17.085 lecture series at King's College London 2003-4

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 02:10:05 EDT

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                    Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 85.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 06:56:01 +0100
             From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
             Subject: "Digital scholarship, digital culture" at King's College
    London 2003-4

    [The following is an early announcement of a major lecture series in
    humanities computing to be held at King's College London during the 2003-4
    academic year. We in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and in the
    School of Humanities at KCL are delighted to extend a cordial invitation
    to attend these evening public lectures. A further announcement will be
    made once the times and locations in London are set. Please circulate
    this announcement widely. --WM]

    Digital scholarship, digital culture

    Lecture series at King's College London
    October 2003 to May 2004

    Schedule.

    Stanley N. Katz, Director, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies,
    Princeton. www.wws.princeton.edu/~snkatz/. Thursday, 16 October 2003.
    "Why Technology Matters: the Humanities in the 21st Century."

    Gordon Graham, Department of Philosophy, Aberdeen; Regius Professor of
    Moral Philosophy. www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/graham.hti. Thursday, 13
    November 2003. "Strange bedfellows? Information systems and the concept
    of a library".

    Yorick Wilks, Professor, Computer Science, Sheffield.
    www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/.
    Thursday, 11 December 2003. "Companions: Explorations in machine
    personality".

    Timothy Murray, Professor, Comparative Literature and English, Cornell;
    Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library.
    people.cornell.edu/pages/tcm1/cv.html. Thursday, 15 January 2004.
    "Curatorial In-Securities: New Media Art and Rhizomatic Instability".

    Ian Hacking, Chaire de philosophie et histoire des concepts
    scientifiques, Collège de France, and University Professor, Philosophy,
    Toronto. www.college-de-france.fr/site/phi_his/p998922592913.htm.
    Thursday, 19 February 2004. "The Cartesian Vision Fulfilled: Analog
    Bodies and Digital Minds".

    Michael S. Mahoney, Professor of History, Program in the History of
    Science, Princeton. www.princeton.edu/~mike/. Thursday, 18 March
    2004. "The Histories of Computing(s)".

    Marilyn Deegan, Director, Forced Migration Online, Refugee Studies
    Centre, Oxford University, and Editor-in-Chief, Literary and Linguistic
    Computing. www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/deegan.html. Thursday, 15 April 2004. "No
    Stately Pleasure Dome: Interconnected Things in the World-Wide Digital
    Library".

    Jerome J. McGann, John Stewart Bryan University Professor, Virginia;
    Thomas Holloway Professor of Victorian Media and Culture and Director,
    Victorian Centre, Royal Holloway College, London.
    www.iath.virginia.edu/~jjm2f/home.html. Thursday, 20 May 2004. "But What
    Does It All Mean? Computing, Aesthetics, Interpretation".

    Rationale.

    The word "digital" refers in origin to the digits or fingers of the human
    hand, hence discrete, countable units, and so the data into which
    computerization fragments the continuous world of human experience.
    "Digital" also suggests what the hand does: it manifests skill in the
    making of things, intervening in the world in order to change it.
    Digital is thus artificial, signifying the use of tools in a familiar
    cycle of breaking apart and putting back together again, in order not
    just to understand what we are given but also, as Northrop Frye said, to
    remake it in our own image. So much of what computers bring is deeply
    familiar, present within human culture since Homer imagined Hephaistos's
    autonomous agents in Iliad 18. But what is new or newly strengthened,
    what consequences and opportunities for scholarship and for our culture
    are now becoming visible?

    "Digital scholarship, digital culture" is a year-long series of lectures
    by distinguished scholars asked to explore this question from the
    perspectives of their own disciplines. "Digital", they remind us, means
    hands-on human choice of what to make and how to make it, not submission
    to the inexorable workings of a super- or sub-human fate. At the same
    time, tools embody tendencies of mind and practice, so choice is not
    exactly unconstrained: we have made our wheels and put them in motion.
    The question these scholars address, then, is not what the future will
    bring. Rather it is what potential futures may be read with the help of
    the linguistic, literary, historical, philosophical and technical
    imaginations that our academic practices help us to exercise. It is how
    those imaginations may prepare us to remake the world.

    Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
    Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
    7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
    www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/



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