Academic blogs
on digital humanities projects are digital spaces wherein personal scholarly
construction and public disciplinary construction occur simultaneously. The
blogger presents the desired public image of his or her scholarly identity in a
very structured and specific way, while at the same time navigating the still
shaky waters of an emerging discipline. In this paper, I propose to use
performance studies as a conceptual framework with which to explore the
tensions and synergies between these personal and collective identity
constructions. I am choosing to work with digital humanities blogs because they
represent complex layerings of digital performance. These blogs must simultaneously
present themselves as personalized blog spaces, constructing specific
presentations of scholars; brainstorming spaces where future digital humanities
projects are discussed, constructing very self-aware presentations of digital
work; and, finally, spaces that then index or literally link to the digital
humanities work of these scholars, pulling both writer and reader outside the
event of the blog’s performance and into another highly performative digital space.
My interest in these blogs is twofold. First, I want to connect them to Roach’s and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s ideas about definitions of cultural identity, but from the perspective of disciplinary identity. Roach’s arguments on surrogation and the processes’ reliance on both remembering and forgetting will be helpful in thinking about how these blogs and their writers both extend and replace traditional humanities work. What does it mean to participate in the construction of a new field and how much of that construction is reliant on the ghostings of what was there before? Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on interactive museum spaces will help me explore how the desire for interactivity and “experience” affects these spaces, and what possibilities this desire posits for the construction of new audiences.
The second element of interest in my research will engage both Bernstein’s and Taylor’s arguments. Bernstein’s ideas will be helpful to explore the function of these digital blog spaces as “scriptive things” for both the writer and reader/user. Additionally, using Taylor’s concepts of performance archives and repertoires, I will explore the possibility that these blogs create a simultaneous archival/repertory event. The blog’s text constructs the performed event that is the blog, simultaneously written and performed, but also provides discussions for future digital performances (the digital humanities projects) that are inseparable from the academic performance occurring on the blog at the moment of typing those discussions. Using these performance studies frameworks, I will analyze blogs like Michael Witmore’s “Wine Dark Sea” (winedarksea.org) in an attempt to understand how scholars are defining the emerging field of digital humanities through their deliberate performances within digital spaces.
My interest in these blogs is twofold. First, I want to connect them to Roach’s and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s ideas about definitions of cultural identity, but from the perspective of disciplinary identity. Roach’s arguments on surrogation and the processes’ reliance on both remembering and forgetting will be helpful in thinking about how these blogs and their writers both extend and replace traditional humanities work. What does it mean to participate in the construction of a new field and how much of that construction is reliant on the ghostings of what was there before? Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on interactive museum spaces will help me explore how the desire for interactivity and “experience” affects these spaces, and what possibilities this desire posits for the construction of new audiences.
The second element of interest in my research will engage both Bernstein’s and Taylor’s arguments. Bernstein’s ideas will be helpful to explore the function of these digital blog spaces as “scriptive things” for both the writer and reader/user. Additionally, using Taylor’s concepts of performance archives and repertoires, I will explore the possibility that these blogs create a simultaneous archival/repertory event. The blog’s text constructs the performed event that is the blog, simultaneously written and performed, but also provides discussions for future digital performances (the digital humanities projects) that are inseparable from the academic performance occurring on the blog at the moment of typing those discussions. Using these performance studies frameworks, I will analyze blogs like Michael Witmore’s “Wine Dark Sea” (winedarksea.org) in an attempt to understand how scholars are defining the emerging field of digital humanities through their deliberate performances within digital spaces.
1 comment:
Whitney,
This is a very compelling project. I am especially impressed by its highly conceptual approach to the performance of discipline-creation. We have seen Jackson talk about this business explicitly (at least when it comes to remembering and forgetting institutional history), but your approach is unique for understanding disciplinarity as an intrinsically performance-based and performative business. That this business takes place in a digital field is also an original gambit insofar as the digital is broadly understood as the antithesis of performance; the opposition of digital to analog makes theatre, as a live and flesh-bound form, especially remote from the DH. To see the blog as a kind of stage is therefore a useful conjunction of fields; even better is the richness of your engagement with performance studies, so that performance is not a single perspective applied to a new discipline, but a multi-valent (and often contradictory) way of thinking about audience, address, implication, effectuality, etc. that sheds light upon the fundamental structure of digitality or virtuality as new mediums of representation/expression/thought. My one recommendation to you is to make digital expression equally rich as a category and field; for instance, much recent work in the DH critiques theorizations that examine the point of delivery (the screen, generally) without considering the codework that lies behind it. [If you are interested in this turn, many of our DR candidates actively engage it. You might like to mine their bibliographies. ] More broadly, I think you might want to explore what the digital might tell us about performance, and not just the other way around. True interdisciplinarity depends upon this two-way street.
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