Abstract
Within the digital humanities, text is often privileged. The core concern of digital humanities research and studies tends to focus on text and textual analyses. The materiality of text is often overlooked. Text, however, does not exist outside of the physical support instantiating it. The materiality of digital text should be foregrounded within the digital humanities to illuminate its fundamental role in transforming text into diverse physical instantiations that are used for diverse purposes, needs, and tasks. This paper therefore calls for greater documentary analyses of text, with a specific emphasis on exploring the documentation of digital text. It argues that documentation is necessary for the materialization of text into material instantiations that can be interacted with, engaged, and used. Documentation determines the kinds, forms, and formats of text that can be inscribed into or displayed on a specific medium that, in turn, shapes the affordances of and practices with that text. By drawing attention to documentation and its associated affordances and practices, the object status of digital texts is foregrounded by documentary analyses. It presents a tripartite model of digital documentation to uncloak the complex material constitution of digital documents and, thus, digital text. This model helps demonstrate the extent to which digital text exists in and as digital documents. The virtual world of the digital humanities, and its respective texts and documentation, is indeed a material world.
Presenters
Marc KosciejewSenior Lecturer, Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta, Malta
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Digital Humanities, Digital Text, Digital Document, Documentation, Documentary Analysis
