A visionary report on the revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.
Digital_Humanities is a ...compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry—including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation—to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.
Mobile Modernity Presner, Todd
2007., 20070419, 2007, 2012-07-16, 20070101
eBook
Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway ...lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews. Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers. Turning to philosophy, literature, and the history of technology, and drawing on transnational cultural and diaspora studies, Presner charts the influence of increased mobility on interactions between Germans and Jews. He considers such major figures as Kafka, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Sebald, Hegel, and Heine, reading poetry next to philosophy, architecture next to literature, and railway maps next to cultural history. Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity.
Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a reappraisal of the controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies since the 1980s. Historians, artists, and writers question if and why the Holocaust ...should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.
By examining the entangled places of encounter, exchange, and contamination between German and Jewish, this article argues that German modernity and Jewish modernity are deeply, precariously, and ...indissociably intertwined. Drawing on its methodology from the field of "mobility studies" (the study of bodies moving through spaces), I argue that we must interrogate the medium in which cultural history is composed and turn our attention to the visualization of narratives of movement, dislocation, and dispersal. I look to Walter Benjamin's urban reflections, the history of modern cartography, the emergence of the railway system, and a web-based mapping project called "HyperCities" in order to show how the history of German/Jewish modernity might be mapped as layered networks and sites of encounter.
Because of their small chest size, their flat-footedness, their ungainly gait, their hunched-over backs, their susceptibility to certain diseases (diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism), their dietary ...restrictions, their inability or unwillingness to abandon the world of abstractions and speculations, and their inherent cowardice, Jews could never become good soldiers.2 Their unfit bodies, cowardly psychic disposition, and religious-cultural strictures supposedly prevented them from defending the countries in which they lived, consigning them to unheroic conduct. Not only were Jews physically unfit for military service, they argued, but Jewish religious strictures, particularly the Sabbath and kosher dietary requirements, made them less than ideal candidates for fighting side-by-side with their Christian counterparts in battle.
Anyone with basic programming skills could now integrate Google's world map and the accompanying satellite imagery into individual Web sites, create and markup maps, and even develop new software ...using the Google Maps application. Henry Hudson 400 is also built on the Google Maps and Google Earth apis and features a series of georeferenced historical maps - particularly a number of rare maps of lower Manhattan and Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and several layers that show the routes of Henry Hudson's voyages, the lives of rhe first New Yorkers, and a well-rendered set of three-dimensional reconstructions of historical buildings and ships.
