The Idiocy of the Digital Literary (and what does it have to do with digital humanities)?

Critical Writing
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2013
Journal volume and issue: 
7:1 2013
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CC Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
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Abstract (in English): 

What does the category of the literary give to digital humanities? Nothing and everything. This essay considers the "idiocy" of the literary: its unaccountable singularity, which guarantees that we continue to return to it as a source, inspiration, and challenge. As a consequence, digital humanities is inspired and irritated by the literary.

My essay shows this in three ways. First, through a speculative exploration of the relation between digital humanities and the category of "the literary." Second, through a quick survey of the use of literature in digital humanities project. Thirdly, through a specific examination of TEI and character rendering as digital humanities concerns that necessarily engage with the literary. Once again, the literary remains singular and not abstract, literal in a way that challenges and provokes us towards new digital humanities work.

Pull Quotes: 

The trajectory of the problem of the literary as digital can be unread, tracked, allegorized, and lost through a much more complex history that casts the discrete back into text encodings that include Morse and ASCII and FIELDATA, but also Viète and Bacon's ciphers. Still, you want the literary. You want me to address the literary in digital humanities, whereas all I do in this essay is speak to its absent efficacy.

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Scott Rettberg