Overview
My name is Ben Smith – I am a first-year PhD student in English at Brown. This is a final project for Digital Storytelling, AMST 2699, Spring Semester 2017. It focuses on digital textual analysis. It is an extension of another project I conducted earlier in the semester on Voyant: https://digitalstorytelling.jimmcgrath.us/uncategorized/voyant-read-this-for-me/.
Debates, Major Issues, and Points of Contention for Digital Textual Interpretation
In an article for the LA Review of Books, David Golumbia spells out what seems to me to be the basic point of contention surrounding digital textual interpretation in particular, and Digital Humanities in general:
Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.