Dismantling Academia: How Digital Humanities Can Impact Scholarship (2014)

Undergraduate: Jessica Kincaid

Faculty Advisor: Daniel Anderson
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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My project examines the Digital Humanities and its place in the modern higher-level literature classroom. I take a critical look at cyber theory in practice and whether or not it upholds the transformative goals of early digital humanists, including: decentralization in learning, greater student-based production of knowledge, and collaboration. By examining the successes and failures of multiple case studies grounded in the use of digital tools, and by observing, first-hand, an undergraduate class at UNC that engages with digital tools, I hope to highlight the value of this emerging literary field, which, I argue, lies in its potential to level the hierarchical structure of academia, and alter the way in which we view the literary process itself. Rather than using these tools to simply supplement a traditional textual interpretation, how might the Digital Humanities dismantle this tradition in a meaningful way? What is lost and gained in this transition? How can we use the Digital Humanities to engage with texts in a new and interesting manner? And, of course¿.what is it??