The Oxford e-Research Centre Tuesday Seminar Series - Professor Andrew Prescott

The Oxford e-Research Centre is pleased to welcome Professor Andrew Prescott from Kings College, to present a seminar on Tuesday 14 February 2012.

This seminar is open to all and will start at 2pm in the Oxford e-Research Centre Access Grid Room (room 277 - access available via 7 Keble Road)

Andrew Prescott
Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London

The Aeolian Harp in a Digital Age: Textual Instabilities and the Digital Humanities

Among the many anxieties of a digital age is the perceived ephemerality and volatility of digital information. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has forcefully argued, the idea that digits are ephemeral and unstable is a deceptive one; hard discs survived the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Such anxieties ascribe a greater stability to printed and manuscript representations than is often the case. Coleridge’s poem ‘The Aeolian Harp’, regarded as a key text in the development of the Romantic movement, occurs in sixteen different manuscript and printed forms, ranging from fifty one to sixty four lines and differing considerably in character. Examples of such textual instability ranging from an illustrated book by Sir Hans Sloane to a cabinet minute by Margaret Thatcher will be discussed. It will be argued that, paradoxically, digital media frequently reduce awareness of such instabilities and give a deceptive impression of the fixed character of texts. Frequently, these instabilities arise from the way in which the textual object interacts with the material character of the book or manuscript in which it occurs. It will be argued that the digital humanities needs to pay greater attention to exploring these textual materialities.