Walden and the Ironic Outcomes of a Digital Literature Course
So far this course has been very computer focused. This is to be expected since it’s a course on the modern digital avenues of studying literature, and the variety of applications of code and computing to literature study have been continually surprising and impressing me. More on this later. Despite this, this semester I have found myself ironically increasingly drifting away from technology use the longer the course goes on. I have been spending less time on my phone, making an effort to see friends in person instead of texting or calling, and have been more and more aware of how pervasive technology is in my every day life. I’ve found joy in writing letters to my friends and the interaction without the use of smartphones or computers feels more genuine to me despite the fact that letters take longer to arrive than texts. This is certainly not a direct result of our class, but it’s funny to me that this attitude towards technology is developing while taking a very computer forward course. This is a view that I think originally developed while reading Walden for the first time. In the Fall of 2023, I attempted to read Walden for my own personal enjoyment, but didn’t have the time or memory span to finish it. Despite not finishing it, I think part of Thoreau’s writing influenced me away from the consumerism and focus on productivity that pervades modern society. I have since began phasing technology use out of my life as much as possible, and so far the reading of Walden in class has only reinforced that. I have no plans to live in the woods any time soon, but I have been swayed by some of Thoreau’s thoughts on living simply and virtuously.
A Reluctant Respect for Coding
Despite my newfound aversion to technology, I am impressed with the digital avenues of literature study. I never would have thought that the humanities utilized coding in this way, but I can appreciate the potential uses for encoding texts in a way that can be read and analyzed by a machine. Learning about coding in the humanities and coding in biology has led me to similar attitudes; I am not a fan of doing it, but I appreciate the need for it and the potential positives of developing it as a field. The development of coding languages for encoding literature at first seemed a little pointless to me; I would have been inclined to agree with the question that someone asked in class “If you’re going through all the trouble to encode all the lines of text in order to count them all, can’t you just use that time to count all the lines of text instead?” Although we haven’t gotten too far into the specific uses of TEI yet, the encoding of the Walden manuscript is a very detailed and undeniably impressive project that forces me to admit that even if I don’t want to be the one doing it, it is useful and cool to be able to describe text that way. For the rest of the class, I’ll try to keep this respect and potentially even enjoy the opportunity to code literature.