Literature

10,175 Australian Novels?

Drawing on an internet software development background where I was formerly a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)  and MySQL (Structured Query Language)  programmer, over the past two years it has been possible for me to engage with AustLit tagged-text data along the lines of enquiry suggested by Franco Moretti and William St Clair. In the absence of proprietary software suiting my research needs, this has meant building functions that enact specific analytical outcomes. These outcomes, presented within the context of ‘new empiricism’ at ASAL  and mini-ASAL conferences during 2007 and 2008, represent many hours of data mining, function programming and … rendering. I deliberately use the word ‘rendering’ because I wish to suggest early on the practice of 3D computer graphic modelling and animation where an underlying mesh, in this case a vast resource of publication data legitimately downloaded from the AustLit website, is worked through a series of hand-made, hand-coded tools to generate useable representations for academic debate. As these representations do not wear their underlying design on their sleeve, the resulting images of statistical analysis, deployed in my research for the purposes of discussing publication trends in Australian literary history, tend to elide their links with the technological labour that preceded their creation. In this sense, one might say – with apologies to Van Maanen who is writing about ethnography – that the ‘fieldworker, having finished the job of collecting data, simply vanished behind a steady descriptive narrative justified largely by the respectable image and ideology of … [new empiricist] practice’.  Which is to say, like the commonplace computer desktop or laptop screen, in using computer technologies to facilitate interpretive work my statistical graphs placed ‘a premium on surface manipulation and thinking in ignorance of [their] underlying mechanism’.  Essentially, it asked viewers to suspend disbelief and become absorbed in, even seduced by, a ‘certain kind of secular magic’ that was being performed on the screen.  As Martyn Jessop claims, ‘Images are seductive and there is a natural tendency to instinctively believe whatever one sees with one’s own eyes but in the case of digital visualisations what is seen is entirely a constructed object’.

This is an important observation because ‘new empiricism’ and its related practices capitalise on the notion of computers employing neutral, carefully structured logic with an absence of poetics and felt emotion. Indeed, it is the ways that computers ‘think’ which is taken to be ‘their most culturally important characteristic’  and contemporary social rhetoric surrounding technology encourages us to view computers as communicating (or ‘thinking’) in a logic that proceeds towards very specific ends. New empiricism, in denoting precise rational procedures linked with computing, seeks to be an expression of those ends and is connected with the production of digitally based visual texts, like my own statistical graphs, that seemingly ‘speak for themselves’ about Australian literary history. This might be because ‘the kind of knowledge the computer encourages is rationalist, linear and analytic, mimicking the public communication of science’  and the possibility of objectivity, of which the humanities secretly desires.

Yet information systems and information use are also highly ‘socio-technical in nature [:] … they develop their own personality as determined through the initial design of the system and its ongoing human interface, and they reflect the politics of the organisational structure and its human actors’.  Perhaps new empiricism, in its perceived relevance to Australian literature and the humanities in general, is a system of analysis that represents what Fredric Jameson lamented as the ‘depthlessness’ of postmodernism,  privileging the consumption of visual images over deeper, critical forms of thinking? Indeed, does the move from ‘close’ reading to ‘distant’ reading parallel the loss of the felt authenticity of emotion and the rise of simulation and surface? Such questions are beyond the scope of this essay. However, if changes in ‘technologies do not just expedite … knowledge transmission, but deliver it in alternative ways which require different interpretive and behavioural skills’,  then by considering the embodiment of the disciplinary space of Australian literature on a computer screen (through AustLit) as a type of ‘cultural work’, we might begin to take account of ‘the representational logic of the [computer] medium’ in discussions of empiricism and modern-day forms of Australian literary knowledge production …

Jason Ensor, ‘Is a Picture Worth 10,175 Australian Novels?’, in Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon (eds.), Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010.