Anatomy of Melancholy

Now last of all to fill a place, /Presented is the Author’s face; /And in that habit which he wears, /His image to the world appears. /His mind no art can well express, /That by his writings you may guess. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, from The Argument of the Frontispiece

Anatomy & the Database Genre

But for such matters as concern the knowledge of themselves, they are wholly ignorant and careless; they know not what this body and soul are, how combined, of what parts and faculties they consist, or how a man differs from a dog. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “Division of the Body” (Pt. 1, Sec. I, Mem. II, 146-147).

We see—Comparatively. Emily Dickinson.

Digital humanities research has only recently begun to consider database as a genre. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars must resort to metaphors, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, Borges’s labyrinths or library, and Jerome McGann’s fractals. Northrop Frye argues that “in every age of literature there tends to be some kind of central encyclopaedic form, which is normally a scripture or sacred book in the mythical mode, and some ‘analogy of revelation’” in other modes (315).

In our current age, the central, encyclopedic form consists of database, a term I will use interchangeably with digital archives, a move that requires some explanation. I use the term digital archive to differentiate digital from physical collections, and by digital archive I mean literary digital archives—specifically, databases with the purpose of collecting literary texts or manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera written by or pertaining to documents created and used by authors who are part of the “literary world.” Folsom comments that we often “hear archive and database conflated, as if the two terms signified the same imagined or idealized fullness of evidence” (“Database” 1575). Jerome McGann criticizes Folsom’s use of the term database, and Folsom replies that the Walt Whitman archive is, in fact, a database, when database is defined as “a vast vault of unseen data that are retrieved and organized by our metaphoric commands” (1609). It is impossible to write or talk of these archives without metaphors—namely words associated with print conventions and physical archives (as in Folsom’s “vast vault” in the previous sentence).

Manovich is less concerned with the technical types of databases than with their cultural implications, so his definition of database acknowledges the computer science definition while developing an argument about the social and cultural effects of database on narrative and on database as a genre. He contends that every web site is, in fact, a sort of database. The exchange between Folsom and McGann later prompts Price to argue that “in the course of denying the applicability of ‘database’ as a term suitable to the Whitman Archive, McGann overlooks that our search engine is entirely dependent on translating XML files into database form” (“Edition”). Price contrasts the “strict definition” of database as a technical term referring to a “collection of structured data that is managed by a database management system, most commonly based on a relational model,” and a “looser” definition that works metaphorically (“Edition”). At odds is how technical and precise to make the term database, and like Folsom, Price, and Manovich, I use the term metaphorically.

Ed Folsom argues that database is a new genre of the twenty-first century, but I argue that it is, instead, a manifestation of an old genre, the anatomy. I offer the metaphor of anatomy to describe the database genre not as just another trope to add to the list of metaphors, but as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. Kenneth Price suggests the term arsenal as a term for literary digital archives because the word derived from an Italian word for “workshop,” a term that emphasizes craft; the problem with the term, according to Price, is its militaristic connotation (“Edition”). While the term arsenal brings with it an etymologically-meaningful history and the emphasis on creation, I believe the term anatomy provides a richer metaphorical basis from which to consider literary databases. Because digital humanities scholarship is under development, any application of terminology presents a problem. Price discusses the current instability of terms for electronic scholarship and how our terms are inadequate, calling for a “new term that is vivid enough to be memorable, elastic enough to cover a class of like things, and yet restrictive enough to allow us to include some scholarly undertakings and not others” (“Edition”). Anatomy is such a term.

Visible and Invisible

Part of my 3rd Dissertation Chapter:

Remediating the Archive

Our idea of what is secret and powerful often depends on what we can see. As our technologies change, our ability to see more changes, and our notion of the unseen shifts to smaller and smaller scales or depths. Technologies that magnify develop alongside our efforts to display what we see; a history of technologies and representation is too large a topic to be covered here, but I will briefly compare early reactions to photography to our perception of digital reproductions. Conservative reactions to digital textuality are skeptical of the usefulness of computing tools and their claims of revolutionary potentiality, which mirror early reactions to photography. Folsom writes of how critics disparaged photography because of its “relentless appetite for details, for every speck that appeared in the field of vision” and how it “insisted on flaws and extraneous matter that a painter would have edited out of the scene to create beauty. But beauty, Whitman said, democratic beauty, was fullness, not exclusion, and required an eye for completeness, not a discriminating eye” (1575). Here, Folsom moves from a critical view of elaborate detail as excessive, to excessiveness as required for democratic beauty. That is, ornateness becomes inseparable from the communal—or, in the buzzword of digital humanities and new media—from access. Naomi Schor discusses how prior to the twentieth century, photography astounded people by its ability to render details that were difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye or that were otherwise ignored (47). As a medium, photography prompted people to notice what they had previously deemed invisible; invisibility could mean two things, both important to the following discussion—that the invisible was important because of its invisibility—secret and mysterious—or, that the invisible was disregarded (pun intended) because it was impossible to see.

Dissertation Introduction

Eakins, "The Gross Clinic," 1875

Here's a little piece of my dissertation introduction:

This dissertation project emerges from my desire to bring together my interests in digital media, history, and literature, a process allowed by what has come to be called “digital humanities.” My ideas align with those of the editors of A Companion to Digital Humanities, who argue that the goals of digital humanities include “using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology” (xxx). My project will theorize on and enact the construction of a literary database—or literary digital archive.

I seek to expand digital humanities scholarship and see this dissertation as an extended response to a forum on “The Changing Profession” from the Fall, 2007 special issue of PMLA entitled “Remapping Genre.” The forum included an article by Ed Folsom called “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” with responses by Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman, Katherine Hayles, and Peter Stallybrass. But my interest in the topic began to take shape a year before I read the forum when I encountered Patrick Leary’s article “Googling the Victorians” for a class and knew that my approach to literature would never be the same, that there was work in English studies working on the intersection of digital media and literature, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

I begin by considering the status of digital humanities as a nascent field. In the March, 2008 issue of The Nation, William Deresiewicz dismissed digital humanities as one of a host of problematic sub-fields in English studies that have led to the fragmentation of the discipline. Several months later in the Summer, 2008 issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Wendell Piez defended the field as a necessary contribution to English studies in the digital age by emphasizing the commitment to creation in digital humanities—the production of texts and not just textual criticism. In 2009, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp argue that digital humanities is not a “unified field but an array of convergent practices” that move beyond print and use digital tools in the humanities as the primary means of knowledge production and dissemination; furthermore, they see it as “generative humanities,” an interdisciplinary meta-field. Its theory is emergent, and writing within the field entails participating in creating its terminology. This dissertation addresses the need for a stable terminology while developing the definition of the database genre. What I call “digital epistemologies” grow from how information and technologies are used in combination. The aesthetics of our digital technologies, unlike those of books, are underdeveloped and under development, and digital humanities itself is under-theorized.

The acts of delimiting by definition and creating knowledge through academic research generate dissonance. Robert Scholes comments that academic research assumes a “progress toward more adequate descriptions of reality” (172). We set definitions and we resist them at the same time. Bruce McComiskey posits that the “disciplinary opacity” of English studies presents an obstacle in “both academic and public contexts,” and that some scholars want to avoid confining the definition of English in general (2-3). Likewise, digital humanities requires a loose definition. The word discipline carries with it the connotation of enforcement, power, and rule. Textual production and consumption—and subsequently, knowledge formation—work discursively, in combination, and often unpredictably.