Introduction

Summary

I began my 2016 book Literature in the Digital Age with what, in subsequent years, I came to think of as “the parable of the cheese.” The story goes as follows.

For their 2013 conference, the organizers of the Modernist Studies Association decided to include their first ever “poster session.” Their intention was to showcase the Digital Literary Studies (DLS) research that was then starting to attract attention in the broader discipline. Since I had some work I thought might be of interest – a synoptic digital edition of To the Lighthouse that visualized wildly varying interpretations of free indirect discourse in the text – I signed up. One night, we were asked to set up our posters at the wine and cheese reception. Not a single person asked me about my project and no one engaged with the demonstration I had set up on my laptop.