Archive for the ‘Academic Culture’ Category

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#522 – Roll Over Ranke and Tell Hofstadter the News

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

more on no more plan b and the future of history.

Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) has a typically incisive blog post about the recent “No More Plan B” brouhaha (upcoming panel this Friday at the AHA in Chicago). Calling Grafton a rock star, hers is a synthesis of his call to restructure the values of advanced historical training and Jesse Lemisch’s retort that what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs in education.

Of course, as TR points out, we need both:

Although I think that Lemisch would agree with me on the point I make above, the implications of his argument are that expanded employment (which would enact other kinds of social justice agendas, not the least of which would be expanded opportunities for education) would be enough. I disagree: it is not enough, and this is why Anthony Grafton is a rock star. Arguing that we stop pushing young scholars into a failed market where the most successful will be constrained in their opportunities and intellectual choices, Grafton wants to change the values that have been ineffective in creating jobs for historians. Public history has the potential to create a more free employment system that would support an expanded intellectual community and allow creativity collaborations to flourish.

Furthermore, in a topic that I will take up in part II of this series, Grafton is arguing that the most path-breaking and influential scholarship in the twenty-first century is likely to be collaborative and accessible to a broad public.  Breaking with the model of the exceptional individual, who works in private and competes successfully among professionally and narrowly similar peers, a paradigm that has governed access to the profession for over a century, is in its own way revolutionary.

There’s a lot to consider in TR’s synthesis, but I want to weigh in again with the point that we need to honor the desire of many hopeful history graduate students to become tenure-track professors. Yes, we can, should, and must imagine new modes of cooperative, public historical scholarship (digital humanities in the house). We just need to do so in ways that do not wind up reinforcing experiences of precarity, exploitation, and contingency among the intellectual laborers in the field of history.

In other words, there are important things to cling to in the older, increasingly impossible model of tenure-track professorships. In fact, the longing to be a tenure-track professor seems to me to be connected to the larger critique of intellectual labor within neoliberal capitalism implicit in Lemisch’s curmudgeonly response to Grafton and Grossman. People want to practice the independent craft of history securely, with a range of autonomy and freedom that empowers democratic historical activity rather than impoverishes it.

Ultimately, the question is not just what kind of history we pursue, but also what kind of public we pursue it in. We need to imagine and work toward a public life that supports the knitting together of university history departments, public institutions, and people’s lives in ways that are robustly intellectual and economically innovative. It needs to be a public that expands individual autonomy and collaborative historical research at the same time.

If we do not think carefully about the profession and public life in tandem and work toward changing both, we risk creating a field and a public that merely incorporate historians into existing, exploitative labor markets instead of transforming labor conditions to unleash improved historical investigation and a better public life.

This project, however, will require more collective modes of historical creativity, not just a rock star in the spotlight.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Educational Culture, Historical Culture, Public Culture | 2 Comments »

#517 – Hall of Science

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

simplicity in building names.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Scientific Culture | 1 Comment »

#511 – New Deal History

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

time for plan wpa: history corps, a proposal for the job crisis in history ph.d. programs.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a response to Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman’s “No More Plan B” article, which called upon history departments to grapple with the lack of tenure-line positions for an oversupply of Ph.D. students. In many respects, my response overlapped with Jesse Lemisch’s critique of “No More Plan B” and the duo’s subsequent article, “Plan C” (more back and forth here).

I find Lemisch’s call for “a program for historians like the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project” a compelling proposal. Not because it would be easy to achieve in the current political environment, but rather because it seems to me that it addresses multiple problems: the lack of rewarding employment for smartly-trained historians; the history being lost all around us all the time for lack of study; the strange and distorted gaps between specialized academic research and historical knowledge among the general public, which need not be so strongly dichotomous and in fact often complement each other.

So Culture Rover is not always just about critique. Here is my proposal, utopian but also weirdly practical, for something that the AHA could develop along with history graduate programs. I call it History Corps.

History Corps would fund historians to “embed” themselves with institutions around the United States and the world in order to explore historical topics. Picture a historian working with a neighborhood association to document the history of a place. Picture a historian working with an Occupy activist group to study historical background and think about making history in the present. For that matter, picture a historian working with a police force on their own history, on developing a better understanding of policing, and other issues. Unions, schools, museums, government agencies, think tanks, corporations, banks, consulting firms, small businesses, retirement communities, health institutions, hospitals, architects, magazines, embassies, NGOs, the military—all these have histories both oral and archival; all these could benefit from historians trained at the most advanced levels; all these might benefit from the back-and-forth project—both individual and collective—of both making history and understanding it.

I am sounding a bit like a marketing brochure here, but so be it. A few other thoughts about this proposal:

History Corps would fundamentally not be about abandoning specialized research but rather deepening it through engagements beyond the classroom. It would not replace traditional research and learning but join what Ph.D. programs already do. It might even offer new ways to reinvigorate graduate historical training by bringing into the classroom the need for new skills, approaches to the past, and perspectives on what it means to study and advance the historical field (for instance, increased digital media literacy, skills, and perspectives).

History Corps would absolutely raise various ethical questions about complicity or advocacy, but that’s fine. Those issues have always been there, so why not engage them substantively and meaningfully.

History Corps might be funded through a combination of governmental, institutional, foundation, and user support. The AHA might perhaps be an ideal organization to administer such a project. It knows how to administer complex, multi-institutional projects. It knows how to mediate between specialized research and general learning. It has the history itself to make this history happen.

This kind of endeavor would address the very real economic issues that younger historians and aspiring historians face. But it does so not by telling them that they should have gone to business school. Instead, it offers a vision of historians as professionals. It gives them dignity and it more clearly distinguishes the distinctive skills, perspectives, and expertise that historical training brings. It’s not about making historical training applicable for other fields, but rather of clarifying how history as a field is necessary to a good society.

And all the while, it makes the historical enterprise itself richer intellectually, both for historians and for those who are history—which is all of us.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#509 – Live & In Person!

Friday, November 18th, 2011

moderating “today and tomorrow through the critical lens” at the chicago book expo, goldblatt’s building, sunday, 11/20, 3-4pm.


For a good (intellectual) time, come on down to the Chicago Book Expo this Sunday afternoon.

Event: Today and Tomorrow Through the Critical Lens

Description: A panel of publishers examining contemporary cultural phenomena and challenges through a variety of academic, research-driven, and pop culture lenses.

Time: Sunday, Nov. 20, 3:00 – 3:55 PM

Location: Goldblatt’s Building (former Borders) at 4720 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL.

Panelists:

  • Joseph Altshuler (SOILED)
  • Jonny Thakkar (The Point)
  • J. C. Gabel (Stop Smiling)

Moderator:

  • Michael J. Kramer (Northwestern University, Culture Rover, Issues in Digital History)

Posted in Academic Culture, Arts Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture | No Comments »

#505 – Reinventing the Wheel

Friday, November 4th, 2011

X-Post from Issues in Digital History.

on developing critical and methodological frameworks for the digital humanities, or the digital humanities is the humanities.

To be an equal partner—rather than, again, just a servant—at the table, digital humanists will need to find ways to show that thinking critically about metadata, for instance, scales into thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance protocols of the world. — Alan Liu

Fred Gibbs has a typically perceptive new post continuing his thinking about developing a more defined critical discourse for digital humanities as a field. Drawing his inspiration from Alan Liu’s question, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, Gibbs argues that digital humanists should aim for three main goals: 1) more effective critical discourse around DH work; 2) better rubrics for evaluating projects; and 3) a different kind of peer review.

These are good starting points chock full of provocative possibilities. However, I think it’s worth returning to one of Liu’s key ideas: that digital humanities is not a “servant” to the humanities, it is the humanities.

What I have been discovering in my own DH work on folk music and archival study is that the digital takes us back to core disciplinary questions (in my case these are long-running methodological and interpretive concerns in cultural history, folklore, pop music studies, cultural studies).

Too often, DH gets framed as something new, as a breakthrough, as a reinvention of the wheel. Witness Patricia Cohen’s breathless “Humanities 2.0″ articles in the New York Times. It seems to me that this is because of an unwise conflation between Digital Humanities as an intellectual and scholarly endeavor and the narrative we use in contemporary society for innovations in the private technology sector.

This conflation has everything to do with the contemporary moment, which finds academicians jockeying for money in an increasingly corporatized and neoliberal university setting. The danger here is that we are not thinking carefully about the framework in which Digital Humanities might thrive and contribute to society beyond assumptions about technology solving all problems and creating financial wealth. This, it seems to me, is where Digital Humanities needs to continue to develop greater critical self-reflection built upon well-tested humanistic models. In what larger systems of power are the digital humanities complicit? What is producing this moment in which digital humanities is making such an impact? How does the cultural context shape everything from the code we are creating to the findings we are producing to the jobs that are available in the field?

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being critically self-reflective an intersection between private sector work and more public intellectual and scholarly concerns; the problem is a total conflation between the two. And there’s nothing wrong with being excited about the fresh, unprecedented, and surprising places that the digital takes us, so long as those are not placed in direct opposition to the rich past of humanities scholarship that we can draw upon (critically of course, since those traditions come with their own troubling problems and historical contexts).

I am not trying to stop DH in its tracks. We can be critically self-reflective and move forward. But perhaps we can only do so if we also move backwards too, recovering and remembering all that the analog humanities has to offer.

In sum, there’s a whole lot of new in the Digital Humanities, including what I think is already an extremely sophisticated intellectual move to cut through stale assumptions about old disciplinary boundaries, approaches to evidence, understandings of authorship, and more. The bits and bytes of the critical theory that Gibbs calls for is already happening, in my opinion, on numerous Twitter feeds, countless blogs, and at various conferences and un-conferences.

But even as we find ourselves experiencing the new, it’s just as worthwhile to locate Digital Humanities in relation to the old. For there is a return, a circling back, to pursue if we so choose. DH takes us back—in deeply illuminating ways—to age-old issues in various fields across the arts and sciences. It is not a revolution away from the humanities, but a turn more fully into the humanities.

It is in this sense that the digital humanities should reinvent the wheel.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Historical Culture | No Comments »

#500 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

harris m. berger on the meaning of meaning.

Meaning is the fungible currency in the economy of our lifeworld, constantly crossing borders between one phenomenon and its neighbors, one location and the next in experience. …

Valences and meanings move among phenomena, stance, and mood; this movement exists within a temporal space that evolves forward in an iterative fashion, expands in accretion, and even rewrites its own history in retrospection.

— Harris M. Berger, Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, 39, 52

Posted in Academic Culture, Arts Culture, Culture Rover, Folk Culture, Private Culture, Public Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#499 – Train In Vain

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

crisis in the humanities, part two: a response to cathy davidson’s “strangers on a train: a chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.”

Continued from Crisis in the Humanities, Part One.

Cathy Davidson has written a typically incisive and clever essay on the crisis in the humanities. She urges scholars in universities who believe in the humanities to confront administrators who are hacking away unnecessarily at departments and programs of study; but, like Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman in their AHA column, she also takes humanists to task for two contrary tendencies: not connecting humanistic education to job training more decisively and, at the same time, not being independent enough from larger neoliberal economic ideologies. Complicity and independence—these are the competing forces in Davidson’s view of how higher education.

Much like Grafton and Grossman in their thinking about graduate education, Davidson calls for more introspection among humanities scholars: what kinds of curricular designs and research foci, she asks, might move the humanities to more engaged, interdisciplinary models? How might these link age-old humanistic modes (reading, writing, and, going way back in time to a humanistic skill once again relevant in the age of computers, arithmetic) to contemporary skills required for the digital epoch? She warns, “If humanists can’t make what we do central in an information age, we never can.”

The central problem is only whispered in the essay (psst…”neoliberal policy”). But it does make an appearance. And it does so in terms of one of Davidson’s keen historical insights: the structure of the university was transformed during the twentieth century from medieval institution to modern research machine, and now must be reformed again to meet the needs of the twenty-first century.

Davidson’s point here seems to be twofold: first, the university should be radically reformed in terms of what it can offer students in their training, with humanities taking the lead to cross what in the end is a false divide between the world on campus and beyond its gates; second, the university should be altered in terms of the actual topics, methods, and divisions among disciplines themselves, the stale false dichotomy between so-called “hard skill” scientists and “soft skill” humanists.

It’s this last point that is the trickiest. Is Davidson calling for less specialization or more when it comes to advanced research? Or is she calling for a new kind of specialization in the academy? What should the relationship be between specialization and interdisciplinary study, between radical critique and practical job training for employment? Can universities be places of research and teaching that reject larger systems of power in the world and, at the same time, train students for that very same larger world? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the core challenge that Davidson seems to be asking of herself and others in the humanities.

What’s intriguing here is that the kind of innovation that Davidson calls for has often emerged from the margins. It has often done so both in terms of research and in terms of structural change to the university. At the edges, in the margins, from the sides, from below, among the outsiders—these have often been places where the kind of knowledge and approaches Davidson calls for have emerged. What she seems to call for is an effort to move those margins more to the center.

That’s a noble democratic goal, an essential one in fact, but it’s also a difficult task. What would it look like to move the margins to the center, institutionally and intellectually? Could one still talk about margins and center then?

Institutionally, who in the university with power really wants to give up on a system that has given them their position, status, and security? But even more confoundingly, intellectually, what would it mean for marginal spaces of creativity to move to the center of the university? Is their marginality essential to their creativity? Would those spaces themselves become complicit and compromised?

It is this notion of complicity—in a flawed university system, in neoliberal policy, in centers of power—that is the real topic of Davidson’s essay. Davidson calls for humanists (and scientists, and administrators too) to establish a more “independent” spirit to reform the university, to “break the cycle” of the ongoing crisis in the humanities. Yet, as she also points out, “Whether you are a vulgar Marxist or a raging capitalist, you have to support yourself somehow, and you have to do so in a given historical moment and cultural context.” Therein lies the rub.

How do hobos of the neoliberal age get off this runaway train? For that matter, how do the conductors and engineers and paying passengers get off? How do they escape this leftover behemoth from the industrial age still driving madly down the main line run? Do they jump? Slow it down? Derail it? Change the tracks? Toot the whistle? Decouple the cars? Take over the driver wheel? Are there other models besides complicity and independence, other ways to conceptualize the democratic workplace both within the university and beyond campus that we need to imagine? Is it independence alone those complicit strangers on a train need, or is it some other kind of training, some different train of thought?

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Economic Culture | 1 Comment »

#498 – Don’t Know Much About History

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

crisis in the humanities, part one: a response to anthony t. grafton and jim grossman on graduate history programs.

The October 2011 issue of the American Historical Association’s newsletter, Perspectives on History, has a column by the president of the AHA and the organizations executive director. It’s a noble piece that once again notes the extreme oversupply of PhD’s in history compared to actual history jobs in the academy. It makes the usual points: that departments need to rethink the privileging of academic jobs over other professional opportunities for historians, that history is relevant to a wide range of fields, and other “modest proposals” (is that title supposed to be a Swiftian joke? Or is it an unintended one about their recommendations?).

In a way, this is a very sad column. It’s a kind of giving up and giving in. Rather than think of graduate historical education as a way to study the past in order to improve the present and future, or at least try to do so, Grafton and Grossman simply call on departments to acquiesce to the world as it is. They write of the declining tenure-track job market:

As many observers have noted, this is not a transient “crisis.” It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins in efforts to convert contingent to tenure-track jobs—but it’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.

“How to work magic.” “It’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale.” There is a lack of engagement here with the deeper inequities and inequalities both in our society as a whole and within the university. Yes, we need to think more broadly about history’s applicability, but the first place that the AHA might apply historical skills is to the university itself: what are the ideals of this institution? If universities are no longer meeting those ideals, why is this so? How did this happen? What kinds of alternatives might we imagine to a world in which only “magic” solves the actual problem? Grafton and Grossman offer a band-aid for a gaping wound. The bandage might be decorated with historical figures and pictures of famous events, but it doesn’t even cover, nevermind cure, the deeper political and economic malady.

Perhaps the answer is not only for departments to level the playing field between work within and beyond the academy in graduate training (an important goal to be sure), but also to recognize the very real desires that I suspect push many students toward doctoral work in the first place. Grafton and Grossman seem to want to make the university more like the rest of the world; what about rethinking how the rest of the world might draw upon the best aspects of the university while jettisoning the worst parts?

Which is to say that their column largely misses the point. My hunch is that graduate students do not only aspire to tenure-line positions at universities because they “internalize” the attitudes of advisers and departments and seek the approval of their mentors and institutions. Sure, that’s part of it. But graduate students also long for careers that produce the kind of life that tenure-line positions make possible. They hunger, in short, for a taste, just a taste, of unalienated labor.

Yes, I know this is an ideal. But Grafton and Grossman’s column refuses to engage—indeed they seem almost cruelly to want to crush—the desire that I think many graduate students possess, which is to do what a professor ideally does: to have a modicum of autonomy over her or his labor (yes, again, I know this is an ideal); to have an opportunity to help others acquire knowledge; to have the chance to explore new, specialized kinds of knowledge and produce new ideas as an expert in a particular topic; to be able to work in institutional settings that have, at some level, a democratic component of debate, deliberation, and collective agreement rather than the hierarchical and solely-profit-oriented rule of the corporation (and yes, once again, I know this is an ideal).

Graduate students may not know much about history, fools that they are according to Grafton and Grossman’s piece, but I think they do long to love their work and be loved back by it. That’s the wonderful world they seek: impractical and idealistic, yes; driven as much by desire and utopianism as by pseudo-realist approaches to the profession, yes; a bit of a pipe dream to change the world rather than acquiesce to its profound imperfections, yes. But for many graduate students, I suspect, this dream of a more beloved future world is at the core of their interest in studying past failures to achieve it.

As history departments aspire to train students for a broader range of careers, they must not lose sight of why it is so many students long to become tenure-line historians. The AHA should be working to make those other professions more like the best parts of the tenure-track position, not giving up on those kind of working conditions.

Without seeking to make good on the hopes among graduate students to become fully-fledged faculty members, why not simply dismantle PhD programs entirely? Just have students earn their MBA’s and JD’s, hone their “soft skills” and “hard skills,” professionalize for the world as it is, become happy team members, and work in their cubicles without all the effort.

If, at some basic level, we don’t maintain the ideal of seeking out historical knowledge as academics do, in the way they do, is there anything left to graduate historical training at all?

Next—Crisis in the Humanities, Part Two: a Response to Cathy Davidson’s “Strangers on a Train: A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.”

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Historical Culture | 5 Comments »

#475 – Higher Ed Lowdown

Friday, July 29th, 2011

debating the humanities phd.

Jonathan Senchyne has a nice response to William Pannapacker’s latest screed against pursuing a Ph.D. in the humanities. Pannapacker’s article starts out as if it is going to mount a critique of the increasingly corporate, neoliberal university, and it hints at the rotten economic system of academic labor at research institutions. But then Pannapacker abruptly shifts into an advice column for aspiring humanities scholars. His advice: don’t be aspiring. The article becomes yet another condescending voice of jaded experience that virtually screams at young, innocent students, “Just don’t go!”

What’s so nice about Senchyne’s response is not that he disputes any of the worthy critiques Pannapacker mounts, but rather that he asks us to move beyond naivete or cynicism. Senchyne writes:

I think it’s a good thing to break down whatever is left of the romantic vision of humanities graduate school bohemia followed immediately by a career resembling your favorite undergrad professor’s. But if we’re going to banish the romanticism, let’s also get rid of the melodrama that Pannapacker and others offer in its place.

There is no doubt about the problems in humanities graduate programs, but Senchyne’s article also points to the enduring interest in humanistic, critically-engaged, and specialized learning, teaching, and researching at advanced levels. The real question is why, as a society, we are discouraging people from pursuing the acquisition and exploration of knowledge. The goal—and I think Pannapacker, Mark Taylor, Louis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, and others would agree—should not be to abandon graduate scholarship, but rather to reinvigorate it. We should draw upon the monastic tradition out of which the Ph.D. comes while also thinking about how to build exciting new passageways between the ivory tower and life beyond the campus gates. We should not get rid of the ivory tower, mind you, but rather recover the ideals of the traditional liberal arts and sciences and apply them to the contemporary world.

A humanities Ph.D. is not for everyone, but it should be for those who want it. Why? Because it’s part of what makes for the good life for individuals and for all. Because sometimes there’s practical value in the most unexpected and surprising of abstract pursuits. Because the humanities, as the name suggests, constitute part of what makes us human.

Senchyne helps here by asking us to move beyond certain binary dispositions. Instead of romanticism or melodrama, instead of entitled foolhardiness or faux-tough guy despair, we might turn to the hard work and fun play of reimagining the humanities—and perhaps society with it. Part of that task might start here for critique and here for inspiration.

 

Differing views of advanced scholarship.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover | No Comments »

#466 – Against Collaboration

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

X-post from Issues in Digital History.

imagining cooperative interactivity and the democratic digital humanities.

Digital humanities gets a lot of hype as a field: it could be, many argue, the way to connect the liberal arts to the twenty-first century labor market more effectively. At the center of this rhetoric is the notion that the digital humanities encourages collaboration.

Collaboration is supposed to supplant the old ideal of the isolated scholar in a medieval garret or monastic library. In the digital future, supposedly, the humanities can help to train workers for a world beyond the cubicle. Students in the humanities will ostensibly know how to dial in to the network and give themselves over to its tweeting, networking, coding, project managing, interning, and team building. But what are they giving up in these supposed collaborations?

The lack of focus on the complex interactivity between self and group is what worries me about current versions of digital humanities collaboration. And this is not just a semantic issue. It’s a question of what it means to be democratic, indeed of what it means to be human. Aside from the fact that the word reminds me of Vichy France, collaborators must often give up something of their independence, if not explicitly then implicitly. At worst, the word is invoked to mask unequal relations of power. Collaborators in such scenarios are told they must, at some level, submit their sense of autonomous judgment, integrity, and ethics to a larger force: the long tail, the smart mob, the data mine, the wiki, the algorithm, or the market. To do this, at an even deeper educational level (perhaps at the deepest level), they must compromise the very skills of critical reflection, analysis, and interpretation that the humanities are supposed to enhance.

As humanists in the digital realm, then, we must carefully probe the meaning and practice of collaboration. Our goal as educators should not be to train ultimately-submissive workers, but rather to encourage democratic citizenship. I would argue that democratic citizens can become innovative workers in the capitalist marketplace (or any marketplace, or any non-market institutional setting, for that matter), but not the other way around. This is because citizenship demands entering into cooperative relationships, not collaborative ones. By cooperation, I mean to emphasize mutuality and the difficult but wondrous balancing act between self and group that, one could argue, defines humans at their best.

Those who enter into the bonds of cooperation must possess extraordinary skills of perception, comprehension, analysis, negotiation, assessment, and communication. They must consider the relation of the common (and the commons) to the uncommon and distinctive. They must learn to get along, but also to fight for their rights. And they must, most of all, be able to assess the interactivity that goes into the balance between self and group. Here is where the digital comes in, for what defines this emerging world more than interactivity?

If one of our core tasks as digital humanists is to study and explore what it means to be human within the digital, then we might think more about connectedness in all its vexed but powerful dimensions. To that end, I would suggest that we shift from collaboration to cooperative interactivity as a key goal in the emerging field of the digital humanities.

The digital humanities might position training in twenty-first century “work skills” within the broader pursuit of understanding the interactive nature of democratic life in all its senses, from the political to the cultural to the economic. Which is to say that the interactivity of people, and between people and machines, must be hyperlinked to the question of democracy. If it is, then research and teaching in the digital humanities can accentuate the active, fraught, and essential connectedness that technologies enable between individuals and groups. Instead of a few lines on a resume, training in the digital humanities starts to become nothing less than the effort, at both abstract and applied levels, to understand and sustain an interactivity between the flourishing self and enriched collectivity.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Economic Culture, Political Culture, Public Culture | No Comments »

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