Digital Humanities Masterplots
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18113/P8dls1159753Abstract
Digital humanities research has frequently been characterized by a high degree of recursivity, that is to say, by attempts to use digital humanities tools and techniques to reflect back on the structures and history of the field. Digital Humanities Masterplots is intended as a contribution to this ongoing project of self-analysis, but one that shifts attention away from actors, institutions, and research agendas and toward what Matthew Kirschenbaum refers to as the digital humanities as a "discursive construction." My aim is not to offer a survey of or an opinion piece on work in an emerging field, not least because a critical mass of such essays already exists. Rather, my primary material will comprise a series of second-order reflections on the field, and, more specifically, how they tend to emplot the rise of the digital humanities in order to render it intelligible within a range of intellectual, institutional, and societal contexts. Inspired by the narratologist Mieke Bal's assertion that "the shape of the story you tell determines what knowledge you produce," my claim is that the shapes of these digital humanities stories derive from certain basic assumptions about the aims of humanistic inquiry, and that by attending to them we can better understand an emerging set of positions regarding the role of the humanities as such.
Downloads
Additional Files
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
- Digital Literary Studies is freely published at no cost to its contributors.