The digital humanities has a long history in British Romanticism with the work surrounding NINES, The William Blake Archive, Romantic Circles, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net and even the newly launched Shelley-Godwin Archive. Still, the emergence of social media has added a number of challenges for the place of the digital within our discipline. The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus and Teaching Romanticism blogs have experimented in recent years with new forms of scholarly communication. Further, as Jason Whittaker and I argue in William Blake and the Digital Humanities, non-academics on Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia discuss, debate, and recreate Blake’s ideas using methods that have very little to do with traditional academic discourse.
In a recent post, Stephen Ramsay argued that there is not one digital humanities but at least two. Digital Humanities type 1, he suggests, originally identified itself as “humanities computing,” stretches back to the early nineties, and included practices like text analysis, GIS, and archiving. Digital Humanities type 2, on the other hand, emerged around 2008 and styles itself in a much broader sense as the study of the humanities “after some technological event horizon,” or “humanistic inquiry that in some way relates to the digital.” Ramsay’s dichotomy may be artificial, but it also sets up a useful starting point for a dialogue about how digital practices are impacting Romantic period studies. This proposed session will juxtapose different generations of scholars that identify with the digital humanities as a way of contextualizing the relevance of the digital. For example, what possibilities are scholars, who write in new modalities or construct scholarly objects, opening for traditional critical approaches to the period? How are forms of collaboration enabled by social media challenging the traditional one-author monograph?
Each of these questions, and others not mentioned here, will intersect with the disciplinary and epistemological concerns of British Romanticism, including the relationship between formalism and historicism, the role of political and cultural studies in scholarship, and the material concerns of book history and archival studies.