Sam's Senior Seminar Blog: Digitalizing English Studies

The first known usage of computer-assisted literary study took place in the 1960’s where they converted a text into an electronic version and used the new medium to detect strings of words and patterns—essentially what English scholars do during a close reading of a text, except with a little helping hand from technology. Over time, this method evolved and now literary computing has become more prominent, especially with the rise of technology in every other aspect of society. Some might fear that literary computing will antiquate the study of the literature, however, the computer is merely a tool without any ability to analyze a text; it points out patterns on the surface of the text and it’s still up to the reader to analyze those patterns in order conclude how they create meaning. Literary computing is still in its infancy and many critics of this new methodological excavation explain that it needs to be clarified that the computer is just a tool in the early stages of the analyzat

In Johanna Drucker’s essay, “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation”, she explains that, with our advanced tools, we are able to make a text so much more than words on a page (physical page or webpage). Prior to the late 20 th century, people had to use typewriters to write and inking words onto a page was literally all those machines were capable of. Why is it then do people’s printed documents, created on highly developed computers, still look like they were typed on a typewriter? According to Drucker, people aren’t entirely aware of how much they can manipulate a page on a computer and it’s frightening because once the elements of a text beyond the content becomes a normal aspect of composition, people might have a difficult time processing what they are reading because it so multimodal. We are in an age where design is just as important as content, if not slightly more important because the way something looks at a glance is what will cause someone to read it or not. Concrete

William Gibson’s strange, but alluring, poem entitled Agrippa pulls the reader in like a Google search and doesn’t let her stop reading until she’s exhausted every tab (or line). Poems, an ancient form of artistic literature, have been continuously and persistently written for thousands of years, Homer being one of the earliest poets of our time on this planet with work dating back to ancient Greece. Gibson, a contemporary of Homer’s, transforms this tried and true art form into something that it has never achieved before which brings into question the genre Gibson is writing in because his poem transcends lines and stanzas to computer code. A reader might wonder if what Gibson wrote, essentially a documentation of his and his father’s childhood, is even a poem at all because it utilizes a different means of communication beyond a pen and paper: codes. Gibson is writing with a new language, one that only recently popped up in the 1980’s with the birth of the computer. What Gibson is d