Thursday, November 13, 2008

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies

Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens have followed their 2004 work, A Companion to Digital Humanities, with A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, published in 2008 by Blackwell. Schreibman and Siemens edit this work which is divided into four chapters. The introductory essay titled 'Imagining the New Media Encounter' by Alan Liu, provides an overview of the link between the 'old' media and the new: 'The premise is that the boundary between codex-based literature and digital information has now been so breached by shared technological, communicational, and computational protocols that we might best think in terms of an encounter rather than a border.' The three sections of the book--Traditions, Texualities and Methodologies--contain a total of 30 essays written by a cadre of literary scholars. The final chapter, 'Annotated Overview of Selected Electronic Resources', is written by Tanya Clement and Gretchen Gueguen: 'This annotated overview is divided into three main sections based on content: Digital Transcriptions and Images; Born-Digital Texts and New Media Objects; and Criticism, Reviews, and Tools.'