THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
4:15-5:45pm
Saturday, February 20
Whitney Humanities Center
Theorizing the Digital Archive
Room 208
- Stewart Campbell, Columbia University, “Eugène Atget and the Digital Archive”
Art-historical self-critique through an analysis of the commercial practice of photographer Eugène Atget remains one of the great tasks undertaken in this discipline in the past 20 years. The most prominent example is Molly Nesbit’s Atget’s Seven Albums, published in 1992, which significantly altered the way art historians understand the archive’s place in historical research. This presentation investigates the institutional discourse of Atget’s work and argues that the Museum of Modern Art’s digital catalog extends the institutions careful editing of Atget’s work required to support the narrative of modern photography, which is often incompatible with the multiple discursive spaces that his images occupy. In comparison to its vast collection of his work, totaling around 3000 images, the 58 pictures visible online to the public are easily codified in aesthetic categories that were not the primary concern for Atget when he produced his them. As we digitize the exhibition space of photography, we must reconsider not only whether, and if so, in what ways, this space replicates the discursive possibilities of the physical archive, but also what methodologies we must produce for investigating and critiquing the role of power in digitally regulating the discourses of photographic history.
- Julie Meloni, Washington State University, “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text”
In this paper I build on recent and ongoing discussion among practitioners of humanities computing about the remediation of texts and the relationship between printed texts and their digitized counterparts, with specific regard to the impulse to capture and recreate the experience of the text in multiple dimensions. In the 2007 PMLA issue on “Remediating Genre,” esteemed literary scholars discuss the concept of the database and its potential uses and misuses with regard to digital scholarship, but this discussion lacks a certain technical depth and detail in the same way that a discussion about literary texts by computer scientists might lack certain critical nuances. After addressing some of the realities of technology that have gone missing in discussions surrounding the use of databases in the study of literature, I return to Jerome McGann’s theories of quantum and n-dimensional texts as indicated in Radiant Textuality and “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” and I offer a tangible starting point toward implementing a system that allows the scholar to study texts in the multiple dimensions McGann describes (linguistic, graphical/auditional, documentary, semiotic, rhetorical, social), both in isolation and combined.
- Alexandre Monnin, Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University, “What is a Tag: Digital Artifacts as Hermeneutical Devices” [abstract not available]
