Category

Literary Studies

• Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies

  Digital Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

  05.01.18 | Permalink | Comments Off on Digital Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

  Digital interactivity has triggered a transformation whose impact is greater than that of any other innovation in the history of technologies of communication. According to a 2016 Ericsson Mobility Report, over 90% of the world’s population will be covered by mobile broadband networks by 2021. “The world has been redrawn,” claims the Internet critic Andrew Keen, “as a distributed network.” It is becoming evident that we too are being redrawn as human beings, as individuals, and as citizens. At the heart of the change from analogue and print to digital is the capacity for connectedness that information technology brings – connectedness of information in and between databases, between experts and the public, between communities across the world, and between the arts and the sciences.

• Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies

  Private Lives, Intimate Readings

  08.05.15 | Permalink | Comments Off on Private Lives, Intimate Readings

  In any attempt to report on the life of another, or even one’s own life, an inescapable ethical dilemma arises that relates to entering intensely private areas of experience and presenting intimate subject matter for the world to see. How much intimate material should be revealed? For what purpose? To whose benefit? At what risk? How?

  In an era when millions of people are willing to share the minutiae of their individual daily lives via social media and the private lives of the famous are exposed routinely to mass audiences, such questions loom larger than ever. With easier access to private information—by governments, hackers, marketers, and private citizens—this area has become one of global concern in the context of the fundamental human right to privacy. Critical engagement with the private and the intimate has always been a key characteristic of life-writing studies, and this field has made a noteworthy contribution to contemporary reconceptualisations of the private and the public spheres and the intricate interconnections between them.

• Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies

  Memory and Commemoration in the Digital Present

  30.10.14 | Permalink | Comments Off on Memory and Commemoration in the Digital Present

  The first ‘Digital Death Day,’ held on 20 May 2010, brought together world experts in the fields of death studies, social networking and data management. Promoting the event, coordinator Jennifer Holmes commented, “The online memorial has already become the new grave” (Andrews 2010). How seriously should we take such a statement? Was this turn of phrase simply intended to indicate the increasing dependence on digital media for performing social rituals? Or has online memorialisation in fact created a new kind of ‘resting place’ for the deceased and if so what is the nature of that place and how do the living relate to it? Whether through intentional online memorialisation or through the unplanned bestowing of an afterlife on anyone who has had an active online presence in life, it is now indisputable that the digital world is being populated, at an exponentially growing rate, by the stories, images, traces and voices of the dead – so much so that this digital afterlife can be seen as a new kind of immortality.

• Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies

  Unearthing the Past

  20.04.11 | Permalink | Comments Off on Unearthing the Past

  When Hitler’s troops invaded and occupied the city of Kharkov in Ukraine, my grandparents Nadia, 26, and Petro, 30, had two young children, aged 7 and 5. My mother had not yet been born. In this tense and uncertain period it was unclear whether Ukraine would ultimately be controlled by Stalin or Hitler. There was nothing to recommend one over the other, they often said. Both regimes were brutal and both targeted Ukrainians. Mid-1943 marked a turning point—the end of their lives in Ukraine and the first stage of a journey into the unknown that led to their eventual arrival in Australia in 1949 as post-war refugees. They were packed into railway goods wagons with other Ukrainians and were taken from Kharkov, where they had built their world, to Dwikozy in Poland. This was the place of their first displacement from everything that made up their history and identity—homeland, language, culture, family, community, and career. Like many other refugees my grandparents attempted to compensate for the loss of their past by trying to recover it repeatedly years later in the stories that they told.

• 18th Century, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Humanities, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Travel Writing

  Virtual Voyages

  25.04.10 | Permalink | Comments Off on Virtual Voyages

  Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.

• Biography, Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Humanities, Life Writing, Literary Studies

  Digital Biography

  25.07.09 | Permalink | Comments Off on Digital Biography

  This paper reflects on an emerging field that has no accepted name or boundaries but is described here as “digital biography.” The activities, formats, and genres associated with this field are rarely linked with life writing or traditional biographical studies. Rather, this field is seen as the domain of those concerned with digital privacy, copyright, data preservation, and identity management. Over the past decade or so, critics in various disciplines, mainly legal studies, information management, multimedia design, and IT development, as well as sociology, psychology, and marketing, have focused on the complexity of online identity. Though online identity has become such a significant focus of attention in these disciplines, few who study biography have discussed it. Indeed, as Nigel Hamilton points out, biography itself has had less attention than one might expect for a field that “has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years”, a field that, according to Carl Rollyson, is widely recognized as “the dominant non-fiction of our age”.

• Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies

  Digital Fabric, Narrative Threads

  25.10.08 | Permalink | Comments Off on Digital Fabric, Narrative Threads

  The traditional crafts of quilting, embroidering and weaving may appear to be a world away from the high tech fields of computer networking, digital interface design, and database development. However, the old and new are increasingly being linked through metaphors that reveal a great deal about changing attitudes to digital technologies as they become more established and widely accessible […] Today’s communication networks are structured around “patchwork” designs, software glitches are fixed with “patches,” computer processors are being described as “multi-threaded,” and over the past decade other “material metaphors” have been embraced as a means of conceptualising and giving form to our new world of amorphous digital texts. In particular, the quilt motif has been used in a variety of ways, including as a means of visualising interaction and information flows and as a template for digital interface design.

• 18th Century, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Humanities, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies

  Fictions of Encounter

  25.09.08 | Permalink | Comments Off on Fictions of Encounter

  The “imaginary voyage” was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome.

• Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies

  Antipodean Myths Transformed

  25.08.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Antipodean Myths Transformed

  Australia and the South Pacific held a special status in the eighteenth century: this was the farthest region from Europe and the last part of the earth remaining for Europeans to explore and chart. In the context of European nations’ own histories of discovering and exploring the world beyond Europe’s borders, this region is unique in the sense that no other part of the earth had such a substantial and well-documented body of European thought devoted to it over such a long period of time prior to its physical discovery. The ‘antipodes’ existed in the European imagination for approximately two thousand years before Europeans set foot on antipodean lands. Myths inspired explorers to go searching for the genuine antipodes, and voyages were often undertaken with the specific aim of finding the uncharted places that punctuated otherwise formless maps.

about

Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. Paul Arthur has over 100 publications including 13 books, and has received A$10M in grant funding, individually and in collaboration. His latest book is Open Scholarship in the Humanities (Bloomsbury 2024, with Lydia Hearn). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held prestigious visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, and given more than 50 keynote and plenary talks in 20 countries.  Click here for full Profile

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• Open Scholarship in the Humanities
• Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging
• Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future
• Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage
• Migrant Nation
• Engaging Collections and Communities: Technology and Interactivity in Museums
• Digital Postmodernism and Postcolonialism
• Things Fall Apart: Identity in the Digital World
• Data Portraits: Identity, Privacy, and Surveillance
• Coda: Data Generation

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paularthur.com

Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity

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