Journal Article

Recovery and Obsolescence: Feminist Scholarship, Computational Criticism, and the Canon

Koser, Julie

2020

Overview

The 1990s and early 2000s saw the efforts of earlier scholars pay off with an increase in print collections, anthologies, and databases dedicated to the works of women writers as well as an uptake in scholarly publications drawing attention to issues of gender and sexuality. Taking stock in 2019, we can conclusively say that while substantive progress has been made, this recovery process is ongoing and faces new challenges. Can current tools and methods offered by cultural analytics that consider the \"many\" rather than only the \"few\" assist scholars, specifically at the intersection of feminist inquiry and eighteenth-century German studies, not only in recovering and preserving the works of women writers-and, indeed, all authors who have been traditionally marginalized-but in increasing their presence and significance within scholarship? [...]making claims about shifts in the representation of gender traits in novels or the relevance of gender in the publication rates of authors is currently problematic, not simply because the works of women writers represent an inherently small sample size compared to those of their male counterparts, as Ted Underwood recently demonstrated in Distant Horizons,4 but because the data on which algorithms are run and from which conclusions are drawn are not comprehensive and, at times, reinforce existing, nineteenth-century preferences when it came to constructing model national histories and the canon.5 To illustrate this point about comprehensive representation in existing digitized collections, a quick search for Benedikte Naubert, one of the most prolific women writers around 1800, in open-access sources such as HathiTrust Library, TextGrid Repository, and Google Books reveals the limitations and challenges of conducting computational analysis on works by women writers.6 Traditional literary scholars have identified some sixty works published by Naubert, most of which were published anonymously during her lifetime-ranging from historical novels, to fairy tale collections, to short stories. [...]search results of open-access sources do not fully represent her oeuvre and indicate that digital scholarship on such authors necessitates time and labor-intensive hand-curation of collections in order to run script that yields consequential results.7 The point here is that we have not yet reached the tipping point in digitized libraries where traditional modes of archival research and targeted collecting are no longer necessary.

• Publisher: North American Goethe Society,Boydell & Brewer
• Subject: 18th century / 19th century / Algorithms / Anthologies / Authorship / Biographies / Digital archives / Digital humanities / Digitization / Fairy tales / Fate / Feminism / Gender / German literature / Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832) / Libraries / Library collections / Literary canon / Literary criticism / Literature / Novels / Open access / Publishing / Publishing industry / Reading / Scholars / Sexuality / Short stories / Travel literature / Women / Writers