I’m reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence as a kind of light reading tangentially related to my scholarly interests. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligences spinning out of control. There are plenty of respectable folks out there who have echoed these worries—Hawking, Gates, Musk, etc. And Bostrom himself is certainly... Continue Reading →
Invention, curriculum, and digital humanities
In the humanities' ongoing struggle to find its way back to wherever the students are (or lead the students back from wherever they are), one of the more written about tactics involves the digital humanities. Basically the premise is that many students are STEM focused, so connecting with more technical matters is a way to... Continue Reading →
rhetoric in the late age of the internet
Some 25 years ago, Jay Bolter described the "late age of print" not as an era when print media were disappearing but rather as time when the question of an impending end began to characterize how we understood the technology. In imagining a late ago of the internet, some semantic clarification is necessary. I do... Continue Reading →
the social-rhetorical challenges of information technology
I spent about an hour this morning responding to two different institutional surveys about technology: one coming from the library and asking about digital scholarship and the other coming from IT and focusing on their services and classroom technologies. What technologies do scholars in your field use? What do you use? What frustrations do you... Continue Reading →
digital humanities and the close, hyper, machine
As you may have seen, the LA Review of Books completed its series on the digital humanities today with an interview with Richard Grusin. I don't know Richard all that well, though of course I am familiar with his work, and our paths did cross at Georgia Tech when I was a Brittain Fellow in the... Continue Reading →
otters' noses, digital humanities, political progress, and splitters
Here's the thing that confuses me the most about this DH conversation. See, for example, the recent defense of the digital humanities in the LA Review of Books (which, at least from my experience of it, needs to consider a name change) by Juliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper, which responds to this other LARB article byDaniel Allington,... Continue Reading →
de-baits in the digital humanities
The LA Review of Books has published 4 interviews so far in an ongoing series on the digital humanities conducted by Melissa Dinsman. The series promises "Through conversations with both leading practitioners in the field and vocal critics, this series is a means to explore the intersection of the digital and the humanities, and its impact... Continue Reading →
the accidents of openness and safety in digital spaces
While I haven't been very active here of late, I have been writing a fair amount on the topic of openness. Similarly the theme of safety has become a familiar one in academic circles; safety comes up often in relation to students and classrooms but also, as it does here, in terms of creating safe... Continue Reading →
Genre, media formats, and evolution
Mackenzie Wark has a useful extended discussion of Lev Manovich's Software Takes Command. If you haven't read Manovich's book, it offers some great insights into it. I think Manovich's argument for software studies is important for the future of rhetoric, though admittedly my work has long operated at points of intersection between rhetoric and media study.... Continue Reading →
