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Digital Humanities: The Ecto-Parasite
This blog entry, exploring Jacques Derrida's Mochlos can be read in three ways. The numbers below refer to the cells which should be read in the specified order. A.) 1-3-4: This essay views knowledge and the University as a technology and asks whether the Digital Humanities under this framework is unnecessary and elitist. We analyze the elitism through Kants attempts to distinguish the University's duties of truth and action and then find out why Derrida thinks this distinction is impossible to make because of the nature language. B.) 1-2-4: This essay starts off the same way but goes into the devouring margins of the University, whether its possible to safeguard against intrusion if the University is viewed as a language act and flips the question to see if the University is a parasite on the outside world and uses the Digital Humanities in this negotiation of power. It goes further to see if this parasitism is inevitable where there is language. C.) 2-4: This is a subset of the previous essay but stands alone as a commentary on a different kind of effect of capitalism on the University from the one explored in the previous blog.
Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age
The author says that he is trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs.
Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education
As part of the collaborative exercise on mapping the field of Digital Humanities in India, a series of short-term research projects were commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore in November 2013. A day-long workshop was organized at CIS on January 28, 2014 to discuss the learning from these projects and explore questions for further engagement with the field.
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
As part of the research enquiry in the field of Digital Humanities (DH), this mapping exercise aims to provide an overview of key people, institutions and emerging literature in the field, and identify some of the pertinent questions and challenges to better locate and contextualise the work done in DH in India.
The Conflict of Konigsberg
Immanuel Kant’s “Conflict of the Faculties”, written in Konigsberg was a daring publication under the censorious watch of the Prussian totalitarian state. In it, he argues for open argument and mutual respect among the state endorsed and free reigning faculties in the University. This blog will explore a modern day conflict among the faculties under the clutches of a different kind of regime. Although the organization has radically shifted, the conflict has escalated to a battle (much like the one that tore Konigsberg apart during World War II) and the regime overseeing it may be more insidious than before.
A Hitchhikers Guide to the Cyberspace
This blog post explores what authors of various stripes have to say about the digital sphere. Directly or indirectly, it looks at the commentary that authors provide on raging debates and contentions within the Digital Humanities.
Thinking Digital Beyond Tools: Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah
Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Netherlands. He is committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu.
Theorizing the Digital Subaltern
As digital humanities research at CIS proceeds, a number of critical positions have arisen, making it possible to reconcile questions of humanities with the digital realm. This blog entry focusses on race as a factor of research and how it is displayed in the digital.
Digital Humanities Talk at CIS
In an attempt to contextualize the digital humanities work within the CIS network of projects, Sara Morais held a talk on the advantages and problems in doing digital humanities work. Following is the transcript of the talk with a video of the presentation.
Towards Critical Tool-building
The last blogpost focused on the importance of design for digital humanities research and on the concept of universal design to make research work more inclusive as well as more accessible, the visual being something that digital humanities stress the importance of in their work. But research work has always been put into form, so aesthetics have played a role in traditional humanities work. What has changed and why is there a self-proclaimed shift towards design in the digital humanities?
Designing Change? Gatekeepers in Digital Humanities
After defining the archive as one of the important concepts for digital humanities research, the question arose, whether or not a redefined archive still functions as a gatekeeper. This blog entry follows the question, if the digital humanities have overcome gatekeepers of knowledge, or if there has simply been a shift in what is doing the gatekeeping.
Archive Practice and Digital Humanities
After trying to define the field of digital humanities in two prior blog entries, one mapping the field, the other defining its values, the third blog entry in the digital humanities series looks at a reoccurring keyword of digital humanities research, namely at the concept of the archive. The following article touches upon how it is being used within research of digital humanities and how that relates to traditional humanities archival work
A suggested set of values for the digital humanities
In a prior blog entry the CIS has started mapping out the field of digital humanities. Subsequent to these first thoughts follows a review in several parts of an alternative publishing project edited by Matthew K. Gold of New Yorks Technology College. It is presented online as a hybrid print/digital publication stream, enabling viewers and readers to comment and highlight sections as they please. In the introductory passage, Matthew Gold addresses questions burning at the back of the research communities mind: Does digital humanities even need theory? Does it have politics?Is it more accessible than other scholarly fields? Does new media usage trivialize the professionalism of DH research?
Mapping the field of digital humanities
This blog is the first in a series of blog entries evolving around digital humanities. As the research proceeds, arising questions will be addressed and attempted to map out, so that we are left with an annotated bibliography of the field which will help create parameters on how to approach research in that sector. In this first episode of the blog series, the introductory volume simply called Digital_Humanities (Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp) will be combined with Patrik Svensson's Landscape of Digital Humanities, so as to assert what it is, we're dealing with, when talking about digital humanities.
Back When the Past had a Future: Being Precarious in a Network Society
We live in Network Societies. This phrase has been so bastardised to refer to the new information turn mediated by digital technologies, that we have stopped paying attention to what the Network has become. Networks are everywhere. They have become the default metaphor of our times, where everything from infrastructure assemblies to collectives of people, are all described through the lens of a network.
Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects
Brown University is organizing an international conference that elucidates the networked conditions of our times, how they produce ways, conditions, and habits of life and living, how they spread local actions globally. The conference will be held from March 21 to 23, 2013 at Brown University, Rhode Island.
Alt needs to Shift
People maybe talking more online, but they all seem to be talking about the same kind of thing.
Habits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society
Recently, in Bangalore, a cluster of academics, researchers, artists, and practitioners, were supported by Brown University, to assemble in a Thinkathon (a thinking marathon, if you will) and explore how our new habits of everyday life need to be re-thought and refigured to produce new accounts of what it means to be human, to be friends, and to be connected in our networked societies.
Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like
There aren’t always rational explanations for the ways in which we behave on networks. While there are trend spotting sciences and pattern recognition methods which try to make sense of how and why we behave in these strange ways on networks, they generally fail to actually help us understand why we do the things that we do when we are connected.
Who’s that Friend?
If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.
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