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.