Mapping Cultural Networks and its Discontents

• Main Author: Finn FORDHAM
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Gaziantep University 2019-12-01
• Series: Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences
• Subjects: networks; digital humanities; disconnection
• Online Access: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/917114

The ‘network’ is a powerful concept and metaphor, a tool for and focus of much recent research and scholarship. We envisage our very world as ‘networked.’ ‘The network’ also has aesthetic or formal possibilities: in the interconnected, reticular, knotted or participatory work. Interest in networks from within literary study arose arguably out of cultural history and sociology, where a ‘social text’ was imagined, partly as a means to displace an outmoded focus on the single author, the autonomous individual, the heroic genius. Readers and texts are imagined together forming ‘networks’ of meaning, feeling, and judgement. But do we take the concept for granted? Though powerful as a tool, is it also somewhat blunt? Can we ever succeed in ‘mapping’ a cultural network, or describing one accurately? Is the metaphor too knotty or nodal for the fluid forms it hopes to catch in its structures? What absences does this metaphor forget? Do we overvalue the notion of a network from the context of our own professional networks, at the cost of forgetting the disconnected? Does disconnection from the ideas of disconnection explain the shock and surprise at how recent democratic processes unfolded? Referring to my research that considers formations and disruptions of cultural networks and of value at the outbreak of World War 2, and to representations of data in the Digital Humanities, my paper addresses these questions amongst others.