Maria Popova’s “Digital Humanities Spotlight” calls attention to technological accomplishments achieved in the last century. She also aptly states that there’s “a large portion of humanity’s richest cultural heritage that remains buried in analog archives” and it is in the “fledgling discipline” of Digital Humanities (DH) where this information is repositioned/repurposed online via “technologies like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition.” Popova also states that because of DH, some of the cultural heritage once confined to the “privileged elite” has been “democratize(d).”

I’m familiar with Popova and recall listening to a podcast that Tim Ferriss had with her a while back. I got distracted by all of the enticing posts in the “favorite reads” section that are featured on the website and thus, I meandered away from the “Digital Humanities Spotlight (Spotlights)” and clicked on the post Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss. I was struck to see the words “Hannah Arendt” and “Love” appear together. Could this really be the German-born American historian and political philosopher or to quote Popova, “one of the most piercing intellects of the twentieth century”? Was this the same person that had produced volumes of serious scholarly work – a fraction of which I’ve read and studied including sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism? Is this the same revered academic that is quoted by many other scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, Giorgio Agamben, and Zygmunt Bauman? Yes, indeed!  

The post didn’t disappoint – I learned the cringe worthy fact that Arendt had an affair with her 36-year-old (Nazi leaning) professor, Martin Heidegger, when she was a 19-year-old university student! Some of their love letters are in the book Love and Saint Augustine, where Arendt, in true DH fashion, kept the past alive by:

“…simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts [used] in her political works of the same period. The dissertation became a bridge over which [she] traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg [where she received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1928] and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine’s question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change” (Amazon).

In reading this post, I started to think that perhaps The Marginalian website, is a digitization project that could be considered DH. The webpage design is not only inviting but addictive and it provides a number of links that captured my interest.  It makes for a satisfying engagement experience, one where  “too much information” allowed me to feel like “a fly on the wall,” because I got to know some juicy personal things about a scholar that I admire and wish to learn more about…but is the site DH? Is it archival or, to quote Prof. Karlin, is it just “a collection”?  Well, according to her website, which Popova started in 2006 and where up until 2021,she had published more than six million pages – or as she states: “if one were to paginate and print everything.” Popova’s former site, Brain Pickings (an earlier version of the Marginalian is described here: Brain Picking – YouTube. According to Wikipedia, Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based … writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.” As such, my take is that her subject matter is selected to match and/or work with her platform and the tools she uses to curate her writings.

Popova’s site contains not only chockful links to the Arendt/Heidegger love letters, but those of others that weren’t “immune to youth’s impulse to relinquish reason for its counterpoint.” I would imagine that Popova purposely chose this DH(ish) median where the reader has the ability to actually engage “with the possible…with that which might or could be,” as Todd Presner states in “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities” (60). I certainly spent a considerable amount of time on the site – never to think of Arendt in the same way, but in one that did “enrich” my understanding of this complex and brilliant woman. In order to learn more about contemporary political theory, with an emphasis on Hannah Arendt and issues related to  democracy, I would say that Popova’s website isn’t enough for this field(s) of study or for future scholars. Hannah Arendt’s life’s work is extensive and as a result of finding the above referenced post, I searched to see if there are any other DH or interactive websites that feature her work that can really be considered “legit” DH and lo and behold I found the  Library of Congress – Hannah Arendt Digital Collections of Papers with a brief description below:

“The papers of author, educator, political philosopher, and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) constitute a large and diverse collection (25,000 items; 82,597 images) reflecting a complex career. The collection spans the years 1898 to 1977, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1948, three years before Arendt’s naturalization as an American citizen. The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of Adolf Eichmann’s trial proceedings, notes, printed matter pertaining to Arendt’s writings, family and personal materials, evidence of Arendt’s network of fellow intellectuals, editors, writers, and theorists, and documentation of her academic affiliations and courses taught.“

Here I’d wager that this Digital Collection of Papers is considered archival and DH!