Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A.

Advisers: David Scott Kastan; John Williams; Katherine Nicholson.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

In this dissertation, I argue that traditional humanists rely too much on narratives and metaphors belonging to print culture in our efforts to characterize the digital environment. As humanists try to capture a piece of the emerging digital marketplace, we use the language of print culture to discuss our ambitions for the digital humanities---but in so doing, we obscure features of digital tools and platforms that differ significantly from their print predecessors, and so block ourselves from making the best possible use of the distinctive affordances and audiences of new media.

The second chapter, "The Electronic Editor," argues that our moment is a deceptively strong period for print publishing in economic terms, but an uncertain and experimental period for literature as a field, as media change forces critics to confront an "unbinding of the book" that began in practice decades before the Internet age. If the rise of digital texts does bring about a changed culture of the book, the changes will occur most powerfully in the narratives and categories that we use to make sense of the literary system. Even so, I argue---using Jerome McGann and Lev Manovich as examples---that the stories we tell about the digital future of print media continue to rely too much on the memory of books and libraries.

The third chapter, "The Game of Authorship," argues that media scholars can better understand the forms of amateur fiction that are thriving in the digital environment by making use of perspectives and frameworks from game studies. Many of the most popular platforms on the internet today, including social news platforms and social media platforms, are organized in the form of games; I argue that online fiction archives, too, have a genealogy rooted in games rather than one rooted in anthologies, poetry collections, libraries, and other strictly literary formats. This argument has implications for efforts to theorize the production of fiction on the internet, and indeed to theorize the reception of fiction in other media forms in the internet age. I close the chapter by showing how we can use game elements to design better digital humanities platforms.

The fourth chapter, "The Printing Press as Metaphor," examines the uses of the historical metaphor of the printing press in industry and academia to discuss the "rise" of the digital age. I argue that the printing press metaphor is ubiquitous for pragmatic reasons: it confers specific benefits within the incentive structures of the industry marketplace of Silicon Valley, on the one hand, and the academic marketplace of ideas, on the other. I suggest that these benefits come at the cost of eliding important features of computers and their uses in, and impact on, our world. The printing press metaphor is useful in the marketplace, but it limits our view of the character of the digital turn---and, by extension, our view of the steps we should take to meet its challenges.