Thinking Activity: Unit 2: Comparative Literature
Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.
♻️Unit: 2, 4: Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?
🔅Here is the video recording of the presentation
🔅Here is the presentation presented in above video:
♻️Unit: 2, 5: Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline.
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This Article is explained by Hirva Pandya and Vachhalata Joshi, students of the English department MKBU.
After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.
👉Key Arguments:
Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?
Comparative Literature since they raise questions that have formed the methodological, disciplinary, and institutional foundation of a wide - range of academic fi elds in the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies
If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer.
The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specifi city of the digital medium vis - Ã - vis other media formats, the various kinds of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, fi nally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power.
Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Google has already digitized and indexed more than ten million books, allowing scholars to perform ever - more complex searches, discover patterns, and potentially export large datasets derived from the digital book repository into other applications (such as Geographic Information Systems) in order to pursue quantitative questions such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as qualitative, hermeneutical questions. Spurred by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the fi eld of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past fi ve years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Such datasets might include historical data that have been digitized, such as every shot in the fi lms of Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and content of every magazine published in the United States in the twentieth century, or the collected works of Milton, not to mention contemporary, real - time data fl ows such as tweets, SMS messaging, or search trends. Because meaning, argumentation, and interpretative work are not limited to the “ insides ” of texts or necessarily even require “ close ” readings, Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. My point here is not to pitch “ close ” hermeneutical readings against “ distant ” data mappings, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities between a hyper - localized, deep analysis and a macrocosmic view.
♻️Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline
Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before)
Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.
N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.
Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.
Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.
The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
- Comparative Media Studies
- Comparative Data Studies
- Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
1, Comparative Media Studies:
For Nelson, a hypertext is a:
Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.
Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing other.
Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
2, Comparative Data Studies:
Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.
Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.
As Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.
The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
3, Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies:
While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. We no longer just “ browse ” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement. This is an economy based on abundance, creative commons, open access, and the proliferation of copies, not one based on scarcity, property, trade secrets, and the sanctity of originals, although, as James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind.
Comparative literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a decisive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and platform studies.
Conclusion:
This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.
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