Digital scholarship as a creative, critical praxis

“I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind” – Ursula LeGuin

Everything is always incomplete. But everything found on the site was somehow ready and fit to share. My digital publication gathers a carrier bag for gift exchange. It is a testament to the abundance I have been given. It is also an offering to readers. This “brief” is one of many carrier bags — for digital scholarship as a creative, critical praxis. It gathers visions, fragments & alliances.

A digital platform’s capacity to juxtapose and entangle writing, images, links, and texts in public exposure was nothing short of a rocket ship for my corporeal philology of ancient Hebrew and comparative (cognate) writing. — My writing is an attempt (essais) to both communicate and convey, these theses, briefs, and collections of essays emerge from my academic practices of corporeal philology. Studying cultural bodies in the ancient world involves critical analyses of texts, historical-comparative methods, theoretical analysis, embodied imagination, and cross-cultural attunement to the words, matters, and forms of ancient societies.

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Ursula Le Guin, in her chapter, “A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” writes: “if it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time....[T]he proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." – Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

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“missing people are the virtual ones, those that can emerge only as the result of a neomaterialist praxis of affirmation, aimed at constructing the plane of composition for such an assembly. This composition requires affirmative relational alliances of a high degree of subtlety and complexity. These alliances need to go beyond identity claims, not by denying them, but by expanding them into diversified embedded and embodied materialist platforms of different “missing people.’” — Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human (Tanner Lectures on Human Values),” 44

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I would like to apply Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” to digital scholarship about the cultural history of Scriptures. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant argues that “the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory." Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future.”

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A. Kuhn, “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media.” A memory text is “a montage of vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, ‘snapshots’ and flashes that can generate a feeling of synchrony” (299). Kuhn calls them cinematic enactments of remembering the past — highlighting their communication via metaphor, cyclic repetition, shifting points of view, and visualizing images, all attributes of performance linked to embodied cultural memory (299).

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Journal of Digital History (DeGruyter & C2DH) — Based on a digital hermeneutics approach, the journal promotes transparency and traceability in digital scholarship and hopes to contribute to a new culture that recognizes digital scholarship as an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort.

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