Reading in the (post)digital age: Large databases and the future of literature in secondary English classrooms

Abstract

While “born digital” artefacts such as video games and e-books have been part of secondary school English in Anglophone countries for over two decades, databases of mass-digitised (hence “re-mediated”) literary texts are yet to have a significant presence in, or influence on, literary work in subject English. The authors contend that engagement with these digitised texts requires a postdigital “literary literacy”. They explore how “distant reading”–applying digital tools to large-scale data to identify patterns beyond the scale of human perception–offers a form of postdigital literary literacy that can be enacted alongside others, including productive reading and code switching. Using the ex..