Referencing at least three of this week’s readings, discuss what is lost and gained, or what is enabled and disabled, when the archive/collection/edition is or goes digital. In other words, what are the implications — conceptual, epistemological, politically, cultural, or otherwise — of the fabrication of these (groups of) artefacts — or the databases that drive them? Note: you may choose to focus your response on a single theme or area of interest, or more exhaustively catalog the implications. Length: about 350 words.
“What would literary history look like if the field was divided not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literature?” The question posed by Wai Chee Dimock in Ed Folsom’s article surrounding literary categorization sparks discussion about where databases belong on the trajectory of discretely divided methods of analyzing literature.
One of Folsom’s biggest claim is that, juxtaposed against narrative-centric organizations, the database is non-linear, non-discrete, “do not tell stories…do not have a beginning or end…do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence” (Folsom). Using his Walt Whitman Archive as an example, Folsom hails the database’s many revolutionary qualities and its categorically different capacities from methods of organization of the past.
McGann, attempting a bit more nuance regarding the dichotomy, disagrees: while the structure of a database may not be narrativized, it is nonetheless still “severely constrained and organized,” since databases still rely on user interfaces, which embed, “implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized organizations” (McGann).
McGill similarly notes the “conceptual and structural horizon” of database projects such as the Walt Whitman Project that restrains such projects in ways that are “surprisingly close to normative ideas” (McGill).
It was interesting to note Folsom’s references that juxtaposes the database against the narrative–positing database as a non-linear, non-discrete, non-ordered collection of items (“Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence”), Folsom writes that this departure from narrativity is in and of itself radical (Folsom).
But this divide seems slightly arbitrary and unmindful of the fact that narrativity is itself an inheritance of Greek/Aristotelian/Western-centric methods of organization, and that alternatives to narrative have been and are around independent of the advent of digital technologies. Claims to radicality that do not acknowledge a lineage feels slightly suspect to me.
On immediacy, Bolter and Grusin write about the logic of the vanishing medium, ie, a medium that disappears in order to leave the audience/viewer in the direct presence of the thing represented, eg, through a webcam recording of a birdfeeder, in a race car, etc. In terms of what is lost or gained, enabled or disabled, I echo Sarah’s observation that visibility and invisibility are highly intertwined with claims of “universality,” a political position that inscribes normativity/whiteness and often masquerades as apolitical.
Tara McPherson’s article feels, to me, the most salient in terms of positioning and acknowledging the archives’ “privileged role in ordering memory and history.” Her article pries apart a bit more the complexity behind what might be lost or gained through digitalization–short answer is that the onus still falls on the human end of digitalization. McPherson emphasizes that digital humanists need to do more and continually reexamine colonial and imperialist methods of organization, to ensure that “digitization does not simply reinstall the absences and imbalances of our physical archives within digital realms.” This rings home. While many of the other writers refer to the transformational prowess of the database as potentially radical, yet, since medium is always relational to human use, to fail to acknowledge positionality is to replicate the gap in acknowledging that the “politics of selection and interpretation…are always implicit in our technologies of memory and storage.”
