August 13, 2007
On Literary Criticism in the Digital Age
If Shakespeare had a hard drive, would we look differently upon the playwright? Matthew Kirschenbaum asks that question in The Chronicle Review, and his thumbnail answer is hard to dispute: “Details of his writing process and his life currently a mystery might be pitilessly exposed.”
If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not know anything definitive about Shakespeare’s original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things. We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open on his desktop. We would very likely have access to multiple versions and states of the file, and if Shakespeare had “track changes” turned on while he wrote, we would be able to follow the composition of a soliloquy keystroke by keystroke, each revision also date- and time-stamped to the second.
This is more than a simple thought exercise, writes Mr. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. Since almost all contemporary literature is “born digital,” today’s authors “will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past.”
Posted on Monday August 13, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Meet the Parents
Next: Debating the Cultural Impact of the Internet
Let’s get realistic. My luggable Kaypro’s don’t work anymore. Their floppy disks got smaller, morphed into CDs, and are rapidly becoming USB sticks. Stuff I have posted on the internet still survives, but only as long as institutions I have no influence over decide to keep it on servers. And such decisions will be made globally, not based on the quality of my work. If people “borrow” it for their sites it will be corrupted by them, not revised by me. Paper-based work products, selectively kept if worthwhile, and winnowed by the processes of time will retain traces of individual authorship. Otherwise all that will survive will be data mining techniques for searching for fragments of original thought and tryingg to put them back into some context. The tools of scholars will change, but the mission won’t.
— Bill S. Aug 14, 06:58 AM #
Bill S. is correct in that intellectual work product is a matter of intelligence and insight, not the delivery method of the words. Scholarship remains a mission of the mind. Humans are an inherently verbal species; written language is already an artificial means of communication brought about by the necessity to reach greater numbers of people more efficiently. Has the digital nature of written language changed that expedient? Or has it made Shakespeare and the like more accessible to more people? Wouldn’t it have been beneficial if Muhammad had had a hard drive on which to store his words, instead of having to rely on whoever was at hand to write them, and then having them destroyed before anyone had a chance to examine them? Distance and time have certainly changed the interpretation of the thoughts, but that would have happened even with digital means. The author’s intention cannot always be culled from the final product, regardless of whether the words are stored on a hard drive or parchment. However, the final product worthy of remembrance will remain timeless.
— Maryann Whitaker Aug 14, 11:03 AM #
I agree. Text on paper, so far, seems to have more of track record. I can go into an archive and read something centuries old. Without Eyeballs 4.0 and all the relevant patches.
I think more of a loss is no longer being able to see manuscript or hardcopy with hand corrections. Unless some writer uses something like the editing function on Word to time stamp every change, I think we’re going to lose that.
Though it is amusing to picture the debates about the authenticity of the First Folio, er, make that First Hard Drive.
— Stuart Aug 14, 02:46 PM #