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’I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how
to best catch them, down there by the stream. Actually, I can’t
remember us speaking at all. Maybe because we never did.’
The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures
nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even
today. What we do know is that it’s born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped
larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the
coasts of Europe – a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at
least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel
and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It
lives a solitary life, hiding from both light and science, for ten,
twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn,
morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the
Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.
And yet . . . There is still so much we don’t know about eels. No human
has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the
eel’s metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso
Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And
now the eel is disappearing, and we don’t know exactly why.
What we do know is that eels and their mysterious lives captivate us.
This is the basis for The Gospel of the Eels, Patrik Svensson’s quite
unique natural science memoir; his ongoing fascination with this
secretive fish, but also the equally perplexing and often murky
relationship he shared with his father, whose only passion in life was
fishing for this obscure creature.
Through the exploration of eels in literature (Günter Grass and Graham
Swift feature, amongst others) and the history of science (we learn
about Aristotle’s and Sigmund Freud’s complicated relationships with
eels) as well as modern marine biology (Rachel Carson and others) we
get to know this peculiar animal. In this exploration, we also learn
about the human condition, life and death, through natural science and
nature writing at its very best.
As Patrik Svensson concludes: 'by writing about eels, I have in some
ways found my way home again.'
Big Digital Humanities has its origins in a series of seminal
articles Patrik Svensson published in the Digital Humanities
Quarterly between 2009 and 2012. As these articles were coming out,
enthusiasm around Digital Humanities was acquiring a great deal of
momentum and significant disagreement about what did or didn't
"count" as Digital Humanities work. Svensson's articles provided a
widely sought after omnibus of Digital Humanities history,
practice, and theory. They were informative and knowledgeable and
tended to foreground reportage and explanation rather than
utopianism or territorial contentiousness. In revising his original
work for book publication, Svensson has responded to both
subsequent feedback and new developments. Svensson's own unique
perspective and special stake in the Digital Humanities
conversation come from his role as Director of the HUMlab at Umea
University. HUMlab is a unique collaborative space and Digital
Humanities center, which officially opened its doors in 2000.
According to its own official description, the HUMlab is an open,
creative studio environment where "students, researchers, artists,
entrepreneurs and international guests come together to engage in
dialogue, experiment with technology, take on challenges and move
scholarship forward." It is this last element "moving scholarship
forward" that Svensson argues is the real opportunity in what he
terms the "big digital humanities," or digital humanities as
practiced in collaborative spaces like the HUMlab, and he is
uniquely positioned to take an account of this evolving dimension
of Digital Humanities practice.
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