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vii 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Making, Critique: A Media Framework Introduction N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman as traditional print-based humanities move into the digital era, many strategies are emerging to support and retrofit academic departments . Some universities have established freestanding centers for digital humanities, including the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia, and the University of Nebraska. Others are hiring one or more faculty members in the area of digital humanities and incorporating them into an existing department and curriculum . Some are fiercely resisting change and remaining resolutely in the print era.Whatever the case, few have attempted to rethink categories, courses, and faculty hiring in ways that take more than a superficial account of digital technologies and their implications for disciplines that have been operating on a print-based model of scholarship.This book is intended to promote such rethinking. The approach we advocate is comparative and media focused. It recognizes that print is itself a medium, an obvious fact that tends to be obscured by its long dominance within Western culture. As the era of print is passing, it is possible once again to see print in a comparative context with other textual media, including the scroll, the manuscript codex, the early print codex, the variations of book forms produced by changes from letterpress to offset to digital publishing machines, and born-digital forms such as electronic literature and computer games.The broad term for this approach is comparative media studies, which typically includes not only text but also film, installation art, and other media forms. The focus in this volume is specifically on text; by analogy, the approach modeled here can be called comparative textual media (CTM).Although our argument will proceed with this more specific focus, many aspects of it apply as well to humanities disciplines that analyze media forms other than text. viii N. KATHERINE HAYLES AND JESSICA PRESSMAN “Why Compare?”R. Radhakrishnan (2009) asks in his article of that title in a recent issue of New Literary History devoted to rethinking comparative literature in a transnational globalized era, noting at the same time that we compare endlessly. The anecdote he tells of conversations with his Indian autorickshaw driver suggests one powerful answer. His driver sings the praises of the Indian traffic system, which he sees as fostering a driver’s creativity, aggressiveness, and competence, whereas Radhakrishnan prefers the rationality, order, and safety of the U.S. lane system. One can see how this small debate might open onto a landscape of sweeping differences in cultures, attitudes, and practices. The example illustrates the potential of comparative studies to break the transparency of cultural sets and denaturalize assumptions and presuppositions, bringing into view their ideological underpinnings. This will scarcely be news to comparative disciplines such as cultural anthropology, comparative literature, transatlantic studies, and postcolonial studies. These rich disciplinary traditions serve to highlight by contrast that there has been a relative paucity of work in comparative media studies in the United States, which nevertheless embodies a similar denaturalization of assumptions. Even though, for the last few hundred years, Western cultures have relied to a greater or lesser extent on print, and notwithstanding the excellent work of scholars such as Elizabeth Eisenstein (1980), Adrian Johns (2000), Mark Rose (1995), and others to understand the complex ways in which assumptions born of print are entwined with social, cultural, economic, and (especially!) academic structures, the comparative media project remains as open ended and challenging as ever. Indeed, if anything, it has become more complex in the last couple of decades. In the new millennium, the media landscape is changing far faster than our institutions, so we now find ourselves in situations where print-born assumptions linger and intermingle with practices such as social media networking, tweeting, hacking, and so on, to create highly diverse and heterogeneous social–technical–economic–political amalgams rife with...

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