The Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of a Profession

Abstract

The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Digital humanities affect: The evolution and revolution of spatial information organization in science fiction

“…In the second half of the 20th century, human society gradually moves from the industrial age to the digital age, driven by technology such as informatics, cybernetics, and bionic machinery (Kopec, 2016). A significant change has occurred in time and space, breaking the original spatial pattern of order, accuracy and systematicness (Moloney et al, 2019).…”

How Distant is Close Enough? Exploring the Toponymic Distortions of Life Story Geographies

“…However, close readings have a historical legacy across disciplines such as geography, anthropology, sociology, history, and literary studies (Gallop 2007;Love 2013;Bode 2017) and seems to have re-emerged more recently in the humanities as a way to resist the databasification of literary studies (Devereux 2012;Kopec 2016). This "databasification" relies extensively on identifying and counting toponyms mentioned in stories (Gritta et al 2018)also known as the "geographic investment" of a text (Wilkens 2013) -but it remains unclear to what extent such bold calculations reflect or distort the geographies embedded in these stories.…”