How Do You Visualize a Million Links?

In the past quarter century, established methods of literary history have been severely contested. On the one hand, syncretic, single-author histories have become problematic as a result of a combination of the expanded literary canon and a range of theoretical challenges. On the other, a demand for historicized overviews that reflect the radical recent reshaping in all fields of literary study has produced large numbers of both collectively written histories and encyclopedias or companions. Literary history thus tends towards compilations in which specialists treat their particular fields, at the cost of integration or of coherence. Meanwhile, the primary materials are increasingly available in digital form, and literary historical scholarship itself is increasingly produced digitally, whether as versions of established forms such as journal articles, or in resources that invoke the potential for new kinds of analysis. Major digital initiatives over the past decades have focused almost exclusively on digital resource creation: the increasingly pressing question is how to use this expanding body of materials to its fullest potential.