(De)Colonizing Literary Digital Annotating: A Student's Experience in the Classroom

This paper is the author's personal experience and interpretation as a student whilst participating in Professor Kyung-Sook Shin's English Literature graduate course, "Literature and Technology II: Feminisms and Digital Humanities," during the 2019 spring semester at Yonsei University, South Korea. Exploring the intersections of literary feminist theory and digital humanities, this paper examines not only the content, but also the methodology and political effects of collaboratively digitally annotating Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel/poem, Aurora Leigh (1856) through the medium, Google Docs. In particular, this paper observes the students' interaction with the digital tools and literature-related pedagogy in two main parts. First, the democratic political nature of classroom culture when creating a new language/code during annotation. Second, the coexistence of cyberspace and the physical classroom space and its effect on time, specifically in the archival of the past, influencing of the future, and the splitting into the present multiverse. From a student's perspective in digital literary annotation, this paper shows that technology could become a way to decolonize and reprogram education to be more inclusive and collaborative.