New Age Scholarship: The Work of Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Abstract

In defending the book and its protocols of reading against the rise of the digital archive, Sven Birkerts worries that "in the theoretically infinite database, all work is present and available—and, in a way, equal." Rather than lamenting this fact, this essay argues that we might recognize such availability as the condition of possibility for cultural studies itself. After first theorizing about the "frenetic" reading practices generated by the digital archive, this essay then engages in an experiment: tracing the use of the word "imperialism" through the digitized version of a British weekly entitled The New Age. The results not only re-embed this now monolithic term in a more complex and unstable historical context, but also point to a new type of synchronic and non-linear critical practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.