With the invention of the printing press communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed providing the condition of possibility for reformation and the Enlightenment of the Age of Humanism and the rise of mass media.The impact of print and the "Discovery of the new world was predicted by networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge and new culture and social sphere's.The invention of the electric telegraph, the heyday of colonization, the exploitation of the natural world, the electrification of cities, the rise of transnational finance, the internet, and "New" media of the radio, film, and television.Explosion of real-time social networking on hand-held devices these technologies have a common thing a contraction of time and space through the control of regulation of knowledge information and bodies In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating the potential democratization of information and exchange on the one hand and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other."
Key Points
Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being
Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before) (Presner, 2007 ).
Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority .
Today, the changes brought about by new communication technologies including, but hardly limited to, web - based media forms, locative technologies, digital archives, cloud computing, social networking, and mixed realities are so proximate and so sweeping in scope and signifi cance that they may appropriately be compared to the encounter with the New World and the dissemination of printing.
N. Katherine Hayles, I fi nd myself wondering as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] fi ve hundred years of print ”.
There is nothing neutral, objective,
or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions,epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.
we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been (and, to a large extent, still is) print, the burgeoning fi eld of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of “ materiality as the interplay between a text ’ s physical characteristics and its signifying practices, ” something that, as Hayles argues, allows us to consider texts as “ embodied entities ” and still foreground interpretative practices.
Walter Benjamin did in
The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.
Benjamin sought to employ the montage form to transform historical scholarship by refocusing attention on what it means to “ write ” history, digital media enable us to refocus on the media, methodologies, and affordances of print culture in the practice of Comparative Literature. At the same time, we must ask ourselves: What happens when print is no longer the normative or exclusive medium for producing literature and undertaking literary studies?
Situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that
have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities.
The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specificity of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kinds of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, finally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power. As a way of addressing such questions, I will briefly discuss three futures for “ Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age. I do not consider them to exist in parallel or isolation but rather as additive and synergistic.
Comparative Media Studies
Comparative Literature has been
positively infl ected by the so - called “ visual turn ” of the twentieth century, opening the horizon of comparative literary and textual studies to the fi elds of art history, photography, fi lm, and, perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent, television, digital media offer a more fundamental challenge since they not only transform the media assumptions built into the works we traditionally study but also the scholarly environments that we inhabit, the analytic and technical tools that we employ to perform our research, and the platforms we use to create and disseminate our work. More than just another medium, digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual.
Both of the foregoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the
World Wide Web. For Nelson, a hypertext is a:
" Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge."
Hypertextual or hypermedia documents deploy a multiplicity of media forms in aggregate systems that allow for annotation, indefi nite growth, mutability, and non - linear
navigation.
How, then, might Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web?Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies it investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing others.
Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone? (Barthes, 1986 )
Comparative Data Studies
In order to pursue quantitative questions such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as
qualitative, hermeneutical questions.
Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the fi eld of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large scale cultural data sets.Here is not to pitch "close" hermeneutical readings against “ distant ” data mappings, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities between a hyper - localized, deep analysis and a macrocosmic
view.
Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties.
The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in
terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic
strategy.
Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
The radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been signifi cantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer -to - peer sharing of content, and crowd sourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0.
Digital Humanities Manifesto, which
sought to perform collaborative authorship by utilizing the blogging engine, Commentpress.
The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the curation of knowledge the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedial constellations is somehow not the domain of literary scholars.
various issues of Vectors , a multimodal, multimedia humanities journal in which each “ article ” is a project that explores the complex interrelation between form and content, underscoring the “ immersive and experiential dimensions of emerging scholarly vernaculars across media platforms.
Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform.
While it is easy to dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable or to scoff at its lack of scholarly rigor, I want to conclude by suggesting that it is actually a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities and at institutions of higher learning, which are all too often fixated on individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment .
Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and refl ection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.
Conclusion
This Article has mainly focuses on 21 century in terms digital humanities after discussing various arguments we come to know that date it has than more three hundred millions edits forty seven languages. It is worth some pause and reflection in a future disciplinary incarnation of comparative literature. This research render this world as a world and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live and what that means.
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