THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
Saturday, February 20
2:30-4:00pm
Evolving Reading Practices
Room 208
- Katherine Liu, Folger Shakespeare Library, “The Folger’s Evolving Response to the Information Age: Digital Image Database” [abstract not available]
- Rachael Sullivan, University of Texas, Dallas, “Dickinson Meets DoubleClick: Remediating Poetry”
On the Internet—where banner, pop-up, and in-text ads interweave with content—literature and seemingly unrelated words and images collide. When poetry is remediated on the Internet, the boundaries we set between the poetic object and contextual frame become apparent as choices that are worth interrogation. Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears on a variety of scholarly and nonscholarly web sites, some of which are filled with online ads. Without a doubt, her words have come a long way from the manuscripts and fascicles that once filled the drawers of her desk in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet, tracing origins does not always bring clarity to texts. As Sharon Cameron points out in Choosing Not Choosing, unity or understanding is not produced through reading Dickinson’s poems in a fascicle context. “What is more radically revealed,” Cameron writes, “is a question about what constitutes the identity of the poem” (4). Online advertising, as it becomes more intrusive and targeted, also reveals questions about what constitutes a literary text and a poem in particular. The Internet is not so much a threat as it is a new textual dimension from which we can learn to be more attentive to language and the interpretive choices we make as readers.
- Austin Graham, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Digitized Blues: Listening to Langston Hughes in the Age of the Online Sound Archive”
The digitization of sound and the advent of the mp3 have made the music of the early twentieth century, once confined to the wax cylinder and the phonograph record, considerably more accessible than had been the case even ten years ago. As a result, twenty-first-century scholars are now enabled to resurrect the largely forgotten musics that once inspired artists of the modernist period. “The Digital Blues” explores these new interpretive possibilities by focusing on the blues poet Langston Hughes, finding that the online availability of century-old blues records — by black and white singers alike — situates his work within an interracial aesthetic that has too often gone unheard.
