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ALH Online Review, Series X 1 Amy E. Earhart, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 172 pp. Reviewed by Thomas Augst, New York University In contrast to other studies that take a broader view of the digital humanities as a multidisciplinary field, Amy Earhart’s Traces of the Old illuminates how scholars have adapted technology to assess "the impact of discipline on the emergence of digital literary studies” (4). Despite the potential for multi- or interdisciplinary approaches, digital humanities scholarship has still been undermined by the academy's traditional structures. By focusing on the development of digital literary studies within the last quarter century, Earhart demonstrates the continuity of critical and theoretical concerns within the larger discipline. Earhart identifies four major forms of digital literary studies that, taken together, yield a highly readable introduction and analysis of generational impact of technology on literary studies: editions, archives, cultural studies approaches, and data approaches. The later twentieth-century history of textual editing as an academic scholarly enterprise haunts digital literary studies. Since W. W. Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text” in 1951, Anglo-American textual criticism sought authoritative editions of literary materials, positing an “ur text marred by subsequent transmission,” as G. Thomas Tanselle put it (qtd. on 14). Practices of textual editing were guided by a faith in authorial intention, as well as a sense of responsibility or “correcting” works in accordance with them. Viewing their labors as antecedent to literary criticism, traditional textual criticism found itself increasingly at odds with the direction of literary scholarship, which by the 1980s was embracing broader, more amorphous accounts of textuality influenced by deconstruction. The material process of composition and publication crucial to establishing a “reliable” text through bibliographic research came to be viewed by many scholars as mere editorial work, ancillary or secondary to poststructuralist approaches increasingly dominated by the ”intentional fallacy,” the “death of the author,” and the instability of language more generally. In the meantime, a rising generation of textual critics, especially Jerome McGann, aimed to dismantle the seeming autonomy of the author with a “social text” approach that treated publication as process rather than event, and for whom digital media became in the 1990s a convenient means for bypassing longstanding economic constraints on the printing of scholarly editions, as well as a “hypertext” environment for reproducing more comprehensive textual histories. Earhart's account is especially persuasive in demonstrating the subsequent influence of a new historicist theoretical model that embedded texts within webs of relation and systems of textuality, and more generally pursued “thick description” of culture and © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
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2 ALH Online Review, Series X context with reflexive self-consciousness of the provisional, constructed nature of authority. The new emphasis on the archive furnished a model for the materiality and variety of discourse, as well as a trusted symbol of scholarly authority. As technology moved away from CD-Rom in the direction of open-access, Web-based production of scholarship, digital archives afforded practical means for representing the materiality of discourse and its social field. From McGann's pioneering work on the Rossetti archives and the Walt Whitman papers to the Willa Cather archive and Stephen Railton's "multimedia archive" Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture, digital archives came to include more diverse materials. In their commitment to generalized concept of "digital object," these projects obscured distinctions among object, image, text and document, "much as new historicists used the term 'text' to apply a lack of preference for form or genre or a baseline from which to begin criticism" (48). This capacious ideal of the “extensible” archive, constraints of money, scale, and form in the execution of digital projects have often "limited the produced archives to the point where the final product might be read as a collection of anecdotes," and, in their emphases on individual items reproduced New Historicism's "signature style” (54). Earhart argues that this generational commitment to the individual object or moment's power to disrupt systems and systems has made many in the discipline resistant to data-driven models of scholarship in the humanities, and renewed disciplinary tensions between history and literature scholars working in digital environments. Promising more democratic, open access to publication, early Internet ideology helped to fuel a boom in digital recovery projects from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Publishing biographies and primary works of women, queer authors, and authors of color, activists created relatively simple websites that consolidated virtual communities and, by making material freely available online, bypassed institutional mechanisms of scholarly validation and publication. This do-it-yourself ethos of digital tools helped to expose the “hidden” archive of lesser-known works and authors, but the rapid obsolescence of technology made digital recoveries unstable, or newly invisible within new databases in the cases where early projects has migrated to new platforms, as Earhart's discussion of the Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive makes clear. As the arena of digital humanities became more highly capitalized, oriented to expensive long-term projects, and as scholarly energies turned away from the canon wars more generally, recovery faded as a priority in digital literary scholarship. With the standardization of technology, the "vast majority of small scale, older recovery projects" among some thousand listed on the MLA bibliography" are invisible in current digital literary scholarship" (83), as Earhart notes. If the first three of Earhart’s chapters demonstrate the genealogy of digital literary scholarship in theories and methods central to the discipline—textual studies, new
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 historicism, and cultural criticism—the fourth chapter documents a field moving toward new kinds of interpretation employing computational approaches. With new emphasis on tool development, visualization, and data-mining, digital literary studies has replaced "the holistic text imbued with a materiality that represents the physical object with a fragmented object of study" (99). Transforming texts into data that can be manipulated algorithmically promises new interpretations of literature not available through traditional, humanistic modes of reading. But limitations of the data sets taken have made accurate findings impossible, leading Earhart to conclude that data mining's most productive use is for revealing gaps and anomalies, for showing “archival silences” as with Lauren Klein's analysis of the digital edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers. As this study arrives at our own contemporary moment, its writing becomes more polemical, closing with a noticeable rise in the imperative "we must." If Earhart's recommendations strike many readers as common sense, it is in part thanks to the critical history that precedes them. Less obvious, however, is the "we" to which they are addressed. Is digital literary studies a subfield? Or is this “we” more generally the community of scholars who are working within a discipline whose objects, methods, and spaces is adapting to tools and methods, and resources shared with scholars in other academic disciplines but also nonacademic communities? In clearly foregrounding lessons of digital technology's emergence within the profession's major intellectual debates, and succinctly distilling challenges and opportunities it offers students of literature, Earhart offers a useful introduction to digital humanities tools to literary studies. Not least of the challenges are institutional and disciplinary barriers to validating and supporting project-based collaboration and process-oriented experimentation within the humanities more generally. Only by integrating the affordances of new technology within disciplinary training and professional standards will literary studies develop lasting innovations in research and pedagogy needed to flourish inside the twenty-first century university.
