Research Catalog

Title

A new republic of letters : memory and scholarship in the age of digital reproduction / Jerome McGann.

Author

McGann, Jerome J.

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 238 pages : maps; 25 cm.

Summary

"A manifesto for the humanities in the digital age, A New Republic of Letters argues that the history of texts, together with the methods by which they are preserved and made available for interpretation, are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the twenty-first century. Theory and philosophy, which have grounded the humanities for decades, no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. Jerome McGann proposes we look instead to philology-a discipline which has been out of fashion for many decades but which models the concerns of digital humanities with surprising fidelity. For centuries, books have been the best way to preserve and transmit knowledge. But as libraries and museums digitize their archives and readers abandon paperbacks for tablet computers, digital media are replacing books as the repository of cultural memory. While both the mission of the humanities and its traditional modes of scholarship and critical study are the same, the digital environment is driving disciplines to work with new tools that require major, and often very difficult, institutional changes. Now more than ever, scholars need to recover the theory and method of philological investigation if the humanities are to meet their perennial commitments. Textual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized as a narrowly technical domain, should be made a priority of humanists attention." - Publisher's description.

Subject

• Humanities > Research
• Humanities > Study and teaching
• Memory > Social aspects
• Learning and scholarship > Social aspects
• Communication in learning and scholarship > Technological innovations
• Digital media > Social aspects
• Internet > Social aspects
• Globalization > Social aspects
• Social change

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Part I. From history to method -- Why textual scholarship matters -- "The inorganic organization of memory" -- Memory : history, philosophy, philology -- Part II. From theory to method -- The documented world -- Marking texts in many dimensions -- Digital tools and the emergence of the social text -- Part III. From method to practice -- What do scholars want? -- Philological investigations I: the example of Poe -- Philological investigations II: a page from Cooper -- Conclusion: Pseudodoxia academica, or, Literary studies in a global age.

ISBN

9780674728691 (alkaline paper)

LCCN

^^2013036538

OCLC

• 861478395
• SCSB-11144413

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library