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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