A comprehensive overview into digital literary studies that equips readers to navigate the difficult contentions in this space. The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. You may have heard of the digital humanities--and what you may have heard may not have been good. Yet like an oncoming storm, the relentless growth of the use of digital methods for the study of literature seems inevitable. This book gives an insight into the ways in which digital approaches can be used to study literature and the ways in which humanistic study can be used to explore digital literature. Examining its subject across the axes of authorship, space, and visualization, maps and place, distance and history, and ethical approaches to the digital humanities, this book introduces newcomers to the topic while also offering plenty for seasoned digital humanities pros. Combining original research with third-party case studies and examples, this book will appeal both to students and researchers across all levels who wish to learn about digital literary studies.

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others.

Digital Humanities for Literary Studies introduces readers to an intuitive range of computer-assisted methods and techniques suited to literary criticism. It describes a selection of the most popular approaches currently being applied by digital humanities scholars, providing both a technical explanation of these methodologies as well as a guide to key theoretical considerations. This edition includes the theoretical underpinnings necessary to understand the fundamentals and purpose of a particular methodology, while each chapter links to a companion website with supplementary materials intended to help readers apply techniques to their own research. Digital Humanities for Literary Studies equips readers with a stronger understanding of how computation can assist in literary criticism. It offers a critical and practical overview of the technical and literary considerations involved in digital humanities approaches to literature, a survey of the tools used, and examples of how one might go about conducting text analysis with computers. Comprised of contributions from some of the pioneers of digital humanities, this essential new resource sheds light on the ways in which the digital humanities can be used to compel, interpret, and re-examine ways of reading.

Literature in a Digital Age: An Introduction guides readers through the most salient theoretical, interpretive, and creative possibilities opened up by the shift to digital literary forms such as e-books, digital archives, and electronic literature. While Digital Humanities (DH) has been hailed as the 'next big thing' in literary studies, many students and scholars remain perplexed as to what a DH approach to literature entails, and skeptical observers continue to see literature and the digital world as fundamentally incompatible. In its argument that digital and traditional scholarship should be placed in dialogue with each other, this book contextualizes the advent of the digital in literary theory, explores the new questions readers can ask of texts when they become digitized, and investigates the challenges that fresh forms of born-digital fiction pose to existing models of literary analysis.

How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation, literary analysis, and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading, editing, and writing will be relevant for several fields, including literary studies, scholarly editing, software studies, and digital humanities.

This Companion offers an extensive examination of how new technologies are changing the nature of literary studies, from scholarly editing and literary criticism, to interactive fiction and immersive environments. A complete overview exploring the application of computing in literary studies Includes the seminal writings from the field Focuses on methods and perspectives, new genres, formatting issues, and best practices for digital preservation Explores the new genres of hypertext literature, installations, gaming, and web blogs The Appendix serves as an annotated bibliography

"By casting the collection explicitly as an outreach to the larger community of Americanists---not primarily those who self-identify as 'digital scholars'---Earhart and Jewell have made an important choice, and one that will likely make this a landmark publication." ---Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature. The volume collects articles from those who are involved in tool development, usability testing, editing and textual scholarship, digital librarianship, and issues of race and ethnicity in digital humanities, while also situating digital humanities work within the larger literary discipline. In addition, the volume examines the traditional structures of the fields, including tenure and promotion criteria, modes of scholarly production, the skill sets required for scholarship, and the training of new scholars. The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age will attract practitioners of digital humanities in multiple fields, Americanists who utilize digital materials, and those who are intellectually curious about the new movement and materials. Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. Andrew Jewell is Associate Professor of Digital Projects, University Libraries, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Cover art: Book background ©iStockphoto.com/natashika digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.