Data Imaginary
Against the backdrop of American studies’ long and deep infatuation with ‘narrative’ as a cardinal category of analysis, this research network proceeds from the realization that there are important other logics of signification and symbolization that reside outside of narrative. While there have been some attempts to explore these alternative logics, most notably in game studies and in new media studies, these efforts typically involve creating stark binarisms to engage the ‘other’ of narrative. To counter
Such narrative liminality is a pervasive phenomenon in American culture, not just of the present but also of the past: Our network assumes that it gains particular cultural currency in contexts of sociocultural transformation, dynamization, and reflexivity—that, in other words, narrative liminality constitutes a key idiom in the formation of American modernities.
Accordingly, the goal of this network is to explore and harvest the potential of ‘narrative liminality’ to unlock and analyze important social and cultural dynamics in US culture. This involves two distinct yet hermeneutically interrelated operations: One is to formally model ‘narrative liminality’ as an analytic category that allows us to ask for the symbolic dynamics shared by a diverse array of cultural expressions: How can the narrative potentiality, the latent narrativity, shared, e.g., by databases an
Data Imaginary