Amy Earhart

Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies , Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a clear, shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods--methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others.

After a hundred years / Nobody knows the Place: Notes Toward Spatial Visualizations of Emily Dickinson

This essay speculates on possible digital manipulations of the relationships between Dickinson texts—the letters and poems—and their spatial contexts and posits that such approaches are ripe for exploration by Dickinson scholars. The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive is used as a case study to explore how literature scholars might locate research questions that would be supported by visualization approaches. The article explores the potential for representational and interpretive approaches to visualization, positing that interpretive uses hold the most scholarly promise. Examining possible tools that might be used by scholars, including GIS and Neatline, the article argues that such tools help us, as Jerome McGann writes, “imagine what we don’t know.” The article ends by cautioning scholars to resist simple, positivistic spatial representations that fix representations. Instead, the article encourages scholars to use visualizations to disrupt, reorder, and expose new forms of inquiry.