In “Visualizing the Archive,” Whitley notes that “While digital visualization tools are poised to deal with a similar set of issues as those faced by our colleagues in the sciences and social sciences, some of the assumptions about reading expressed in the scholarship on information visualization tend not to sit well with scholars and teachers of literature” (192). Whitley observes that such a disparity arises from the differing natures of the documents that are the traditional objects of study in their respective fields. The gap is of course very marked across the scientific-literary divide, but I wonder about the differing sets of assumptions and challenges that exist across different literary subfields. The projects presented in the excerpts from “The American Literary Scholar in the Digital Age” that we read chiefly (and naturally) focus on American documents from the 19th and 20th centuries. While Burnard does briefly discuss the challenges of treating a text such as Beowulf, I would love to learn more extensively about how the use of the same digital technology is translated across the study of, say, a medieval manuscript fragment and Herman Melville’s draft of Typee. In “A Case for Heavy Editing,” Gailey mentions TEI’s “recommended vocabulary for the treatment of humanities texts” (131)–I wonder how this standardization (or the process thereof) accounts for the different sorts of document format, circulation, authorship, and readership that occur across the humanities.
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