Category Archives: Ideas

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 …

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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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Narrative: Can’t Live With It. . .

Last week in my Historiography seminar I taught Hayden White’s classic 1966 The Burden of History.  This is the third time I’ve taught him (last two times were in 2000 and 2004) and each time, certain aspects of his argument seem fresh, others seem dated.  What’s wonderful is that those labels change each time. Here …

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Two New Texts avec Backstory + New Rhythm for Villeray

Two new texts on the casseroles appear today: 1. Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest. This was the piece that got me started writing about all this stuff — as in, “I have to write something and this has such an obvious sonic angle.” I emailed Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, as I’d admired the Sound Studies …

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