Abstract
This article takes up the question of reproducibility and explainability in the digital humanities in relation to questions of the reproduction of literary prestige. It argues that the controversy over reproducibility in “computational literary studies” sparked by Nan Z. Da’s “Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies” can be understood as a struggle over the autonomy of disciplinary standards of argumentation and evidence, using the work of Pierre Bourdieu on literary fields and the reproduction of prestige. The essay examines a particular dataset relevant to the reproduction of literary prestige, the “Index of Major Prizes Database” housed at the Post45 Data Collective, and re-analyzes some of the surface features of this dataset in relation to the reproduction of literary prestige in the early twentieth century. It examines the dynamics of both surfaces and silences in explanations of literary prize data, ending with a call for more thinking on literary forms of reproduction and explanation in relation to open datasets.
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Data availability
“Major Literary Prizes” can be accessed, with a curatorial statement, here: https://data.post45.org/our-data/.
Notes
Other absolute statements throughout Da’s text also make the absolute nature of the divide between “reading well” and computational readings clear: “CLS has no ability to capture literature’s complexity,” for example (Da 2019, 634).
See my forthcoming chapter on “Critique” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (ed. Adam Hammond).
Data and curatorial statements available on the Post45 Data Collective Site: https://data.post45.org/our-data/.
We might question the national framing and the effect of inflation on such prizes, but these are outside the authors’ main interests.
This interactive dataset is available here: https://view.data.post45.org/mlpwinners.
See https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/academy-american-poets-fellowship; on Danez Smith’s Forward prize in 2018 and spoken word poetry: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/18/danez-smith-forward-poetry-collection-prize-dont-call-us-dead.
On cultural reparations, see Monk-Payton, Brandy. “Blackness and Televisual Reparations.” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 12–18. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2017.71.2.12.
As a judge for the inaugural Bollingen Prize of 1948, awarded to Ezra Pound.
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Hankins, G. Reproducing disciplinary and literary prestige: “The index of major literary prizes in the US”. Int J Digit Humanities (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-023-00082-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-023-00082-x