Chapter 16 - Cultures of Data

Summary

The nineteenth century was the first era of “big data” in the modern world, and American literary texts published during this time, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), offer an aesthetic reframing of how individuals and institutions within a culture of data use information at scale to claim authority over knowledge and, by extension, power over people. Moby-Dick also gestures toward the ways that African and African American bodies were subjected to the most brutal regimes of quantification that the nineteenth century had to offer in the form of the transatlantic and intra-American slave trade. One of the major problems facing American literary studies and digital humanities today is the question of how to excavate and explicate the quantitative turn of earlier centuries as we seek to better understand the cultures of data we live in today. The best initial response to this problem is not to begin with a specific digital tool per se, but to build a set of guiding principles for how to critically approach data, media, and power from within a context that recognizes the distinctive contributions of literary texts as aesthetic objects. This essay models one such approach to do so.