Category: Digital Approaches to Literature
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Just When I Thought I Was Out…
Reader, it turns out dissertations have a great big gravity well, with the pull of a 1,000 black holes. Light can’t escape. Thoughts can’t escape. I can’t escape. Just a few weeks ago (weeks. ago.), I waxed poetical on focusing on the now. Look, I tried. My intention until, oh, about two days ago, was…
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Custom and the Law: Some Speculations
In 2012, at the end of a dissertation regarding the relationship between the literary custom sketch and the novel in the nineteenth century, I speculated that “the struggle between local laws and national laws only mask the struggle between customs and the law” (134). My larger point was that, in the context of maturing countries…
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To Network or Not to Network?
There’s nothing quite like a graduate seminar for encouraging you to like one approach one week, see it as intellectually bankrupt the next one, only to be redeemed weeks later. I have academic whiplash…or, better yet, I am currently the intellectual kombucha girl.
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Genealogies: Back Again
Yo sé que a ti te gusta el pop-rock latinoPero este reguetón se te mete por los intestinosPor debajo de la falda como un submarinoY te saca lo de indio taíno…No importa si eres rapera o eres hippieSi eres de Bayamón o de Guaynabo CityConmigo no te pongas pickyEsto es hasta abajo, cójele el triquiEsto…
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Computational Literary Studies: What’s the Point?
In “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Nan Z. Da levels a serious critique of, if not the whole discipline of digital humanities, then its golden child, computational literary studies (CLS). By CLS, Da means the use of computational and algorithmic tools for the use of literary study, specifically “distant reading.” Da’s critique of…
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Beyond Now
As I detailed in a previous post, I see in my academic and intellectual trajectory a push and pull between the past and the present (and, for that matter, between the humanities and the social sciences). But now that I’ve committed myself to the present, the question is: where exactly to begin? At first, this…
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Indexes, vindicated
In “Against Cleaning,” Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz make an important contribution to the question of methodology in the digital humanities, especially in relation to preparing and working with large datasets of humanities information. Drawing on their experience with the New York Public Library’s What’s on the Menu? public data, Rawson and Muñoz problematize the…
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Getting to Now
“I want to understand how [literature] presents different modes of thought, different conceptions of reality, how it both sustains and undermines language as a unifying principle of communication… I am interested in connections, not only in the intertextual links within one language or tradition but also the interrelationships and influences of languages, literatures, and cultures…
Javier Jiménez Westerman, PhD 