The Literary, The Humanistic, The Digital: Toward a Research Agenda for Digital Literary Studies

Julia Flanders

What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Department?

Mathew G. Kirchenbaum

Hope Wilson

         I have recently began to personally utilizing computers.I actually carry my iPad daily on most days to read and research at my leisure. Just last year I was utilizing computers for school and work related concerns only. I now feel comfortable with my learn knowledge of some applications that I now research, make purchases, and download information when needed. 

       The digital humanity has become a popular concern of many scholars concerning the English department as well as public usage. As soon as I read the first couple of lines I too googled digital humanities and my results where on wikipedia also. The definition is the digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing. There are constant concerns of how to reinvent and improve processes like the success of the project of the “developed and tested standards and best practices for archiving and ensuring future access to computer games, interactive fiction, and virtual communities” providing the users with better applications. Digital humanities are encouraging change in the English Department. It provides options on how to research, teach, invent, and compute. The entire methodology of investigating, analyzing and how we present information in electric form have changed. This change will provide enormous amount of access to needed information and research. Although I consider myself to be “old school” I continue to enjoy going to a physical library and holding books in my hand as I read them. I have adjusted to the internet because it has its convenient. I am engaged in progress and inspired by the technical tools that are presently available to students and willing users. Although we must consider “The recession-era push to do more with less provides motivation for both defensive, retreating shifts (such as elimination of specialized departments and increased class size) and opportunistic ones (such as the creation of online educational programs that arguably serve to expand access and increase educational opportunities even while they help reduce costs). But both shifts reduce the visibility of the individual—reduce the proportionality, we might say, of the individual to the system. This is true whether we are considering the teacher (now an intellectual focal point for an expanding set of educational relationships that might number in the hundreds or thousands per course) or the student (now a proportionally smaller participant in larger and larger classrooms or online learning communities). It is important to note that both retreat and opportunity operate in the same way here: they accept the same structural premises, namely that the individual must be placed in ever greater subordination to a system of interconnections and that the efficiency and scale of the educational operation are the primary measures of its success—a developmental direction mapped out and justified by the logic of industrial technology,” may effect the transition of technology. We must also consider how accurate our look up has to be to receive exactly what we are searching. The library system is more convenient in that aspect. Considering the World Wide Web has enormous amount of information available to the seeker who are  knowledgeable of the process of researching information. We use to know exactly what we were getting in books and in the World Wide Web I am not exactly sure.