A distinguished new offering in the digital humanities, Digital Defoe was reported on by Wired Campus yesterday in a review titled 18th-Century Literature Gets a Makeover on the Web. We learn in the report that: “The site was created by the Defoe Society, an international group that studies the work of Daniel Defoe, an 18th-century English writer most famous for his story of Robinson Crusoe, a man shipwrecked on an island. Defoe is considered by some to be the founder of the English novel.”
My contention that the internet can showcase educational content in powerful new ways, by mirroring the inherent network structure of learning, is directly confirmed by the approach the scholars have taken in building Digital Defoe. In their Introduction, after a tribute to the value of print, the editors move on to embrace the new virtual network medium. In this excerpt they make it plain that the “complex network” around Defoe can be studied in new ways in digital media:
We find that scholarly approaches to Defoe’s work in this issue are also self-reflectively aware that studying Defoe now means more than reading one of his most famous novels and performing an isolated, decontextualized close reading; that approach is certainly still helpful, yet the nature of Defoe’s career and cultural moment has always required scholarship to go beyond the page to consider the complex network of associations at play in his writings, personal contacts, and interests. In Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation, Paula Backscheider begins with this explanation of the difficulties of studying Defoe:
“Widely read in historical collections, universal histories, travel books, conduct books, sermons, political tracts, works of natural science, and theoretical treatises on government and aware of developing forms of prose fiction, such as the picaresque, French memoirs, and novella, he accepted the noncanonical genres and the mixing of forms.” (3)
As Maximillian Novak shows us in “Starting Out with Defoe in the 1950s,” included in this issue, the study of Defoe and of eighteenth-century culture more generally has at least since the 1950s been inspired and mediated by a socially interactive community conversing in public and private spaces, sharing resources and knowledge and contesting claims. “Defoe 2.0” is itself also a redundant term in that sense and the cyberspace created by Digital Defoe merely an extension of the physical spaces of university offices, libraries, and hotel conference rooms.
The interface shown here to the right is titled 1704 – Birth of a Review and provides a timeline of the history of periodical publication. It concludes with an explanation of how to use the newest periodical: Digital Defoe.
