JHFweek2Notes

Notes on Week 2 readings and topics

Folsom

NB the special topic for this PMLA issue is "remapping genre"; genre is a literary categorization and it's worth thinking about what analytical purpose genre serves outside of literary analysis: does it have utility for historians? For museum curators? Think as well about what other kinds of categorizations of cultural objects stand in its place in other disciplines

Genre is important because it's an example of how we intellectually model cultural objects as part of our study and consumption of them; think about:

• what work do models like this do for us?
• what are some other examples of models of this kind?

Interesting here that Folsom picks specifically the database as his model of digital representation, and the features that he notes in particular:

• "they do not have a beginning or an end...they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence" (1574)
• "collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other" (1574)
• "if...the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database" (1574)

Which is ironic, given that the Whitman archive is precisely not modeled as a database in this sense.

The new, database-driven biography (in his terms) is characterized by:

• a dialogue between the (incomplete) biographical narrative and the (complete) data archive that backs it
• a dialogue between assertions ("facts and claims") and "documentation"
• a dialogue between maps/photographs and "rich contextualizations" (which are narratives; so the dialogues go both ways)

Stallybrass

Think about the larger version of this metaphor that Stallybrass introduces: "database" as a way of characterizing an aggregative cultural urge; maybe a connection here to museums. 

NB Stallybrass's model of scholarship and the antagonists he sets up (e.g. those who might want to widen or preserve the gap between their own knowledge and that of their students)

NB Stallybrass's positioning of "originality" in the post-Romantic sense and the importance of a dialectical/dialogic approach to writing and thinking ("you are not, nor should you be, the origin of your own thoughts...Having your own thoughts in the literal sense is as impossible as having your own language...it's silly and unnecessary to attempt it" (1584). 

Freedman

Very important point toward the end about the soaring rhetoric of Folsom, Whitman, Google:

He points out Whitman's self-positioning as a "citizen" and considers this as a way of modeling audience and community: a combination of critique and engagement

Going to the Show

Reference points:

• "in-depth case study"
• "documentation"
• "searchable archive"

As part of my close reading:

• note interconnectedness of different types of data: theatres, people (managers), newspaper images, towns and other geography; however, the tabular display isn't an effective way of seeing connections
• importance of completeness in the data: as a reader, I feel stymied when there isn't consistent data across the entire matrix

Think about how special-purpose this project is.

In the searching, think about how hard it is to search if you don't know what data is there.

Questions

Is "database" as a genre relevant to museums? to historians? to literary scholars?