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Sunday, March 4, 2012

Whitson on Archives and Digital Humanities

I was happy to read this because it referenced the OOO idea of nonhuman agency. It also discussed the notion of an archive, which I'd been thinking about a bit recently with a view to OOO:

When you teach a poem in a literature class (which I've been doing frequently), you seem to have a choice between contextualizing the poem and close reading it. This is a silly choice. One reason why it's silly is because the context is often assumed to be within a narrow, ill defined human bandwidth: say 1600 to 1650 for a Shakespeare sonnet (tops).

But here you are, it's 2012 and you are also reading the poem. It has that context too. It's better, though more complex (and thus far more interesting and realistic) to think the poem as caught (and not caught) in many different networks of agents, from anthologies to Victorian readers to your classroom.

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