Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presener

1. Comparative Literature in
the Age of Digital
Humanities: On possible
Futures for a Discipline
Todd Presener
• Vachchhalata Joshi
• Roll no.19
• Hirva Pandya
• Roll no.10
• Department of English
• Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavanagar University

2. Abstract
• With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of
knowledge completely changed providing the condition of possibility for
reformation and the Enlightenment of the Age of Humanism and the rise of mass
media.
• The impact of print and the “Discovery” of the new world was predicted by
networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge
and new culture and social spheres.
• The invention of the electric telegraph, the heyday of colonization, the
exploitation of the natural world, the electrification of cities, the rise of
transnational finance, the internet, and “New” media of the radio, film, and
television.
• Explosion of real-time social networking on hand-held devices. these
technologies have a common thing a contraction of time and space through the
control of regulation of knowledge information and bodies.
• In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating the
• potential democratization of information and exchange on the one hand and the
ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other.

3. Key Points
Age of
Humanism
Rise of mass
media
Sharing and
transforming
humanistic
and scientific
knowledge.
Liberation of
Humankind

4. Key Arguments
• Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital says perhaps even hundred dollar computer will
not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but
will not likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way
that the radio and the railway did in the last century.
• Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept
of culture along with “Black Atlantic” voyages of discovery enlightenment, and progress also
meant, at the very moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction.
• New communication technologies including but hardly limited to web-based media forms,
locative technologies, digital archives, cloud computing, social networking, and mixed realities.
• N. Katherine Hayles ponders various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second
decade of the twenty-first century- how to rouse ourselves from the “somnolence of five hundred
years of print”.

5. Key points
• “Materiality as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying practices”,
as Hayles argues allows us to consider the text as “embodied entities” and still foreground
interpretative practices.
• Walter Benjamin did in “The Arcades Project” both the media and methodologies for the study of
literature, culture and society. Just as Benjamin sought to employ the montage form to transform
historical scholarship by refocusing attention on what it means to “write” history, digital media
enable us to refocus on the media, methodologies, and affordances of print culture in the practice
of Comparative Literature.
• What happens when the print is no longer the normative or exclusive medium for producing
literature and undertaking literary studies?
• While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future
of Comparative Literature.

6. Key Arguements
• Comparative literature since they question that have formed the methodological ,
disciplinary and institutional foundation of a wide range of academic fields in the
humanities , including history and art , literary and cultural studies and humanistic
,social sciences such as anthropology, archaeology and information study.
• The purpose of these chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out
what this means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more
specifically.
• Digital Humanities “a term which still needs the qualifier ‘’digital’ in order to highlight
the proliferation of media and the move away from strictly print artifacts”.
• Digital Humanities projects are almost collaborative.
• It is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope humanities not replacement or
rejection of humanistic inquiry.

7. • Jeffrey schnapp says “Digital Humanities Manifesto ”, it is essential that humanist assert and insert
themselves into the twenty century cultural wars.
• Humanists ,foundations and universities conspicuously silent when Google won its book search
lawsuit and effectively won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself?
• Digital millennium copyright act, radically restricting intellectual property , copyright and sharing?
• Humanists are engaged with digital culture, production , publishing , access and ownership.
• European Avant-garde in the early twentieth century, the Digital Humanities Manifsto is bold in its
claims fiery in language and utopian in its vision.
• Robert points out the beginning of the fourth information age not the first. To reshaping university,
curricula, departmental and disciplinary structures.
• We are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind.

8. Google , Technorati , JSTOR, Facebook ,Flicker ,Twitter
we are producing sharing , consuming and archiving exponentially
more cultural material ,textual and visual data , than ever before in
history of our species.

9. • Franco Moretti’s provocation is to consider comparative literature as a “Problem” that “asks for
new critical method”.
• The problem of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new
authoring, annotation and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
• Post –print age.
• We must actively engage with design, create , critique and finally hack the environments and
technologies that facilitates this research.
• The world of print are comparatively different in interactivity and expressivity but this is not to say
that digital media is more evolved than print media or books are obsolete.

10. • Moretti has already indicated one possible way of doing this articulation of
“Distant reading” a specific form of analysis that focuses on larger units
and fewer elements in order to reveal their overall interconnection shapes,
relations, structures, forms and models.
•
It is term specifically arrayed against hermeneutics extracting meaning
from a text through ever closer, microscopic reading but beyond distant
reading we might entertain possibility of machine reading.in which trends
correlation and relationship would be extracted through computational
method.
•
Hyles points out in her recent studies on the transforming power of
digital humanities even if we were read a book for our entire adult life
the upper end the number of books that can be read about twenty five
thousands

11. • As we are in the first decade of massive transformation it may be somewhat premature articulate
new disciplinary methodological and institutional fault lines.
•
Concept of literary or equally vexing notion of what constitutes literature and culture are terms of
owe much of their meaning. as object of knowledge study and pleasure in humanistic tradition to
the history of writing and inscription practices.
•
Friedrich Kittler calls “Aufschreibesysteme”(System of writing down), These system are not
limited to print but include vastly differentiated material history of knowledge systems from stone
carving, leather folio and parchment scrolls illuminated manuscripts, printed Books,CD ,Roms.
• Now various forms of electronic literature web based media digital authoring environments.

12. Comparative Media Studies
• Comparative literature has been inflected by so called visual turn of 20th century.
• Television, Digital media offer more fundamental challenge since they not only transform the
media assumption built into traditionally study but also scholarly environment.
• Digital media are always already hyper media and hyper textual
• Both originally term were coined 1965 by the visionary media theorist Theodor Nelson
• For nelson hypertext is body of written pictorial material interconnected in a such complex way
that it could be not conveniently represented on a paper such a system could grow indefinitely
gradually including more and more of the world’s written knowledge.

13. • How then the comparative literature can be practiced when scholar work are created exchanged
and critic multi model environment such as the web?
•
How do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate evaluate media specificity of every
literary cultural artifact?
•
Comparative media studies foreground the material of quality surface structures upon which
inscription are made the process of reproduction and circulation the institutional mechanism of
disseminations and authorization the reading and navigation practices enabled by media form and
social implication for literacy and knowledge production
•
Comparative media studies implies that output or scholarly work is not uni-medial and for that
matter might not even be textual
• Comparative media studies enables returns some fundamental question who is author? What
is a work? What constitutes particularly in environment in which text readerly writerly by
potentially anyone?
•
•

14. Comparative Data Studies
• Lev Manovich and Noah wardrip-fruin the field of “cultural analytics” has emerged over the past
five years to bring the tools of high –end computational analysis and data visualization to
dissect large scale cultural data sets.
•
Comparative Data Studies allows to use computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance
literary scholarship precisely by creating orders, visualization, maps, semantic webs of data are
simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties.
•
Comparative Data Studies also radical broadens the canon object of cultural material under
consideration on one hand originally constituted as singular object in one medium.
• On the other hand “Born digital objects whether blogs, webpages, video etc.
• As MCGann argue regarding to the first in his elegant analysis of “radiant textuality” the
difference between codex and electronic versions of oxford dictionary.

15. Comparative Authorship and Platform studies
• Claims of web and information technology certainly be critically interrogated.
• Collaborative authorship, peer to peer sharing content, crowd sourced evaluation of data the hall
mark of participatory known as world web2.0
• James Boyle points out there are many corporate entities eager, regulate late the public domain
control the “commons of the mind”
• for Boyle the real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but failed sharing due to enclosures and
strictures placed upon creative commons.
• Comparative literature has not concern it self with design, interactivity, navigation strategies these
issues are decisive part of the Comparative Authorship and Platform studies
• In a print model scholar typically “handed off” the content of their manuscript To publishers who
did layout, design, editing, print, disseminations of the work, now this work moved to the
forefront of digital humanities.
•

16. • Other Academic Platforms such as Grand text Auto, USC’s experimental authoring and
collaboration platform “scalar”, “Rice University Press” connexions and the institute for future of
the book variously explored knowledge production and legitimacy in the post print era by re
examining authorship, design, peer review and participatory dimensions of scholarship.
•
My own work on Hyper cities a collaborative digital mapping platform for exploring authoring
the complex layers of the city spaces.
• Wikipedia a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform.it is represent a
dynamic flexible and open ended network for knowledge. it is most comprehensive representative
and perceive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by Human kind.
•

17. • Conclusion
This Article has mainly focuses on 21st century in terms digital
humanities after discussing various arguments we come to know that date
it has than more three hundred millions edits forty seven languages. It is
worth some pause and reflection in a future disciplinary incarnation of
comparative literature. This research render this world as a world and produce
knowledge about who we are , where we live and what that means.

18. Thank You