A recent Facebook post by John Sloop asked why academic writing isn’t better–more creative, more varied, more polished. This has been on my mind lately, as I spent a month in March with the copyedits to Diminished Faculties. On one hand, the book is very intentionally academic. With A Political Phenomenology of Impairment as a …
Category Archives: Digital Humanities
Geoffrey Bennington’s review of the new translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: read as a commentary on the humanities.
Read the review here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/embarrassing-ourselves This was a great read over breakfast. I want to leave aside the intra-Derridean sniping and draw some bigger lessons from this review: 1. It’s dangerous for scholars to cut corners: look at the text, not your notes on the text. Advice for students and super stars alike. (or rather, we …
Some Suggestions for Improving the Humanities Dissertation and Defence at McGill
…or at least the dissertation in Communication Studies. How do you improve the dissertation and the defence? A few weeks back, the faculty members in Communication Studies at McGill met to talk about the graduate curriculum and these topics came up. But some changes we would like to make would be impossible in the current …
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“Look! Now you can…”: Gadget Logic in Big Data and the Digital Humanities
One of the problems with the move to digital humanities and big data is a kind of “gadget logic” taken from the advertising rhetoric of consumer electronics. Lots of the reportage around digital humanities work on the big data side of the field focuses on what computer could do that people couldn’t. By that I …
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Logics of the Humanities and Online Long Form Argument
Thursday’s talk at the NEH/Vectors institute by Alex Juhasz raised some interesting questions for me about online argument. Humanistic thought has, for hundreds of years, operated in relatively linear and long-form arguments. Even those works that challenge linearity (I am thinking here of the standard stable of poststructuralist critiques) exists with reference to it, and …
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Born in Word vs. “Born Digital”
There’s a lot of talk in Digital Humanities about “born digital” content. But what we are really talking about at this point is different kinds of digital, and the politics of competing standards. My project for this institute is to create a digital companion for my mp3 book. The purpose of the site is to …
Audio in Digital Humanities Authorship: A Roadmap (version 0.5)
Background: 0.1. Existing digital humanities work has largely reproduced visualist biases in the humanities: work with images and audiovisual texts has been thus far assumed to be more primary than work with sound as a text. And yet, sound is one of the major areas where huge gains could be made in digital publication. As …
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