Table of Contents
Digital Humanities and Comparative Study:
3. Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
The Present of the Comparative Literature:
Abstract
Todd Presner's seminal 2011 article, "Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline," explores how the digital humanities have transformed the practice of comparative literary studies. Tracing the evolution of literature from print to the era of groundbreaking technological advancements, Presner examines the impact of digitization on the field of comparative literature. This study builds upon Presner's arguments, delving into his exploration of comparative literary analysis in the digital age while also considering the significant technological developments that have occurred since his article's publication. It investigates how the rapid pace of innovation in digital humanities has further reshaped the landscape of comparative literature, offering new avenues for data-driven analysis, cross-cultural exchange, and interdisciplinary collaboration. By critically engaging with Presner's vision and assessing the present state of the field, this research aims to illuminate the continued potential of digital humanities to redefine the boundaries and methodologies of comparative literary scholarship in the 21st century.
Keywords: Digital Humanities, Comparative Study
Introduction
Todd Presener posits that the contemporary era is undergoing a watershed moment analogous to the epochal impacts of the printing press and European exploration of the Americas. Just as those seminal technological advancements catalyzed seismic epistemological shifts and reconfigured global power dynamics, present-day innovations in digital communications technologies portend similarly profound sociocultural transformations occurring at an unprecedented, rapidly accelerating pace. These developments necessitate the emergence of new intellectual frameworks and disciplinary methodologies to grapple with their profound implications across diverse spheres of human activity. Invoking N. Katherine Hayles' scholarship, he interrogates the centrality of print materiality that has historically underpinned academic approaches across the humanities. The rise of digital/electronic literature and textual forms disrupts assumptions of print as a neutral "conveyor of meaning", prompting a reconceptualization of materiality as the interplay between physical characteristics and signifying practices. This reframing enables considering texts as "embodied entities" while foregrounding interpretive practices suited to emergent media formats.
Surveying the "Digital Humanities" with large, Presenerr contends key issues around authorship, access, collaboration, dissemination, media forms, platforms, and scholarly legitimacy raise fundamental questions about how knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated across the 21st-century academy. Digital technologies afford radically democratized modes of global knowledge creation, authentication, and dissemination at an unprecedented scale by engaging previously marginalized technologies, communities, and epistemologies in these processes. For fields like Comparative Literature specifically, this technocultural shift mandates a critical reexamination of the discipline's foundations, methodologies, and potential futures as print becomes dislodged from its historical position as the preeminent medium for literary composition and analysis. It calls for interrogating how this dislocation reconfigures understandings of materiality, embodiment, authorship, and the institutional legitimation of knowledge production. (Presner)
Todd Presner, argues that comparative literature needs to adapt and evolve in the age of digital humanities.
Digital Humanities and Comparative Study:
The term "digital humanities," refers to the proliferation of digital media and the move away from print artifacts. He sees digital humanities as an interdisciplinary umbrella term encompassing practices for creating, applying, and interpreting new information technologies across the humanities. Digital humanities projects are inherently collaborative, bringing together humanists, technologists, librarians, and others.
While an outgrowth of traditional humanities, Presner believes the role of the humanist is more critical than ever as our cultural legacy migrates to digital formats. He argues humanists must engage deeply with digital culture, publishing, access, and ownership issues. The digital humanities manifesto he co-authored calls for this deeper engagement by humanists.
Presner outlines three potential futures for comparative literature in the digital age:
1. Comparative Media Studies
This approach foregrounds the formal material qualities, processes of production/circulation, institutional mechanisms, and cultural implications of different media formats - both new digital media and traditional print media. It investigates all media as knowledge systems bound up with power, institutions, and gatekeepers. Scholarly outputs need not be limited to text, but could incorporate multiple media elements and modalities.
2. Comparative Data Studies
With the massive proliferation of digital data (books, websites, social media, etc.), new computational tools are needed to analyze large cultural datasets - from mapping to data visualization to machine reading and text mining. Traditional close reading alone is insufficient for the scale of available data. This allows for quantitative textual analysis at a macro level while still permitting micro hermeneutic analysis.
3. Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
Digital media have lowered barriers to creating, sharing, annotating and remixing content through participatory platforms like blogs and wikis. This opens up new collaborative models of authorship. Design choices around interfaces, navigation, databases, etc. are part of how arguments are staged and need humanistic input. Platforms like Wikipedia represent innovative approaches to collaborative knowledge production worth examining.
Throughout, Presner stresses that digital media are not just another medium, but are inherently hypermedia, interconnected, and open to reconfiguration. This challenges traditional conceptions of authorship, texts, and the literary object. Rather than resisting these transformations, Presner argues humanists must creatively engage with and critique the design of new knowledge environments and media platforms.
While there is still early in this transition, the very notions of "literature" and "culture" owe much to the history of writing and inscription systems. Digital media constitute a fundamental shift in how cultural knowledge is produced, analyzed, and disseminated. Humanists can no longer ignore the materialities and affordances of different media forms.
Presner advocates augmenting the deep interpretive skills of hermeneutics with new quantitative methods and collaborative paradigms attuned to the scale, multiplicity and dynamic qualities of digital media. Comparative literature must move beyond traditional confines to grapple with the altered meanings, rhetorics and architectures of power emerging in digital culture.
The Present of the Comparative Literature:
The aim of the comparative study is to analyze more than two texts written in different languages, cultures, and nations. Todd Presner rightly observes that digital humanities will change the ways of comparative studies.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning
NLP techniques have revolutionized computational literary analysis by allowing researchers to analyze large textual datasets in unprecedented ways. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, has been used to identify latent themes and topics within literary texts. Sentiment analysis algorithms have been applied to analyze the emotional tone of literary works, providing insights into character emotions and narrative arcs. Mohammad (2011) developed a sentiment analysis system to study the portrayal of emotions in literary texts, demonstrating its application on a selection of novels. Named Entity Recognition (NER) algorithms have been used to automatically identify and classify named entities such as characters, locations, and organizations within texts, facilitating analysis of character networks and geographical settings. Bamman et al. developed BookNLP, a tool for extracting and analyzing character networks from literary texts using NER and coreference resolution techniques(Bamman et al.).
Increased Digitization
Initiatives like the HathiTrust (“HathiTrust”), Google Books (“Google Books”), and the Internet Archive have vastly expanded the corpus of textual material available for computational analysis in comparative literature studies. These large-scale digitization efforts have made millions of books, including many rare and non-English texts, accessible in digital formats.
This wealth of digitized source material opens up new avenues for data-driven literary research that were previously prohibitive due to the physical limitations of accessing scattered print collections. For instance, computational techniques can now be applied to analyze macro-level trends and patterns across thousands or millions of digitized books simultaneously. One area where this proves powerful is in studying the evolution of literary genres over long periods of time and across cultures. Researchers can deploy techniques like topic modeling and stylometric analysis on massive digitized corpora to map how genre conventions, narrative styles, and thematic preoccupations shift gradually through different literary movements and eras. This longitudinal view was virtually impossible with limited access to physical books.
Another application is in comparative studies of different translations of the same literary work. With digitized versions easily accessible, scholars can examine how a canonical text gets reinterpreted and adapted when rendered into different languages and cultural contexts. Automated textual comparison algorithms can surface subtle nuances and deviations that a human alone may miss.
Moreover, the digitization of rare texts from small linguistic communities and non-European traditions vastly expands the range of primary source material available to comparative literature researchers. Works that were previously confined to a few archival collections can now be studied globally by anyone with digital access. Formerly marginalized literatures can be incorporated into the canon. That said, there are well-founded concerns around quality control, copyright issues and systematic biases in the texts being digitized. But overall, mass digitization has been a democratizing force, allowing scholars to move beyond the limitations of physical library holdings and elevate comparative literary inquiry to a broader, data-rich scale.
Data Visualization
Powerful data visualization tools have emerged that allow literary scholars to represent and explore complex textual data in more intuitive visual formats, revealing patterns and relationships that may be difficult to discern through textual analysis alone.
For instance, Voyant Tools, an open-source web-based application developed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, provides a suite of interactive visualizations tailored for text analysis. Using Voyant, scholars can generate word clouds that highlight the most frequent terms in a text, with sizing and color-coding to distinguish significance. Network graphs map the relationships between words, characters, or other textual entities based on co-occurrence or other metrics. Temporal plots visually track the narrative arc by plotting the density of events or references over the course of the text. Sinclair and Rockwell showcased how Voyant Tools can be used to create interactive visualizations of textual data, such as word clouds, network graphs, and temporal plots of narrative events, facilitating the identification of patterns and relationships within literary texts. (Sinclair and Rockwell)
These visualizations facilitate the identification of patterns, outliers and structural elements that may go unnoticed through traditional close reading methods alone. Voyant allows seamless toggling between the visualization and source text to connect insights back to the original material. Its web-based interface also enables easy sharing and collaboration around datasets. Similarly, business intelligence tools like Tableau have found applications in literary studies by allowing scholars to build rich, interactive dashboards integrating multiple views into a text corpus - from metadata distributions and sentimental arcs to character networks and semantic models extracted via natural language processing techniques. Such multi-modal visualizations provide a holistic, exploratory environment for generating novel insights and testing hypotheses about literary works at scale.
Data Visualization
Powerful data visualization tools have emerged that allow literary scholars to represent and explore complex textual data in more intuitive visual formats, revealing patterns and relationships that may be difficult to discern through textual analysis alone.
For instance, Voyant Tools, an open-source web-based application developed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, provides a suite of interactive visualizations tailored for text analysis. Using Voyant, scholars can generate word clouds that highlight the most frequent terms in a text, with sizing and color-coding to distinguish significance. Network graphs map the relationships between words, characters, or other textual entities based on co-occurrence or other metrics. Temporal plots visually track the narrative arc by plotting the density of events or references over the course of the text.
These visualizations facilitate the identification of patterns, outliers and structural elements that may go unnoticed through traditional close reading methods alone. Voyant allows seamless toggling between the visualization and source text to connect insights back to the original material. Its web-based interface also enables easy sharing and collaboration around datasets.
Similarly, business intelligence tools like Tableau have found applications in literary studies by allowing scholars to build rich, interactive dashboards integrating multiple views into a text corpus - from metadata distributions and sentimental arcs to character networks and semantic models extracted via natural language processing techniques. Such multi-modal visualizations provide a holistic, exploratory environment for generating novel insights and testing hypotheses about literary works at scale.
Spatial Humanities
Geographic information systems (GIS) and digital mapping platforms have enabled new modes of spatial literary analysis by allowing scholars to visualize and investigate the geographic representations and spatial dimensions within texts.
For example, in a 2009 article, scholars Shawn Caquard and William Cartwright demonstrated how interactive digital mapping tools could be leveraged to map and analyze narrative spaces in literature. Using a platform called Cybercartographic Atlas of Canadian Fiction, they constructed rich spatial visualizations of movement, place descriptions, and landscape representations extracted from canonical novels like Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. This mapping process revealed nuanced relationships between literary space, real-world geography, and the experiences of characters.
More recently, open web-mapping libraries like Mapbox and Carto have made it easier for humanists to build custom geographic visualizations and storytelling applications without extensive GIS expertise. Projects like the Scholarly Clusters Mapping Tool at Stanford map out the geographic footprint and citation relationships of literary scholarly clusters worldwide based on publications metadata.
Such spatial humanities projects allow literary scholars to analyze texts through a geographic lens - tracing the routes of characters, correlating settings to real places, or detecting spatial patterns in imaginary spaces constructed by the author's narration. This spatial grounding provides new contextual insights into literary works while methodologically extending comparative literature into the geographic information sciences.
Born-Digital Objects
The scope of literary inquiry in the digital age has expanded beyond printed texts to include the analysis of digital-native or "born-digital" narrative objects and new media storytelling artifacts. This emerging area bridges literary theory with insights from fields like videogame studies, new media narratology, and electronic literature.
A pioneering voice is N. Katherine Hayles, who has extensively studied and critiqued early works of electronic literature and hypertext fiction. In her book Electronic Literature, Hayles examines how attributes intrinsic to digital media like networked communications, multimedia integration, and procedural operations give rise to new narrative possibilities that challenge traditional print conventions around linearity, authorship, and audience engagement.
For instance, Hayles analyzes works like Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story which presents itself through an exploratory hypertext interface, requiring the reader to construct their own path through the fragmented narrative by following different links. Such unconventional formats upend assumptions about narrative coherence and destabilize the author-reader relationship.
Similarly, game studies scholars like Astrid Ensslin have explored how narrative theory needs to be reframed when applied to videogames and other interactive digital storytelling environments. Since the viewer/player has agency to shape the unfolding events through their choices and actions, traditional Aristotelean models of plot progression prove inadequate. Ensslin develops new analytical frameworks for identifying narrative techniques adapted to these ergodic media forms.
As born-digital storytelling artifacts become more prevalent across platforms like social media, virtual worlds, and mixed reality experiences, literary scholars are expanding their methodological toolkit to critique these non-linear, multi-modal, and interactive narratives. This challenges conventional boundaries and forms the vanguard of comparative literature in the digital realm.
Open Data & Collaboration
The spirit of openness, sharing, and collaborative research has taken firmer root within comparative literature and digital humanities. This has been enabled by the growth of public data repositories, version control systems, open publishing models, and virtual workspace tools.
On the data front, initiatives like the Open Literature Data Initiative (OLDI) aim to create large open datasets of literary texts formatted for machine readability and computational research. OLDI's mission is to build a community-driven corpus spanning multiple languages and literary traditions to foster more inclusive and data-driven comparative studies. Such open datasets lower the barrier to entry, allowing researchers globally to access quality textual data without copyright obstacles. Tools like Git and platforms like GitHub have enabled literary scholars to collaboratively develop, share, and iterate on analytical code bases and data pipelines. Just as large software projects leverage distributed version control systems, research teams can use Git to seamlessly merge their contributions, maintain version histories, and ensure transparency/reproducibility of their computational workflows. Virtual workspace platforms like Google Docs, Slack and Microsoft Teams have facilitated remote synchronous writing, editing and communication around literary research. The ability to share drafts for real-time collaborative editing, engage in discussions, and coordinate tasks - all virtually - has accelerated the pace of teamwork and opened up new distributed models of knowledge production.
Open-access publishing of literary research, whether through pre-print repositories like ArXiv or open monograph initiatives, has improved the reach and impact of scholarly work by making it freely accessible to global audiences. Alejandra Dubcovsky's Born-Digital Scholarly Multimedia allows digital humanities scholars to publish interactive, multimedia monographs embedding visualizations, software, and data.
Immersive Environments:
Technologies like virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) have the potential to transform the way we engage with literary texts by creating immersive environments for readers. Projects like "The Great Gatsby for Oculus Rift" recreate scenes from the novel in virtual reality, allowing readers to explore the world of the text in a new and interactive way . Tools like Twine enable authors to create interactive narratives that readers can navigate and shape through their choices, blurring the lines between author and reader.
The landscape of tools, infrastructure and methodologies available to digital humanities and comparative literature scholars has expanded rapidly in the last decade, powered by advances in AI, ubiquitous computing and shifting paradigms around open access and collaborative research practices. This allows for novel interdisciplinary connections and mixed methods that were unimaginable just a decade ago when Presner's articulation of the three futures was written. The accelerating pace of technological change will likely continue reshaping scholarly inquiry in the comparative literature space in unpredictable ways going forward.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the digital age has ushered in transformative technologies that are fundamentally reshaping how literary scholars approach, analyze, and recreate texts. From visualizing complex textual data to mapping the spatial dimensions of narratives to critiquing born-digital storytelling artifacts, the methods and scope of comparative literature have expanded dramatically. The spirit of openness, collaboration, and public accessibility enabled by digital tools and platforms is democratizing literary inquiry on a global scale. Perhaps most profoundly, immersive technologies are blurring the boundaries between the textual and experiential, allowing audiences to inhabit the narrative worlds of literary works in multi-sensory, embodied ways. As these technologies continue evolving, they will catalyze new genres of interactive digital literature crafted around the unique affordances of computational media. While these digital approaches present exciting possibilities, they must be balanced with traditional humanities skills like close reading and critical interpretation. The future of comparative literature lies in forging novel syntheses that leverage both the depth of humanistic inquiry and the strengths of digital methods. By embracing this synergy, literary scholars can generate richer understandings of how stories and texts help shape cultural meaning across contexts and media forms. The digital revolution challenges us to reinvent the very nature of literary research for the 21st century.
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