During coursework, I took a class co-offered both at my uni and at UIC. As a co-offered course, it was also co-taught, and one of the profs, Walter Benn Michaels, at one point, as is his wont, issued a seeming non sequitur of a command: “raise your hands if either of your parents is a [...]
I don’t have much to add about the above video, which probably every Humanities graduate student (or close family member thereof) has already seen, forwarded, groaned or giggled over, and so on. Over at Zunguzungu, we see how the situation is coded in a few ways at once, most notably as a conflict between realism [...]
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about [...]
Continue reading about Curating addendum (ok… “webmapping vs. mapping”)
“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as [...]
Continue reading about Curating and analyzing (or, curating vs. analyzing)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what [...]
Since 1998, part of my excitement over the World Cup has been stoked by ads leading up to it. Usually, Nike makes charming and witty ads, like this one, in which the Brazilian national team messes around at the airport, having just been told that their flight to Paris is delayed: What Eric Cantona is [...]
Continue reading about The cringe-inducing South African World Cup ads have begun
I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.” The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown [...]
Continue reading about Eurovision and neoliberalism: the case of InCulto
I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest. And now, I don’t get it. I think [...]