Digital Scholarship, Economics, and the American Literary Canon

Abstract

This article explores the nature of the newly emerging digital canon of American literature, a canon that is developing partly by design and partly by chance. Whether in mass‐digitization projects or in electronic scholarly editing, there is a strong predominance of electronic projects devoted to the study of literatures and cultures from the nineteenth century or earlier (copyright restrictions limit work on later periods). In addition, though some of the material needed for American literary study is publicly accessible, a significant amount of material is available only via subscription. Yet only some libraries can afford electronic access and only some users have university affiliations – thus the availability of information is limited significantly. Problems are especially acute for independent scholars and those at smaller or under‐funded institutions who often lack access to fee‐based resources. Ventures like Google Book Search admirably make massive numbers of books widely available to readers, but such projects lack the structures useful for advanced work. When scholars attempt to create a digital scholarly edition (sometimes called an ‘archive’ or a ‘digital thematic research collection’), and insist on rigor and a full critical apparatus, we trade Google's equalizing treatment of texts for a highly specialized and inevitably expensive treatment of a limited number of texts.

The Literary Canon in the Age of New Media

“…To canon theorists, studying new media is of additional interest, because "inasmuch as canon formation does not stop with or in newest media, it can be studied closely there, in the test-tube of the computer screen" (Gendolla 2002: 96;my translation). Similar research exists in English, but it is, again, largely oblivious of the German endeavors (Mactavish 2013;Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin 2004;Price 2009). …”

Digital Humanities’ Shakespeare Problem

“…The well-supported Shakespeare Quartos Archive raises another reason for author-centric approaches, namely, existing funding models. As Jamie "Skye" Bianco (2012) explains, "digital humanities is directly linked to the institutional funding that privileges canonical literary and historiographic objects and narratives" (see also Price 2009). In her review, Desmet unpacks the project's "rationale for a focus on Shakespeare's quartos" (Desmet 2014, p. 143): the rarity and fragility of the material objects; their locations in libraries around the world; and the lack of Shakespearean manuscript texts.…”

“…It has been well-documented that major digital literary studies projects often focus on canonical authors. There is excellent work on the biases of digital humanities projects, particularly in relation to the status of women writers (see, for instance, Wernimont and Flanders 2010;Mandell 2015;Bergenmar and Leppänen 2017) and the canon of American literature (Earhart 2012;Price 2009), yet comparatively few scholars have critiqued how digital humanities overrepresents perhaps the most canonical figure in all of English literature: Shakespeare. "Shakespeare and Digital Humanities" has been and continues to be a fruitful area of research, with special issues of Shakespeare (Galey and Siemens 2008), the Shakespearean International Yearbook (Hirsch and Craig 2014), RiDE: Research in Drama Education (Bell et al, forthcoming), and this issue of Humanities.…”

The Kingdom has been Digitized: Electronic Editions of Renaissance Drama and the Long Shadows of Shakespeare and Print

“…26 26 As Kenneth Price notes, ‘various experiments with peer review mechanisms are now underway’ (‘Digital Scholarship’ 275), pointing to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) EDSITEment portal and to NINES as examples. …”