![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
To outline a general framework for a dialogue between the digital humanities and ecocriticism, we begin by exploring the meanings of “reading the environment” and “reading environments” within ecocriticism and the digital humanities, respectively. We then describe a digital ecology where the digital humanities and ecocriticism come together in playful, creative, collaborative interactions. In the second part of the article, we illustrate more specifically the (inter)play of such a digital ecology, by analysing Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, using Voyant (a set of text analysis tools) and Neatline (an online suite of tools for plotting time and space in texts). Finally, we explore the broader context of the digital environmental humanities, a new and burgeoning area that still remains largely undefined, but that asserts the importance of the humanities in responding to the ecological crisis while leveraging new tools and technologies.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reader for the insightful and extremely useful comments that provided a wonderful springboard for more in-depth reflection and discussion on the possible passages and impasses between the digital humanities and ecocriticism.
Stephanie Posthumus would like to thank her research assistant, Amy Goh, who has worked tirelessly on the Neatline exhibits for over a year and a half, redoing many features and images with each new upgrade of Omeka, the platform on which Neatline runs. Thanks also to Wayne Graham and Bethany Nowviskie both at the University of Virginia for their email responses to multiple queries about Neatline.
Notes
1. Heise and Meek’s work using digital analysis tools to mine IUCN Red Lists of Threatened Species has not yet been published, but Heise presented some of the results in her talk “Narrative, Database, Biodiversity Loss” at the Umea University Humlab, 20 September 2011 (http://stream.humlab.umu.se/index.php?streamName=narrativedatabase). The Rachel Carson Centre in Munich, Germany, also has a blog “AntSpiderBee” that posts information about overlapping interests in the digital humanities and the environmental humanities. In the area of environmental history more specifically, the Canadian group NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and the Environment) has led a pioneering effort in the use of digital tools and technologies.
2. We hosted a Digital Environmental Humanities workshop at McGill University in September 2013, which brought together digital humanists and environmental humanities scholars from various disciplines to discuss new projects and collaborations.
3. There are many in-depth analyses of Houellebecq’s novel as this author has become increasingly recognised as worthy of scholarly attention after first rising to fame as a best-selling author. It is not our intention here to develop this type of traditional close analysis; instead, we aim to point to some of the possibilities of reading the novel from a different perspective, touching on alternative interpretations and arguing for the importance of these readings alongside of (and not in place of) more traditional close readings.
4. This desire to rejoin the natural world can be traced much further back. For example, romantic poet William Wordsworth invokes readers to get up, leave their books and go out into the “long green fields,” to close the “barren leaves” of science and art in order to fully immerge in the “lore which Nature brings” (“The Tables Turned” 1798; http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174826).
5. A quick look at the percentage of single authored articles in ecocriticism’s flagship journal, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment, reveals that the individual scholar writing about a small corpus remains by far the norm – 87% of scholarly articles from 2013, for example.
6. See for example Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image. Cinema, Affect, Nature (Citation2013). Ecocritical film studies seem to have done a better job of focusing on these larger ecologies that include the means of production, the effect on the spectator, etc., than more traditional ecocritical literary studies.
7. Multidisciplinary research on reading in print vs. on screen from the past three decades confirms that the perceived experience of reading can vary significantly but that the effective outcomes are relatively similar between the two types of media and depend on a variety of specific contextual factors – see for instance Noyes and Garland (Citation2008).
8. For a sustained though controversial perspective on the perceived losses of print culture and reading practices, see Sven Birkert’s Gutenberg Elegies (Citation1994).
9. A different argument can be made about reading shorter texts, like articles, and browsing linked and multimedia-rich web pages but we are discussing reading literary novels here. Moreover, we realise that format and medium may have other implications for other aspects of reading culture, such as accessibility and economics.
10. The value of knowledge is a different issue – we make no more claims about the knowledge derived from computational processes than we make about non-computationally derived knowledge. It is useful in this context to recall Umberto Eco’s arguments and examples from Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Citation1992): humans are association-creating machines. A playful example from the Digital Humanities is Patrick Juola’s (Citation2009) Conjecturator which algorithmically produces an infinite number of truth claims about a text, a tiny fraction of which may turn out to be truly interesting.
11. Criticisms of distant reading include the argument that the methodologies represent a disciplinary shift from literary interpretation to quantitative history.
12. Technical journalist Erica Sadun (Citation2014) relates in an article entitled “The Book and I: How the iPad has changed my reading life” how she had become so used to reading on a Kindle that she found herself automatically tapping on a word in a print edition.
13. One notable exception is Michael Branch’s creative non-fiction that humorously poses the question of our encounters with nature and culture. In “Are You Serious? A Modest Proposal for Environmental Humor” (Citation2014), Branch argues for the place of the comical and the witty in environmental discourse that often takes itself much too seriously.
14. We are using the Kindle edition of the English translation of Houellebecq’s novel (Citation2005).
15. The digital edition cannot be made available for copyright reasons – the legal realities of the digital environment discourage scholarship on contemporary literature.
16. Jonathan Feinberg uses the term “Wordle” for this kind of compact word clouds (see wordle.net).
17. See http://docs.voyant-tools.org/ui/stopwords/ for more information on stopwords in Voyant.
18. Because each section of the text has a title to indicate which Daniel is narrating, it was quite simple to create a script to divide each narrator into separate files.
19. Looking more closely at the occurrences of the term “sister” in context confirms that Daniel1 is referring to sibling relationships, whereas Daniel24 and Daniel25 are referring to the entity that dictates the rules of clone living.
20. As Heise (Citation2008) has astutely noted, Google Earth represents one possible “comprehensive model for considering ecological crisis and environmental as well as cultural connectedness across different spatial scales” (209).
21. French literary critic Bertrand Westphal’s La Géocritique (Citation2007) is an example of work that draws on geography, cartography and urban studies, to analyse descriptions of European cities in literary texts. Westphal’s geocriticism does not, however, use digital technologies to visualise such places nor does it consider the issue of the ecological crisis as fundamentally altering our relationship to space and place.
22. For an idea of the diversity of possible projects in the digital environmental humanities, see the “Projects” page of the website Digital Environmental Humanities that is the result of the workshop we organised around this theme in September 2013 at McGill University (http://dig-eh.org/).
23. See the 4humanities website created by a group of scholars in the digital humanities (4humanities.org) and the Environmental Humanities Now website (environmentalhumanitiesnow.org) housed at UCLA.
24. Within the digital humanities, these questions are beginning to emerge (see Bethany Nowviskie’s plenary talk at the DH conference 2014; http://nowviskie.org/2014/anthropocene/#more-2445). The environmental humanities have taken so far a largely critical position, examining the problematic use of digital media to represent environmental issues (see the recent issue by Carruth and Marzec [Citation2014]).
25. See Latour’s plenary talk at the Digital Humanities conference 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland (http://dh2014.org/videos/opening-night-bruno-latour/).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephanie Posthumus
Stephanie Posthumus is professor of European literatures at McGill University. Focussing on French contemporary literature, her research areas are animal studies and environmental literary theory. She is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled The French Environmental Imagination: Beyond Nature and Ecology that develops a French écocritique to analyse the fiction of Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Marie-Hélène Lafon and Jean-Christophe Rufin.
Stéfan Sinclair
Stéfan Sinclair is associate professor of Digital Humanities at McGill University. His primary area of research is in the design, development, usage and theorisation of tools for the digital humanities, especially for text analysis and visualisation. In addition to his work developing sophisticated scholarly tools, he has numerous publications related to research and teaching in the Digital Humanities, including Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage, co-authored with Stan Ruecker and Milena Radzikowska (Ashgate 2011).