Digital Milton

David Currell, Islam Issa, David Currell, Islam Issa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319904771
• eBook ISBN: 9783319904788
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton's geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.

© The Author(s) 2018

David Currell and Islam Issa (eds.)Digital Miltonhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living in These Media

David Currell¹ and Islam Issa

(1)

Beirut, Lebanon

Keywords

John MiltonDigital humanitiesDigital literary studiesDigital mediaLiterary criticismCritical methodologiesHistory of scholarshipOnline resources

End Abstract

Digital Milton presents new scholarship on John Milton that engages with digital methods and digital media. That this scholarship fills a book is a sign that Milton studies is participating in the digital turn. That this scholarship fills a book is a sign that relationships between media and platforms are not (and are never) simple relationships of transition or substitution, and a sign that humanists accord unique value to both print and digital media while grappling with the urgent and compelling challenges to which their simultaneity gives rise. Our hopes are that Milton should have renewed life in digital media, that scholarship should have a vital role in this metamorphosis, and that the results should enliven global literary culture.

Digital literary study is a rapidly changing field whose theories, resources, methods, and institutional arrangements reflect this state of dynamic flux. In that context, although this book aims to present the full range of digital work on and with Milton, many of the contributions within it are notable for their reflexivity and critical outlook towards this digital moment and the histories leading to it, and are explicitly experimental or exploratory in their orientation. The range spans all five illustrative clusters of scholarly activity in the digital humanities (DH) presented by Julia Thompson Klein in her mapping of kinds of work frequently associated with that rubric.¹ To identify just one example from each of Klein’s clusters that is well represented in this volume: “electronic text production and editing,” “computing practices in disciplines of the humanities and arts,” “cultural impacts of the Internet and new media,” “design and production,” and “new approaches to teaching and learning.” Our methodological openness is also an openness to methods yet uninvented, and so, to a greater than usual extent, this book anticipates its own eclipse with optimism. That said, the genealogical spirit animating many of these chapters intimates longer durations, extending both into the past and into durable futures of new connections and collaborations, fresh momentum for existing projects, and sustainable trajectories for germinal ones.

The contributors represent a wide spectrum of academic experience, from doctoral student to professor emeritus. Their range of institutional and geographical locations is also broad. For some, digital literary studies is already a primary scholarly identity. For others, this work is a first taste, or even a “triall…by what is contrary.”² While chapters have been written and projects have been designed so as to speak directly to contemporary Milton studies, the issues and approaches engaged are also crucially in dialogue with early modern studies more broadly, textual and editorial theory, media studies, the sociology of reading, curatorial practice, and the teaching of literature.

“Books Are Not Absolutely Dead Things”³

Collections of Milton scholarship have rarely taken account of the digital.⁴ Likewise, collections in the digital humanities have rarely taken account of Milton.⁵ This mutual blindness contrasts with the state of Shakespeare studies,⁶ to such an extent that “the digital” begins to look like another axis to add to Rachel Trubowitz’s sketch of the orthogonal orientations of Shakespearean and Miltonic scholarship in recent decades.⁷ Where the decisive influence in the former domain has been “Greenblattian New Historicism,” the governing paradigm of Milton studies has been Cambridge School “contextualist historicism.”⁸ But “the rise of ‘big data,’” Trubowitz continues, “has further exposed the limitations of traditional archives (among them the exclusive rare book collections at elite libraries), on which the specificity of historicist interpretation was grounded.”⁹ While the mass digitization that underpins “big data” promises to make work in book history, print culture, and the sociality of text accessible to scholars physically remote from “traditional archives,” it does so under conditions of mediation and representation that leave the physical archives indispensable. Shakespeareans’ comparative cosmopolitanism across material and mediated scholarly worlds surely reflects the medial confluence of theatre and print, as well as Shakespeare’s greater presence in mass media and popular culture generally. Shakespeare also has an unusual prominence within the long history (antedating the modern computer) of quantitative stylistics, motivated by questions of authorship. While scholars including Blaine Greteman and Whitney Anne Trettien have published work at the intersection of Milton studies and digital literary studies, and while Milton has a presence in major digital projects like Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, the academic imbrication of Milton and the digital remains incipient.¹⁰ Another way to put this is to say that while we are all digital Miltonists now, nobody is yet a Digital Miltonist.

To assert that we are all digital Miltonists now probably still has some shock value, but part of this should be a shock of recognition. From communicating by email with colleagues and students, to searching online databases for scholarly sources, downloading and reading articles on computers or mobile devices, consulting facsimiles of seventeenth-century texts on Early English Books Online, or performing a keyword search at The John Milton Reading Room, the routines of academia have become digitized. The scholarship and study of Milton’s works inevitably engage the kinds of digital and computational technologies and electronic media that have continuously reshaped culture over the last several decades. Yet a digital revolution in the everyday practice of scholarship on a print author sharpens the pointed question that Jerome McGann poses in A New Republic of Letters: “What kinds of research and educational program can integrate the preservation and study of these two radically different media?”¹¹ McGann’s own answer is “philology in a new key,” and scholars of Renaissance literature should take timely advantage of their special collective capacity to compose that answer.¹²

The nature and timeliness of Digital Milton also validate Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold’s assessment in the 2016 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities, that “the challenges currently associated with the digital humanities involve a shift from congregating in the big tent to practicing DH at a field-specific level, where DH work confronts disciplinary habits of mind.”¹³ The “big tent” has been a longstanding metaphor in digital humanities circles.¹⁴ It is a reassuringly irenic image. It may recall:

By living streams among the trees of life,

Pavillions numberless, and sudden reared,

Celestial tabernacles[.]¹⁵

What follows in Paradise Lost, of course, is a war in Heaven. It is as well to acknowledge that a title like Digital Milton might also presage a drawing of battle lines, recalling William Kolbrener’s figuration of Miltonists as “warring angels.”¹⁶ Should we fear that Miltonists have been seduced, and, the more to increase your wonder, with an Apple?¹⁷ Our contention is that Miltonists’ “disciplinary habits of mind” (including philological habits) are too important to leave out of conversations about digital scholarship or distant reading.

“Distant reading” is the term under which quantitative and computational approaches to literary studies have become widely known and widely argued in the twenty-first century. The term was advanced by Franco Moretti in a spirit of iconoclasm. Hitherto, he claimed, academic literary criticism had been essentially “a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.”¹⁸ Being of the devil’s party is generally more tolerated in Miltonic circles than elsewhere, and we have already stressed that, in fundamental ways, the contemporary academy is already of the digital party whether knowingly or not. But DH is more than distant reading. The “Milton” of our title foregrounds the ongoing serious reading of selected and prized texts (but not only those), while “Digital” is intended to denote much more than the algorithmic processing, visualization, and computational analysis characteristic of “macroanalytic” methods.¹⁹ More than, but also those: it is necessary to take the measure of quantity.

McGann notes of the digital humanities that “both its promoters and critics regard [it] as a set of replacement protocols for traditional humanities scholarship.”²⁰ Framed as a battle line, the situation may appear—to both “sides”—as a zero-sum game, a mutually exclusive contest between two cultures over cultural studies themselves. This reflex framing has roots in C. P. Snow’s thesis of “the two cultures”—of letters and of science, bisecting both academic and public life in mid-twentieth-century Britain—with its frequently invoked observations concerning the mutual failures of communication and recognition between the two domains.²¹ Recent scholarship has helped to clarify that such a division between literature and science was no part of Milton’s intellectual formation, while also valuably complicating its application to his period altogether.²² Nevertheless, the present-day stakes for disciplinary formations and future philologies are high. While we lack space to unpack these issues here with the fullness that they deserve, we wish to underline two specific and related problems raised by critical voices internal and external to digital literary studies, one regard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living in These Media
• Part I. Textual Remediations
• Part II. Scale, Space, and Sociality
• Part III. New Audiences, Novel Engagements
• Back Matter