Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio

⠀

Menu
  • Scholars Studio Blog
    • Disciplinary Fields
      • Anthropology
      • Archaeology
      • Architecture
      • Art History
      • Business
      • Computer Science
      • Critical Digital Studies
      • Cultural Studies
      • Dance
      • Economics
      • Education
      • Environmental Studies
      • Film Studies
      • Gaming Studies
      • Geography
      • History
      • Information Science
      • Linguistics
      • Literary Studies
      • Marketing
      • Media and Communication Studies
      • Music Studies
      • Political Science
      • Psychology
      • Public Health
      • Sculpture
      • Sociology
      • Urban Studies
      • Visual Art
    • Digital Methods
      • coding
      • critical making
      • data visualization
      • digital pedagogy
      • immersive technology (AR/VR)
      • mapping
      • textual analysis
      • web scraping
  • Events
    • VR@TU: “Real Research in Virtual Realty”
  • About
    • Current Staff
    • Current Fellows
    • Faculty Fellowships
    • Graduate Extern Program
Menu

When the Study of Authorship Goes Digital

Posted on May 12, 2015January 14, 2020 by Angela M. Cirucci

By Angele M. Cirucci

2014-2015 HASTAC Scholar Jaclyn Partyka shares some details regarding her newest digital project.

(Posted on behalf of Jaclyn Partyka)

When I first entered the HASTAC program at the beginning of the academic year, I had no idea how much the digital humanities would impact my research and approach to studying literature. I had a vague idea that I wanted to look at digital forms of self-fashioning on social media and how these kinds of narratives challenge or contribute to current theorizations about authorship, but I wasn’t sure how digital tools and new research strategies would work out.

My dissertation as a whole looks at how celebrity and canonical authors use hybrid forms of literary genres – often between the novel and traditional autobiography – to respond to the perceptions of their authorship within the literary marketplace. For my final chapter, I wanted to look at Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir Joseph Anton since it directly responds to the often inflammatory rhetoric surrounding the Verses Affair – when the Ayatollah Khomeini decreed a fatwa against the author’s life following the publication of Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). This was a global news event and forced Rushdie to go into hiding and live with constant police protection for ten years so it’s not very surprising that a memoir detailing an inside look into Rushdie’s life during this period would act as a means for the author to write back to his numerous fans and critics.

Part of my approach to reading Joseph Anton was to consider it alongside Rushdie’s significantly active Twitter feed. To do this I had a colleague write a script where I would be able to scrape all of Rushdie’s tweets from 2011-2013 so that I could have a record of his activities before and after the publication of the memoir. Using this data, I was able to use a few of the digital tools I learned about over the past year. First, I used NodeXL to tag and visualize Rushdie’s egocentric twitter network. Then, I used Voyant to generate some word frequency graphs and visualizations to trace topical trends across his twitter feed. I presented some of the preliminary details of my findings at the HASTAC digital scholar presentations on April 17th. And that’s when things got a little more interesting.

It should come with no surprise that the digital humanities have seriously embraced forms of social media, such as twitter (and this blog!), in order to easily spread insights, developments, and innovations throughout the scholarly community. Ergo, the HASTAC presentations were live tweeted by a few audience members. And someone noticed.

RushdieTwitterResponse
RushdieTwitterResponse

In many ways, Rushdie’s wry response here does much to support my argument about how celebrity and canonical authors participate in curating their brand of authorship – and online forms of social media are just a new terrain for this drama to play out. Of course Rushdie knows what he’s doing in presenting himself online, even though he attempts to deny it.

So, have I accidentally written myself into my dissertation with the help of the digital humanities? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; rather, it says a lot about how much literary studies have changed in our contemporary moment and how online forms of literacy are becoming much more integrated into contemporary literature.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email

Related Posts

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recent Posts

  • Creating a Virtual Environment in Blender and Unity January 18, 2021
  • Arcade our Way: Video Games and Toys for Social Change. December 7, 2020
  • Using 3D Scanning, Modeling and Printing as a Tool in Art Making November 17, 2020
My Tweets

Tags

3D modeling 3D printing 360 video arduino augmented reality authorship attribution coding corpus building critical making Cultural Heritage data cleaning data visualization digital art history Digital Preservation digital reconstruction digital scholarship early modern film editing games gephi machine learning makerspace mapping network analysis oculus rift OpenRefine Photogrammetry physical computing Python QGIS R SketchUp stylometry terrain modeling text analysis text mining textual analysis top news twitter video analysis virtual reality visual analysis voyant web scraping YouTube

Archives

©2021 Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.