Do new modes of literary and cultural production require new methods of analysis and assessment? With this question in mind, the following monthly column aims to present and discuss important changes in the practice of literary criticism and research derived from developments in digital technology in the Humanities. The practices and theories examined will be assessed in the interest of designing new research paradigms for literary studies that are:

• more information-centred, as they work at a higher level of abstraction
• interactive with the scholar, using proactive software with respect to the literary work
• multifunctional and integrated

To read an object digitally or in an information-centred manner means more than recognising its format as binary encrypted pixels. The digital text demonstrates an entirely transformed relationship between texts. Where traditional print archives present networked information as a more or less centralised system composed of independent sources of content, the digital text suggests a more dynamic, inconsistent arrangement, where the meaning of any single “node” of content literally depends upon the connections informing it. Hence, interpreting a text digitally becomes at a fundamental level an exercise in data placement or mapping, where various formatted components of information within texts can be configured and reconfigured according to pre-determined frameworks of meaning – for example, cultural, semantic, grammatical, etc.

Welcome to the Department of Imagination, Design and Translation

Disciplines in language or linguistics will configure meaning according to semantic or grammatical templates, whereas in the arts, these configurations are usually discussed and analyzed in relation to the following “culture-oriented” categories: the imagination, design/rhetoric and translation. In other words, a literary critic may consider herself to be primarily an interpreter and assessor of narrative/poetic forms, but if one looks beyond cultural genres, very basic questions concerning the existence or function of specific imaginative faculties in relation to the design or interpretation of social argument emerge as central dilemmas informing all work in this area. In the present “digital” era of high media convergence, it may become increasingly important to reconsider such questions, as fewer and fewer formal distinctions between cultural genres seem critically relevant. When texts and images and sound, for example, suddenly appear literally as the same medium, how does a literary field of study distinguish itself from a linguistic one? English literature will likely continue to find more scholarly and critical areas of common interest with disciplines in visual culture compared to linguistics, but what formally links the two will be specific references to culture-oriented categories like those described above. Could the digital medium thus compel new department titles to emerge, promoting more overt collaboration between traditional Humanities fields? Will we see a department of Imagination, Design and Translation materialise in the near future? With the erosion of genre-specific modes of interpretation, departments on the whole might soon find themselves re-defining their critical and pedagogical objectives accordingly. As with the original development of the Humanities disciplines, much of the deciding factor of how the fields will evolve will depend upon what technologies are available for presentation and analysis. Just as slide projectors and dictionaries can be considered examples of older tools that kept the disciplines of Art History and English fairly autonomous, new software programs that work with digital information as frameworks of imagination or design will encourage more collaborative models of pedagogy. Some examples next month!