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Emerging digital humanities scholarship concerns the relationship between database and genre. The Fall, 2007, issue of PMLA contains a forum on the topic. In her forthcoming dissertation, Elizabeth Vincelette will consider the generic aspects of literary digital archives and their implications for literary and historical studies in the humanities.

As part of the dissertation project, she will work with archival materials, focusing on a collection of letters and manuscripts relating to a run of The Independent, a nineteenth century Congregationalist newspaper that had its heyday in the Antebellum era. The paper focused on social and religious issues. Most materials in the archival collection are limited to the years 1880-1881.

In particular, Vincelette is interested in the writings by women in the collection. Materials include poems, short stories, and a number of letters exchanged between the authors and the editor of the newspaper.

In 2008, Vincelette received a scholarship to attend the DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The Institute (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) is located in Victoria, BC, and is housed at the University of Victoria. In 2009, she will attend again to take a second course in TEI, or the Textual Encoding Intiative.

The following is an excerpt from a synopsis of Vincelette’s dissertation project:

My study is about a type of website that doesn’t have a standard or agreed-upon name, but that is recognizable as a form. When grouped together, these websites can be considered as an emerging genre—literary databases with the purpose of collecting and recovering women’s writings from archives, or from obscurity. The writings collected at what I’ll call “digital recovery archives” belong to textual history, to literature and other textual forms filed in boxes in archives, spooled on microform reels, or perhaps moldering in someone’s attic—letters, diaries, scrapbooks, recipes, signatures, art. Creating a name and inscribing a working definition of the digital recovery genre would help understanding of how digital humanities might change the canon. How do we, or do we, inscribe limits on what we consider intrinsically worth knowing? While recovery archives do not fit an established literary category, they share characteristics and can be generalized. Considering genre means considering limits, a paradox when a digital archive is by nature potentially limitless. Yet a creator who singles out any subject sets limits—choosing women who were well known in their time and unknown in ours; women who never intended or expected their private writings to be exposed and published; or women who are now canonical, but were unknown in their times.
Scholars can control what exists online as “representative women,” but also can invite the expansion of their numbers, enlarging our understanding of women writers and how knowing them changes how literary history is known. In a brief overview of several case studies, as well as my own (ongoing) experience constructing a digital recovery archive, I will attempt to inscribe characteristic of this emerging genre.

To read more, visit Elizabeth Vincelette’s blog, Tech Tonics, at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/