I’m not sure what to make of the McGann and Price pieces. They seem to be addressing a crisis that is not really there. Or maybe what the writers are addressing does not seem as radical as they suggest. The break from print to digital is important, but a lot of this rhetoric seems to come more from professional discomfort than actual theoretical necessity. Jerome McGann’s piece about “imagining what you don’t know,” is, in one sense, an ode to the creative potential of building and using digital texts. But I don’t buy his differentiation between speculative projects and specific constructions. Every act of theorizing is both. The fact that he had a hand in crafting a set of programs that enabled Rossetti’s works to be digitized does not privilege the medium or the new viewpoint. From our perspective, where all of the problems he encountered have been rectified by advances in pixilation, User Interfaces, scanning technology, etc., the borders of textual and digital scholarship seem roughly coterminous. What we can do with archives and annotation do not, as far as I can tell, change the fundamental nature of either archiving or annotating, other than to point out that digital = way faster. Much of this essay reads, to me, like a 1st millennium monk musing on the possibilities of paper. Yes, the medium has a profound effect on one’s ability to record and reflect, but, ultimately, analyzing the medium is not a replacement for analyzing content. Now, the possibilities of photo analyses like the filtered images of The Blessed Damozel certainly do seem to signal a change in the nature of this particular scholarship, but that’s something entirely different from digital archiving.
Kenneth Price’s piece comes from this same sort of urge: what do we call what we are doing? His exhaustive explorations of the terms “edition,” “project,” “database,” etc., are certainly valid, thorough, and informative—but I still can’t help feeling that this crisis of naming is somewhat contrived and/or self-interested. Yes: names and definitions are important. But Price tips his hand in the last line of his intro: “In the fraught circumstance of the academy, driven by a prestige economy, humanities scholars are well advised to be highly self-conscious about what we do and how we describe it.” How am I to take this? It’s an arrow aimed at the job-insecure academic’s heart. But this cannot be what impels scholarship—I refuse to believe that. Price’s piece is a glorified exercise in definition and naming. I am currently teaching this kind of writing to my sophomores, so I am about as well primed as a person possibly could be to revel in an act of definition. What Price seems to lack is an occasion. My students write definitions because I tell them to. That is there occasion. This piece attempts to control the discourse around something in the process of emerging—or something that might never emerge. To suggest the term arsenal for these undertakings strikes me as tone deaf. Create something people talk about and they’ll name it for you. The Walt Whitman Archive works fine as a name because there already is a category encompassing it: it’s a website. It is not qualitatively different from a website about baseball or Seinfeld episodes. This seems to be a prime culprit for digital humanists’ crisis: it’s not that the humanities are absorbing new techniques, it’s that the digital complex is absorbing the humanities. Is that scary? Not to me. Maybe it is to these folks.
I know this all sounds resoundingly anti-scholarship and maybe even anti-academic. But I have always felt the horizon for self-reflection lies far past the endpoint of any work’s creative emergence. I feel that one must contribute something before one starts analyzing what they’ve contributed. My imagination is not captured by criticism of something that has not happened yet (especially when it isn’t clear that the something ever will happen).
As far as the implications of digital archiving… that’s a pretty big subject. One of the largest areas of impact seems to be the economic spaces that literature and scholarship have traditionally occupied. The internet undermines a capitalist dynamic whenever a physical commodity can be digitized without loss of utility (use value). This happened with music, and music profits from record sales plummeted. The publishing industry is facing similar pressures. You could once sell Whitman’s collected works in 22 volumes and make a profit. I imagine it is harder to do so when his collected works are on a website. This is, of course, assuming people have the right information. Case in point: I bought an edition of selected Whitman works just last year. Had I known this archive existed, I wouldn’t have. This effectively shifts scholarship funding from private interest to public grants. I’ve barely set foot in that world—and don’t necessarily plan to—but I think the pressure exerted is pretty apparent in scholarship like Price’s piece—scholarship that is, as far as I can tell, pretty unique to the digital age—that presents as essentially high-end PR for the writer’s professional enterprise.
