thoughts on the digital humanities

cc license, scorp84

This year I'm taking Ropes, an annual topics seminar and lecture series named after Nathaniel Ropes in which all first-year PhD and second-year MA students are enrolled.

In previous years the course was structured like a regular seminar, meeting every week during the winter quarter, with 5 additional lectures taking place in the winter as well. This year we've moved to a year-long format, which means that our meetings and lectures will stretch throughout the year.

This year's topic is digital humanities, which is proving interesting for a student audience that's a mix of technophobes and technophiles, fiction writers and literary critics, poets and rhetoricians. The line-up of guest speakers is absolutely fantastic: N. Katherine Hayles spoke this past week, Ryan Trauman will be leading us in a workshop on digital storytelling next week, and the rest of the year will feature speakers and readers as diverse as Lisa Nakamura (race, gender, sexuality in online games), Charles Bernstein and Kenny Goldsmith (avante-garde poets), Siva Vaidhyanathan (ideology of the Internet), and Alan Liu (close reading vs. distant reading in the digital age).

We are keeping blog posts for the course on a Wordpress, and I invite you to visit my posts there. My most recent post interrogates speed, content, and materiality in a digital environment, and the implications/changes these will have for our knowledge-making processes.

I'm also tweeting this year's lectures (@Jalouxdelalune) with the hashtag #ropesDH. If I can figure out how to use third-party archival services, I'll post a link to an archive of them soon (I tweeted Hayles's lecture last week).

EDIT: I've created a Twapper Keeper archive here; you can also subscribe to the RSS for this archive.