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.
A distinction between autographic and allographic signs was formulated by the art historian Nelson Goodman in his important work, The Languages of Art (1972). This distinction links the signifying ...qualities of form with the function of signs as systems of notation. In analyzing this difference, this article interrogates the question of whether an epistemological and political dimension plays a role in the subject of enunciation. Self-portraits by André Breton and Lazar el Lissitzky provide principle examples that demonstrate two very different concepts of artistic subjectivity.
An 1842 compendium of literary curiosities assembled by bibliophile Gabriel Peignot presents a collection of works and rules for their composition that has interesting correlations with electronic, ...computational, and digital productions of poetic works. Because these works were written under constraint, their rule-bound approach has an algorithmic character that can be compared with the compositional tactics used in computational work. This paper analyzes Peignot’s collection in terms slightly different from those on which he organized his compendium. Rather than sort the works in a typology of formal properties, this paper presents a typology of production methods and compositional techniques. Though not all electronic approaches are anticipated by the works collected in Peignot’s remarkable work, the range and variety of these methods, many of which reach into antiquity, establishes a long lineage for conventions of rule-based poetic composition.
This article addresses the challenges for design pedagogy in supplying the intellectual and critical skills for knowledge design in networked projects. In addition to the need for technical ...understanding (of data formats, infrastructure, and information systems), this piece suggests that a critical understanding of the concepts of agency should also be part of the designer's agency-- as an autonomous, free-willed individual, a part of a social system, an agent for transformative change, an interventionary force, an instrument of resistance, etc. In turn, the designed environment encodes illusions of agency for a user. The ability to articulate these critical dimensions and understand one's role in the supply chain of illusion is an essential aspect of design practice. Preparing designers for this role should be crucial component of design education.
Theories of materiality include attention to the literal, forensic, formal, and distributed-to which categories the "performative" adds another dimension, one that is premised on the instantiated and ...situated experience of an aesthetic work rather assuming its existence as a self-evident, autonomous object defined by inherent properties. The idea of performativity is also crucial to diagrams-drawings that work, that are generative in their activity because of structural features that spatialize semantic relations and make spatial relations semantic. Because diagrams are exemplary-even paradigmatic-they offer a way to reconceptualize approaches to design and reading/viewing aesthetic artifacts across a broad range of artistic works and practices. This paper proposes that the "diagrammatic" and "performative" concepts offer a way to think about aesthetic practice from a theoretical perspective that draws on non-representational and new materialist perspectives that embody crucial principles of humanistic epistemology relevant to the creation of knowledge in the digital environment. Examples from the history of information visualization, poetics, book arts, and digital arts will be used to illustrate these principles.
Database Narrative in Book and Online Drucker, Johanna
Journal of Electronic Publishing,
01/2015, Letnik:
18, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Web Resource
Abstract
Concepts of sustainability touch every aspect of scholarly work and are particularly urgent in thinking about those practices that depend on digital technology. The costs of digital ...scholarship are frequently posed in terms of human labor and rights abuses, ecological and environmental damage, carbon footprints, waste of resources associated with obsolescence, and other issues that affect every stage of the lifecycle of production. But sustainability also needs to be understood as an epistemic concept embedded in complex systems, not merely as a set of problems to be solved through instrumental means applied to operational logistics. This article addresses mechanistic approaches to sustainability, while suggesting that the complexity of the concept of sustainability requires the humanistic methods and ethical principles to be engaged in decisions about future practices in pedagogy, research, and institutional sites.
PDF
