English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Hacking Literature: Reading Analog Texts in a Digital Age(2014) Dinin, Aaron; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evangelists of the digital age, in the immediacy of its adolescence, often describe digital technologies as "revolutionary" (e.g. "the digital revolution") and as having a world-changing impact on human cultural interactions. However, by considering digital media from a temporally scaled vantage point spanning thousands of years, Hacking Literature proposes ways in which the digital age might also be introducing "world-saming" technologies that are as likely to reinstantiate cultural norms as they are to create new ones. Hacking Literature finds evidence for its arguments by considering examples of similar technological innovations prevalent in "revolutionary" technologies of information storage and dissemination: that of differently mediated literary texts. Using arguably iconic examples from Homer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Dickinson (an epic, a drama, a novel, and poetry), and creating analogies between those texts and, respectively, the Linux kernel, Internet security protocols, the history of the World Wide Web, and the world's most successful blogging engine, Hacking Literature describes ways in which literary media and digital media appear to undergo similar kinds of technological transformations. The project then analyzes these similarities to suggest possible opportunities for using software development concepts as entry points for literary analysis, as critical lenses for reading that meld technology and humanities.Item Digital (In)Humanities: Re-reading Digital Archives as a Form of Cultural Expression(2009) Dinin, Aaron; Nell Smith, Martha; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A 2007 PMLA article discussing the Walt Whitman Archive juxtaposed narrative and database as competing forms of cultural expression. This article incited a flurry of responses which continued to use the database and narrative comparison. Dinin, in his article "Digital (In)Humanities," reassesses the terms of the digital archive debate, arguing that the terms "narrative" and "database" are both constricting and misleading. The juxtaposition shouldn't be database versus narrative to see which one becomes the dominant form of cultural expression because narrative, he argues, is a form of database. The more proper juxtaposition, as presented by the paper, is one that places "digital archive" alongside "narrative" because both are products of database and both are forms of cultural expression. Dinin, in his article, then goes on to explore the potential of digital archives as a form of cultural expression.