Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing

Description

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. Cover Contents Incipit: Evolutionary Textual Environment A Digital Humanities Experiment From the Book to the Archive Modeling Literary Performativity Cross-over View 1 From Archive to Simulator Metamedia and Simulation The Persistence of the Codex Digital Scholarly Editing From Textual Marks to Textual Fields Modeling a Virtual Book of Disquiet Beyond the Bibliographic Horizon Reader-function Editor-function Author-function Book-function Simulation Layers 2 Reading as Simulation Modeling the Life of Reading Marginalists and Extractors: Traces and Trails Intertext as Hypertext: A Network of Quotations Critical Reception as Reading Practice Reading Protocols Social Media Reception as Reading Practice Visualizing the Spacetime of Reading 3 Editing as Simulation From Edition to Meta-Edition Document, Text, Book, Work Exploding the Book: Editing as Process Encoding and Visualizing Variation From Meta-Edition to Virtual Edition 4 Writing as Simulation Writing Acts in the Book of Disquiet The Kinetics of Writing Fragment, Book, Self From Handwriting to Language Processing Disquiet Variations Machines of Disquiet 5 Living on in the Web Digital Libraries and Networked Books Textual Instability and Modular Variability The Dynamic Digital Archive and the Library The Monograph, the Work, and the Archive Explicit: No Problem Has a Solution Foresight Hindsight Acknowledgments References Index