive digitally accessible can undermine the nuances that made the archive valuable in the first place.
This problem (or not) of “denigrate[d] detail” (Folsom 1574) is further illuminated by McGann via an exploration of what can be gained from the inevitable change that text undergoes when it is digitized. Rather than seeing the digitizing process as a peril to the nuances of the texts, we can rather take a broader view with these databases, enabling “an investigation into the character and status of documents and their relationships”. So, again, we see the inherent dichotomies of practicing DH: macrocosmic theoretical assessment is made available, perhaps at the expense of the internal nuances of a singular text or author’s oeuvre. So, here, the idea of “electronic hypertexuality” as an unambiguous benefit to scholars (via the self-reflexive exposures of information about the texts and about the texts’ digital bodies) needs to be addressed. The best example from the readings comes from McPherson’s description of the archive. Here, we are confronted with the notion that databases should be understood not as digitized version of physical texts, but rather as a new body: “not an archive that is erasing its objects [but] an archive without objects. Here, the unease of digitization’s propensity to remove context is alleviated with the proposal that digitization, instead, invites engagement that actually enriches its contextual grounding in a way that would be impossible sans digital assistance.
