Abstract
What are the new adventures of the digital? How and why should we do DH projects? What does DH add that couldn’t be done by more traditional means of research and scholarship? Invoking Richard Altick’s popular The Scholar Adventurers (first published in 1950; revised 1987) we emphasize both the rejuvenating potential of DH and stress some of the continuities of exploration and intellectual excitement with more traditional modes of scholarship. Our introduction highlights the long history of cross-overs between modernism, print culture, and the digital. Altick wrote in 1987: ‘my research has been concentrated on gathering together masses of hitherto discrete and scattered data and discovering the patterns into which they fall as significant literary or historical themes’ (xi). The goals are not so dissimilar, but in the digital age the work of the literary scholar can be transformed.
Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors. (Virginia Woolf, Diary 3, 22 September 1925 (1980, p. 43))
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout our book, we have bolded DH terminology and the titles of DH projects to indicate that both categories are annotated more fully in our appendices. Readers are encouraged to turn to Appendix A for definitions of DH terms, and to Appendix B for descriptions of DH projects.
- 2.
This phrase, although it comes up reiteratively for Woolf, first appears in the 1927 essay ‘The New Biography’ (1966). It addresses the combination of the ‘facts’ of a life (granite) with a novelistic sense of the imagined inner life (rainbow).
- 3.
- 4.
For an extensive treatment of the rise of periodical work as a focus in modernist studies, see Scholes and Latham (2006).
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Battershill, C., Southworth, H., Staveley, A., Widner, M., Willson Gordon, E., Wilson, N. (2017). Introduction. In: Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47211-9_1
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