Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Critical Spatial Scholarship


There was a brief moment as I read Matthew Wilkens' contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities where I felt swept along in the dream of a data driven English department. I imagined undecided freshman filing into their undergraduate education. They were confronted with an English department split into two tracks, one traditional the other digital, "data driven". The two tracks shared, of course, a core curriculum. Everyone read a bit of Shakespeare, everyone took at least a basic literary analysis course, and everyone at least heard the name "Foucault" in the same sentence as "sexuality" at some point in their education. Where the tracks differed however was in their commitment to the tradition of close reading or, conversely, to "distant" reading, perhaps even literary mapping (though Moretti's work gives us reason to question the validity of the word "map" to describe his kind of scholarship). The two tracks shared some classes together and spoke a similar scholarly language, but they also had the opportunity to specialize into the particularities of their particular reading commitment. I imagined something similar to a university's multiplicitous engineering offerings: computer, chemical, mechanical, electrical.

My reverie came upon me as I read Wilkens concluding remarks on the necessary displacement of scholarship that must accompany a move by the humanities into broader textual analysis. He says: "If we do that--shift more of our critical capacity to such projects--there will be a couple of important consequences. For one thing, we'll almost certainly become worse close readers." (256) For Wilkens, scholarship is a constant question of opportunity cost. It is this principle of opportunity cost which has kept the canon firmly in place, even after decades of poststructuralist fashionability. We are only so many eyes, Wilkens seems to suggest, and we must consider the cost of directing those eyes elsewhere, away from the two hundred or so sacral texts which anchor the discourse fields of literary scholarship. I will return to this idea in a moment.

Jo Guldi, in her series of blogs on the "spatial turn," seems to suggest a historically traceable trend in myriad fields of scholarship. She likens this "turn" to the linguistic turn with which English departments are far more familiar. Guldi explains that a "turn" is concerned with a retrospective reevaluation. It is the movement of a discourse field in the process of rearticulation according to a newly (re)introduced logic. Thus the spatial turn is the incorporation of spatial logics into seemingly disparate modes of knowledge production. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. Guldi locates the beginnings of the spatial turn in literature before the Civil War. However, in much the same way that digital technologies reinvigorated debates about the history of the book and the canon (even as they effaced the longstanding tradition of exploring both), Guldi sees new tools like GIS as a refreshing force in the application of spatial logic to other fields.

Franco Moretti certainly seems to agree by way of his experimentation with spatial logic in his "Maps" of Graphs Maps Trees. Though he admits that his spatial representations aren't really maps (a map, he says, would find value in a location "as such") they are certainly a spatialization of literary texts. While I like the approach, and I think that his diagrams of various village narratives from the nineteenth century present an otherwise hard-to-see set of information about the genre, it also feels strangely like a kind of close reading as well. The conclusions Moretti draws are, more than most of his claims throughout the text, founded in the question he starts with, and it is never quite clear why he chooses to arrange the texts according to the concentric circle logic that he selects. If this is a kind of shift in textual analysis toward scientific modeling, then it is a very strange shift. The methodology is comprised of thoroughly uninterrogated assumptions about the "best" way to represent the interior spaces of a given series of texts. It is also unclear how this particular methodology could generalize out to other genres of texts, and whether it would even be worth doing.

The diagrams in Wilkens' text seem to me to have much more utility. His net is cast broad enough and his methodology is distant enough from close reading that his conclusions are, I think, genuinely insightful. Sometimes, I am even surprised by what he finds. Most importantly for me, however, is the very specific revisions that his data suggests. This, to me, is the sign of productive scholarly work: surprising conclusions that when properly reckoned, bring about change in the body of knowledge to which it belongs. In the case of Wilkens, the revision is to "American regionalism," a critical historical construct with implications across a whole spectrum of humanities disciplines. I wonder if the difference between Wilkens' work and Moretti's isn't ideological motivation. Moretti's work, while interesting, remains inscrutable to me. It's lively, experimental, and evocative, but only sporadically does it have a political locus. Wilkens, on the other hand, begins with the clearly enunciated assumption that canons are in some way damaging to understanding the human activity we call "literature." This, I feel, is quite different from what Moretti does when his question already contains the answer, as it seems to in "Maps." Wilkens' question has less to do with a hunch about the nature of the texts and more to do with the conviction that these other texts that lie outside the purview of canonization are indeed worth investigation.

Perhaps what the digital humanities have been lacking is neither good ideas nor clever experimentation nor academic rigor. Perhaps it was merely lacking the spine of critique.

6 comments:

  1. I find our posts in odd conversation with each other this week though in a completely opposite way-- I am critiquing Wilkens' methods and enjoying Moretti's while you do the opposite. The reason I enjoyed Moretti's project was its connection and alignment with traditional close reading practices. Oddly enough, this is the very reason he rubs you the wrong way. You write of Wilkens: "His net is cast broad enough and his methodology is distant enough from close reading that his conclusions are, I think, genuinely insightful"... you go on to say that, through his distant reading, his project can have an ideological motivation. You seem to credit this to his use of distance, though, which I think is an unfair jump. There's no reasons close readings can't have an ideological motivation (depending on how you're defining close reading). I think, when it comes to distant or close reading, there are unproductive ways to do both--it's a matter of finding a happy marriage between the two in a way that aligns with your scholarly and political interests. There's no reason that Moretti's maps and visualization of narrative space could not lead to an argument with an ideological thrust--perhaps he applied this mapping tactic to, say, Uncle Tom's Cabin and is able to make a statement about race and power in relation to space. The point is, we need to unsettle our understanding close/distant reading from this binary construction we seem to be stuck in- it's not one or the other and one as good and one as bad. It's learning to use the tools on a spectrum in effective ways.

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    1. I have nothing to say except, boy does this sound provocative: "it's not one or the other [close reading or distant reading] and one as good and one as bad. It's learning to use the tools on a spectrum in effective ways."

      Have we seen someone use these approaches as tools along a spectrum? Does Moretti perhaps do *both*? What would that look like? I like the idea quite a bit; but does it threaten to pour oil over the roiling seas of a debate so fundamental (perhaps not close versus distant, but between ideological/aesthetic commitments) that it may not be so easily accomodated?

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  2. Your engineers have been knocking around in my brain --- my tech friends will tell you that not all engineering directions are created equal. At RIT there is something known as a 'packaging engineer' (naturally, the appellation draws lascivious mirth) - a friend in industrial engineering made explicitly clear that the 'packaging engineer' is the bottom of the barrel. You become him because you didn't get to do the kind of work you had come intending to do. The only point I'm making is that the split department fantasy (I endorse it in my post from last night) carries with it the specter of 'separate, but unequal'. This specter looms taller when we take into account the enormous funding given to the DH and the not-so enormous funding given to not the DH. Will a split department involve digital fellowships that are worth more than non-digital ones? Will applicants with computer skills become preferred in the field of English Literature? Will political conflicts in English departments arise between the camps (as there tend to be b/w 'language' and 'literature' people in Comp Lit depts)?

    Sorry, that wasn't the most productive response - I was just trying to make that Freudian move in which fantasies and anxieties coincide and give rise to one another.

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    1. I'm wondering how much different this would be from the way things currently are in English departments. Though we (taking the SU department as an example here) don't have the obvious DH/non-DH split, there is already always a hierarchy in terms of what projects get funding. Some inquiries/methodologies/projects are simply "hotter" in the academic marketplace than others, and the funding that those projects receive reflect that. It seems in a DH/non-DH split, it seems like the separate but unequal issue could manifest in a similar way, though it does not seem like it would be a particularly new sort of occurrence.

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  3. “Moretti's work,” you write, “while interesting, remains inscrutable to me. It's lively, experimental, and evocative, but only sporadically does it have a political locus.” This is fairly said. Ditto—two weeks back I called it insipid—the sense that Moretti’s “question already contains the answer.” About the politics. Wilkens’s rhetoric, as you say, gets hot here and there. But he’s not, I think, interested in ideology has heuristic/cudgel. We’re not wringing our bread from the face of the wicked (sexist, hetereosexist, patriarchal, &c) writer. How—and indeed what—he’d have us read won’t in the end allow it.

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  4. WRT Adam's comment regarding funding and "worth" to a department in terms of computer skills, I actually posted a tweet wondering whether, or perhaps more accurately, when, we should tackle the beast of funding in seminar. A large number of our readings have had sly praises and thank you's to the generous funding of Google and other such corporate entities. These thank you's seem most often to be directed at Google -- I think we still refer to Google predominantly as a tech company? -- in particular. I don't mean to foreclose on the possibility (and awkwardness) of a Larry Flynt Endowed Chair of Something in Eighteenth-Century Studies, but having specific projects funded from outside companies makes me raise an eyebrow. Granted, this is maybe something English departments, specifically, have yet to deal with while some in the humanities and many in the sciences have already come to grips with in terms of ethics. I don't know where I fall on this issue, but it seems to raise the question.

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