Data Worlds: Patterns, Structures, Libraries

The emergence of world literary studies and the digital turn in literary studies share a seminal text in Franco Morettis Conjectures on World Literature. Since that article was published in 2000, the ongoing digitization of cultural collections and emergence of new computational methods of analysis have only increased the excitement of some, and concern of others, that digital research will become a major, even a dominant, trajectory in world literary studies. But the associated claim by critics and proponents alike that digital approaches represent a paradigmatic shift ignores major continuities between digital research and the non-digital scholarship that preceded and continues alongside it, including in world literary studies. Much of the traction that Morettis distant reading has gained can be ascribed to commonalities in the conceptions of archives, and foregrounding of networks and patterns, in non-digital scholarship. And Morettis claim that distant reading dismantles traditional, specifically national and canonical, frameworks is not true of most digital literary projects, including the majority of Morettis own experiments. Such continuities, and the resulting disjunction between enactments of digital research and the global and democratic rhetoric in which new technologies are often couched, arise from the substantial ways in which pre-digital traditions, ideologies, and infrastructures shape digital resources and methods. Recognizing and interrogating this inheritance, an emerging group of digital projects advance key aims of world literary studies including situating literature within a vast transnational library, expanding the canon of the literary properly to reflect global diversity, and offering new conceptual frameworks that adjust our reading of the novel to world scale (Smith 92).