Notes Towards Day 3 (Tues, Jan 24): Mawrtyrs Going Digital

I. Welcoming two of the authors of today's texts,
Mooring Gaps, Seeing Stigma and A Moment's Ornament
Jen Rajchel, '11 and Aya Martin-Seaver, '12
Introduce yourselves to them, initial responses to their web-work?

II. coursekeeping:
registrations and postings?

for Thursday, please read Kathleen Fitzpatrick's blog post from this month,
Networking the Field, and the Introduction to her 2009 e-book, Planned Obsolesence

please look again @ ALL of your partner's paper (from last Thursday);
bring it and yours; we'll be talking about our own writing in light of your
postings, today's blogs, the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 & Fitzpatrick's work

this all a warm-up for your first 4-pp. web "event," due a week
from Friday, posted on Serendip by 8 p.m. on Feb. 3rd, reflecting on
(possible/actual) "breaks" in writing. This could involve
reading an on-line site which represents a "break" in the
writing in your discipline; or examining a social networking site
as a genre (how does it work? what are its characteristics?
what possibilities does it offer for public intellectual work?).
Or you might want to focus on the "breaks" in your own writing,
in light of the generic conventions you've been taught (perhaps
you'd like to create a text for The Breaking Project ?)

sign up now for a writing conference ...

III. Jen and Aya are here to inspire you in this work!
"let's imagine a new topography".....
***how did you happen to come to do this work?
*what was it like, doing it? (emphasis on process)
*what sort of reception did it get? (question re: product)

** what are your reactions, now, to one another's work?

** what are all of our reactions, now, to this emerging web-work?

** how does it illustrate and/or challenge the vision of the Digital Humanities Manifesto?

IV. Reading Notes
from the Digital Humanities Manifesto (2009)
* no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era
* medium-specific features of digital technologies become its core...print is absorbed into new hybrid modes of communication
* Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty words ( ) unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output.
* The digital is the realm of the open source, open resources. Anything that attempts ot close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
* a utopian core...without walls
* Its economy is abundance-based .... It values the COPY = COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE
* Co-creation ... teamwork ... the ant colony
* expand the compass of the affective range to which scholarship can aspire
* Process is the new god ... iterative ... networks of research ... it honors the steps by means of which results are obtained as a form of publication
* the increasingly distributed nature of expertise and knowledge
* Wiki-scholarship is iterative, cumulative, and collaborative. Social media are the new laboratories of culture and knowledge making.
* The dichotomy between the manual realm of making and the mental realm of thinking was always misleading .... Today, the old theory/praxis debates no longer resonate. Knowlege assumes multiple forms... all making.
* curation as a central feature ... making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds
* the great diminishers... disciplinary finitude (and the Humanities' infinite work)
* Why defend the very disciplinary structures that emerged in the course of the formation of modern universities in the 19th century even when the intellecutal ground has shifted out from under their feet?
* let's imagine a new topography ... open-ended, global in scope, designed to attract new audiences and to establish novel instititutional models ...a distributed "virtual department" ... weaving together shifting archipelagos of researchers ...
* reinvent the department as a finite knowledge problematic which comes into existence for a limited period
* Digital Humanities as "strategic essentialism"