Hello all,

My name is Andrew Keener, and I’m a first-year Ph.D. student in the English Department. It was truly a pleasure to join all of you on Friday to discuss a some meanings and complexities of digital humanities, and I look forward to the next session. Special thanks go to Michael and Jillana & all at the Kaplan Institute.

In this post I’ll share something about myself, as many of you already have, but I also want to briefly revisit some ideas in our Friday session (some of these points were touched on by Michael in the previous post). Much of my interest in the digital humanities results from my own interests in the history of the book and the literature of the Renaissance. I’m particularly interested in the circulation of Continental literary forms on the early English book market, as well as the collaboration among authors, printers, and booksellers. Fellowships and courses at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Rare Book School inspired me to take up bibliographic methods, and now I’m thrilled to have the Newberry so close by. I spend as much time as possible in the archive handling the artifacts, but I also find myself relying to a large degree on digital tools. For example: the uploaded microfilm copies in Early English Books Online (EEBO) with its corresponding Text Creation Partnership texts, the Electronic Short Title Catalog, and other digital scholarly projects like UToronto’s ‘Lexicons’ and Martin Mueller’s ‘Word Hoard.’ These are great resources and truly useful instances of scholarly service. I confess the material books still seem more like ‘texts’ to me, but combining rare book research with the available Renaissance digital scholarship has been a rich experience so far.

Friday’s session was very useful but my definition of digital humanities remains admittedly nebulous. I’m comfortable with Josh Honn‘s loose definition, though, mainly because it allows me to unite a series of interests that don’t fit normally under the rubric of a single department. Digital humanities, then (to reiterate), can refer to (1) the electronic scholarly resources we use to address our questions; (2) the publication of our work in electronic forms; and (3) scholarship about this transitional period between print and digital. As Claire Stewart said, though, we are still in the ‘dark ages’ in our understanding or capability with digital technology (for humanistic purposes or otherwise, I think),  and so I feel decidedly more comfortable with the first 2 parts of this definition until we have some historical perspective on the changes we are undergoing now. This presents exciting possibilities through which the academy might recuperate a public audience. Without a doubt, our current, theoretical understanding of print culture and other forms of media (TV, radio, etc.) come to our aid when we use or create projects like ‘Lexicons’ or the ESTC. But the issue is vexed; there is also value in delivering and reformatting the historical and literary record for future generations in ways that prioritize the presentation of the primary documents without imprinting them with a decidedly ’20-teens’ look. Just how to do this is the real question. I look forward to meeting again next time and thinking more deeply about these and other things.