Can Computational Codaco-exist with New Criticism and Deconstructive Sharing? Re-Visiting Post Colonial Digital Humanities in the Habeas Corpus of the Reader

Abstract

Digital spaces are rapidly emerging as the sites where human knowledge is not only coded but also researched, reproduced, circulated, disseminated, stored and amplified. As the reproduction of digital codal knowledge has accelerated at such a fast pace in the last decades, the exclusions and prejudices that marked the print culture as products of imperial political economy, colonial rule, patriarchy and racism, were reproduced in the digital cultural record. As current and prospective publics check out principally to digital sources for their information and communication, the output they find there is reflexive of these digital politics. More preoccupying is the fact that exegetes approach cyberspace sources with the presumption that the digital scripted or video text is a democratic site where representation is available to all and sundry thanks to access to social media platforms, blogging and other channels.

However, this paper reminds us by arguing that we are also living in the age of the reader ‘outside' the digital codal realm and New Criticism can illuminate the ambiguous relation that exists between the digital coda and the readership. As a performance practice, codal reading has taken multiple forms in various human societies depending on whether one is referring to the pre-modern times in African and other world oral communities, the Eurocentric Middle Ages, the modernization epoch of yesteryears or the post-modern epoch of globalization and digitization today. The reading process is a dialogical and therefore dynamic act that constructs new meanings irrespective of the metanarrative text being read. In the digital context of Web 1.0, reading is a process of visual and silent appropriation of the textual idea at the cost of reading aloud, which was the practice for comprehending texts read. However, this problem was resolved in Web 2.0 with the incorporation of social media apps like YouTube, videogames and animated designs. This hybridized public space of readership in the contemporary global neo-liberal epoch is now being occupied by new thought leaders who are re-thinking (i.e. re-reading) the old digital texts and their ideas on postcolonial nationalism and economic internationalism with a different habeas corpus such as TED talks in various sectors of life with the support of plutocrats. The sectors of thought leadership include religion (e.g. revivalist evangelism, return to ancestral/shrine worship), identity politics, the free market economy of technological disruption and innovation, mentoring and coaching, etc

       But the humanities as a reading process must be taken very seriously because it is deeply ingrained in humans and particularly in the human populations living outside the digital world as a result of the ‘divide'. As an act, reading is a historical experience that straddles the biographical and historical periods, the pre-modern times in African and other world oral communities, the Eurocentric Middle Ages, the modernization epoch of yesteryears and the post-modern epoch of globalization today. Therefore, beyond the internet as codal text is a whole universe of reading with its own practices.