Kristine has posted some notes on a new Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies, in which this blog gets an honourable mention, along with Blogging the Renaissance and Renaissance Lit Blog, as early modern pioneers. Cool!
I’m certainly not going to nitpick that I’m an historian, not a literary scholar. It’s not as though we history bloggers ever have any problems co-opting folk from the Literature department as members of our little empire, is it now? One of the many good things about blogging is that boundaries are fuzzy, and long may that continue.
But it does seem a bit of a shame that the book, unlike recent guides to Digital History and Digital Humanities*, isn’t available as an online resource.
There’s something not quite right about a guide to digital studies only being available in a paper version. Can you have a completely meaningful discussion of digital artefacts that is paper-bound and hyperlink-less?
Oh yeah, and it’ll set you back the guts of £100/$200. I’ll bet that somewhere in its pages there’s something completely unironic about crisis in academic publishing and the prices of academic books…
………
*A quick Wayback check suggests that Blackwell made that Companion (pub. 2004) freely available online in 2006. So perhaps they’ll do the same with this one sometime next year.
4 comments on “Digital Literary Studies”
Yes, it is a strange experience to read about online sources without being able to click on them! I do hope that the volume will eventually be made available online by Blackwell, ideally with a comment function or perhaps even a wiki so that readers can add to the information gathered in it. The online version of The Digital Humanities has a button to send corrections to the editor, but there is no room for discussion.
The cluelessness seems a little strange, when you think about the potential audience for such a book/resource. Who would buy and read it, except someone who was already familiar enough to want the links/etc.? This is a great example of how the imperatives of academic publishing make it much harder for actual scholarly readers to take advantage of the scholarship.
Yes, it should be digital, bloggable, and updatable, given the subject matter.
DM
The Companion to Digital Literary Studies is now online!
[…] 9, 2008 · No Comments Thanks to Sharon at EMN and Kristine at Serendipities, I just saw that the Blackwell Companion to digital literary studies, […]