Technologies of Reading: Theorizing Manuscript Study after the Digital Turn (A Roundtable)

How might we analyze and understand, especially through theoretical engagement, the possibilities and challenges afforded by computational approaches to manuscript study?This roundtable provides an occasion to think critically about the paradigm shift (from manuscript to digital) often hailed as simply innovative as a set of changes in our reading and writing. At a meta-critical level, how should this shift be theorized? How should we best understand acts of reading of manuscripts and their digital surrogates by humans and / or machines in specific textual, institutional, or archival environments? How do those acts of reading relate to composition, compilation, editing, or disseminatation? How might literary and cultural theories (feminist, deconstructive, queer, disability, Marxist, historicist), or theories of reading and writing (including those drawn from cognitive, behavioral, social and computer sciences), be brought to bear on this situation? How might it change our narratives of literary production and the textual productions (i.e. editions) that we make?Sylvia Federico