October 12 2017

Kathaleen McDonald

Dr. Wielgos

Senior Seminar

12 October 2017

Response Ten: Our Projects & The Future of Print

            I’m not really sure what I was supposed to gain from the three articles. Laura Mandell’s “What Is the Matter? Or, What Literary Theory Neither Hears nor Sees” just felt like a close reading of some of Wordsworth’s poems, Borges’s “The Library of Babel” was just straight up confusing, and Marija Dalbello’s “Circulating Culture for the Knowledge Continuum: Living History, Digital History and the History of Web” I feel just reiterated the fact that we are supposed to value digital history.

            Mandell’s article states a very important quote, I think, to the world of computing and digital humanities from John Unsworth, “’[h]umanities computing is a practice of representation, a form of modeling,’ it induces and intensifies our self-consciousness of the ‘practices of representation’ underlying textual production of any sort’ (Mandell, 756). I took this to mean that technology, especially computing, in the world of humanities really only serves the purpose of reformatting what is already in print. Mandell goes on to say “Attention to the digital therefore disrupts our view that textual materiality and physicality are identical, instead reconfiguring it as, in Hayles’s words, ‘an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies” (Mandell, 757). I think Mandell also makes an interesting point when she quotes Gunther Kress later on in the article, saying “’the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing. This in turn will have profound effects on human, cognitive/affective, cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of knowledge’” (Mandell, 767). I think what Mandell is trying to say is that looking at poems or other works of literature will not evoke the intended emotion or intended takeaway the author originally intended. I don’t necessarily agree with this. Although I prefer reading from print (because it’s comfortable for me and easier to make notes directly on the page), I don’t think reading a poem on a screen will change the poem’s meaning or how it is supposed to be interpreted. I think that only changes when we mess with the formatting. Making a poem harder to read than what it was originally intended to be read as is what I think takes away from the author’s intended purpose.

            I would’ve liked to have quoted from Borges, but I feel like I was on some strange acid trip reading his article. The “Library of Babel” and whatever its meaning is intended to be completely went over my head, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to gain from it as a student of English studies, especially in this class directed toward digital humanities. As for Dalbello, I agree that we should continue to document and keep with the change the internet is going through. Just look at all the changes Google has gone through. I think keeping in mind how constantly the internet is changing is important for students of digital humanities to keep in mind.