What is digital English study?

Digital technology has opened up a world of possibilities for literary studies, from distant reading of texts on the macro-level to worldwide collaborative archival projects, but computers are just another tool that we use; what we do as English scholars has not fundamentally changed that much over the years. Gary Hall makes this point in “There Are No Digital Humanities.” He uses the phrase, “celebratory data fetishism” (which I love), to describe what some DH enthusiasts are doing. What I think is most interesting about the field, though, is thinking about digital content as legitimate literature, which can be analyzed using the same critical approaches that we have used to analyze print literature for decades. Tara McPherson, for instance, shows that programming languages can be understood in racial terms, in the absolutely fascinating article, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.”

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply