Welcome to Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities.
Up earlier than usual thanks to A Day in the Life, sitting at my desktop with a cup of coffee and starting the day with some reading that will connect to the class I am teaching online and on-blog at 1:30 this afternoon, “Thoreau, Wilderness, and American Nature Writing.” My morning reading includes:
1) Onno Oerlemans, *Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature*, a superb U of Toronto Press book (2002) that explores the link between Romanticism and the materiality of the natural world. The link to sustainability here is the way the Romantics [Wordsworth, Shelley, John Clare, Gilbert White] heralded “modernism and contemporary environmentalism” through their emphasis on the way we are “at once subsumed by . . . and remote from” the nonhuman, “natural” world.
2) Dana Phillips, *The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America*, an Oxford volume (2003) that effectively presents the current state of ecocriticism and its discontents: the tension between nature-as-text and nature-as-the-things-outside-the-window, the need for a thoroughgoing critique of the nature/culture divide, the desire to provide a philosophical and theoretical framework that can help us delimit the wide range of topics now prefixed with “eco-.”
I will bring some of these issues into our class discussion this afternoon. Between now and then I will provide another post once I get into the office and open up the Dreamweaver pages with which I am constructing and editing *A Romantic Natural History: 1750-1859*:
[see http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/
More anon. AN
My final thoughts on today’s class suggest that digital humanities have important links to our current ideas about sustainability. My students are reading the equivalent of 1,000 assigned digital pages this term, reducing the need for paper texts and the expense required to buy them. Students submit work that will be graded electronically, receive responses from me without paper or pen, and generate countless ideas, new thoughts, and intellectual exchanges while operating only in hyperspace, away from the world of papers that will be thrown away or lost, books that will be sold back or discarded, and material traces of learning that are likely to prove as ephemeral as any website, perhaps even more unstable. Years from now, students will know how to get back to sites where this information originated and back to sites that Dickinson College continues to support as part of an academic online presence. Our class blog and our wikis may outlast any paper version of this same information. Link to:
Recent critiques of ecocriticism have worried about the element of nostalgia in all ecocritical thinking. That may or may not be a problem. Here is an etymology for the root of “nostalgia”:
Our other home in a digital world? Hyperspace. More significant over the long term–and to the wider world–is the fact that hypertext and hyperspace are themselves tools for a nostalgia of “home.”. Hypertext is based on the principle that units of information, bits and bites yielding up sentences and webpages, are always saved, kept even when they are “deleted,” preserved in various stages of development and revision. So twenty versions of my homepage exist in various locations on the web: preserved because my page was created over chronological time, saved with different extensions and URLs, housed on different hard drives and servers, copied and printed by various users for various reasons. Even my emails have all been potentially copied or saved at every junction or server or inbox or monitor through which they have passed. My URL as home. My homepage as home.
The nostalgia implicit here should now be clearly evident. We long to return to places we have been before in hyperspace, just as we long for the hypertexts that we have seen, or created, or revised. We bookmark our homepages and favorite sites. Indeed, the bookmark and “favorites” are the ultimate and undeniable proof of our nostalgia-laden web. We print out our favorites, create a home out of and around our homepage. We love our homepage and the homepages of others, just as we love many of the “places” we have been in the universe of hyperspace (the “hyperverse”) to which we long–nostalgically–to return. Witness MySpace. Witness Facebook.