Below are all of the upcoming 2009 MLA sessions related to new media and the digital humanities. Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the list. You may also be interested in following the Digital Humanities/MLA list on Twitter. (And if you are on Twitter and going… Continue reading Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA
I half-heartedly had wanted to live blog the MLA convention last week, but it just didn’t happen. The last time I live blogged was the 2004 presidential debate, and I guess, in comparison, the MLA just wasn’t worth the effort. That, and the fact that less than 24 hours after my own MLA presentation I… Continue reading Live Blogging at the MLA
On Thursday, January 5, I participated on a round table at the 2023 MLA convention, organized by the MLA itself. The panel was called “Infrastructures of Professional Development.” Here’s the panel description: This roundtable includes leaders who have developed technical, pedagogical, administrative, and organizational structures with potential to serve as sites for professional development. Brief… Continue reading Four Points about the Infrastructures of Professional Development
In early January I joined a group of AI researchers from Microsoft and my fellow humanist Kathleen Fitzpatrick to talk at the Modern Language Association convention about the implications of artificial intelligence. Our panel was called Being Human, Seeming Human. Each participant came to this question of “seeming human” from a different angle. My own focus… Continue reading AI Dungeon and Creativity
This summer I attended the first annual Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Hamilton College. It was an inspiring conference, highlighting the importance of collaborative faculty/student digital work at small liberal arts colleges. My own school, Davidson College, had a team at ILiADS (Professor Suzanne Churchill, Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman, and undergraduate Andrew… Continue reading Your Mistake was a Vital ConnectionOblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities
Here are abstracts for the Making as Method MLA 2015 panel, organized by the Division on Methods of Literary Research. The panel seeks to highlight critical making as a methodological approach to understanding literature and culture. Time: Sunday, 11 January, 8:30–9:45 am Place: 210, VCC West Presider: Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology 1. Warped… Continue reading Making as MethodMLA 2015, Vancouver
A new course for the Digital Studies program at Davidson College. Influences for the syllabus abound: Lisa Gitelman, Lauren Klein, Ben Schmidt, Matt Wilkens, and many other folks in the digital humanities. Course Description “Data” is often considered to be the domain of scientists and statisticians. But with the proliferation of databases across nearly all… Continue reading DIG 210: Data Culture
The Expressive Work of Spaces of Torture in Videogames At the 2014 MLA conference in Chicago I appeared on a panel called “Torture and Popular Culture.” I used the occasion to revisit a topic I had written about several years earlier—representations of torture-interrogation in videogames. My comments are suggestive more than conclusive, and I am… Continue reading Sites of Pain and Telling
Curriculum Vitae My full-length downloadable CV is available. Peer Reviewed Research “The Black Box and Speculative Care” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2018 Edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein University of Minnesota Press, 2019 “Difficult Thinking about the Digital Humanities” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 Edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein University… Continue reading Research and Creative Work
“Non-consumptive research” is the term digital humanities scholars use to describe the large-scale analysis of a texts—say topic modeling millions of books or data-mining tens of thousands of court cases. In non-consumptive research, a text is not read by a scholar so much as it is processed by a machine. The phrase frequently appears in… Continue reading The Poetics of Non-Consumptive Reading
Like the pair of mice in Leo Lionni’s classic children’s book, I had a busy year in 2012. It was a great year, but an exhausting one. The year began last January with a surprise: I was mentioned by Stanley Fish in an anti-digital humanities screed in the New York Times. That’s something I can… Continue reading From Fish to Print: My 2012 in Review
Below is the text of my presentation at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. The panel was Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media, and it was assembled by Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon, Zach Whalen, and myself. Seeking to have a rich discussion period—which we did indeed have—we limited our talks to… Continue reading An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
I’ve gone on record as saying that the digital humanities is not about building. It’s about sharing. I stand by that declaration. But I’ve also been thinking about a complementary mode of learning and research that is precisely the opposite of building things. It is destroying things. I want to propose a theory and practice… Continue reading Notes towards a Deformed Humanities
A Chronicle of Higher Ed column by the former Idaho State University provost and official Stanley Fish biographer Gary Olson has been making waves this weekend. Entitled “How Not to Reform Humanities Scholarship,” Olson’s column is really about scholarly publishing, not scholarship itself.
Or maybe not. I don’t know. Olson conflates so many issues and misrepresents so many points of view that it’s difficult to tease out a single coherent argument, other than a misplaced resistance to technological and institutional change. Nonetheless, I want to call attention to a troubling generalization that Olson is certainly not the first to make.… Continue reading Serial Concentration is Deep Concentration
Here (finally) is the talk I gave at the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle. I was on Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature’s Past and Present panel, along with Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink. Lori’s talk on e-lit’s stand against the interface-free aesthetic worked particularly well with my own talk, which focused on Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain. I don’t offer a reading of Strange Rain so much as I use the piece as an entry point to think about interfaces—and my larger goal of reframing our concept of interfaces.… Continue reading Strange Rain and the Poetics of Motion and Touch