diss definition

It’s always hard to answer the question, “What’s your dissertation about?”

I have one answer for non-academics and another for scholars.

My own idea of what it is has changed over the last couple of years. I now see it as a “textual studies” dissertation more than anything else. For a while I wanted to say it was a “digital humanities” dissertation, which it still is, I suppose, but that was before I realized (after reading a bunch of things) that DH isn’t exactly a “field,” and that I’d better situate what I’m doing in a field.

Matthew P. Brown comments that if "textual studies" is "understood as a concern with the transmission of the book and the manuscript as physical objects taken up by human agents and conveyed through material media, we can begin to glean its relevance to studies of communication, interpretation, subject formation, and historical change" (81).

Brown’s definition suggests a broad notion of textual studies that incorporates the history of the book, including the most recent manifestation of textual evolution—electronic text. Within English studies, both textual studies and new media concern electronic textuality, as does the additional sub-discipline known as digital humanities.

Brown, Matthew P. “Cultural Studies, Materialist Bibliography and the New England Archive: Editing an Elegy from King Philip’s War.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 81-89. Web. Academic Search Complete. 20 September 2008.