Doug Eyman

Digital Rhetoric and the Infrastructure of DH

Bio:

Collin Brooke

Too Big to Scale? Culturomics and Crypto-Rhetorics

Since the Google Books Team’s 2010 article in Science and their release of the N-Gram Viewer, the idea of “culturomics” has begun to appear in a variety of academic studies (e.g., Twenge et al.2012, Kesebir & Kesebir 2012, Greenfield 2013). While the resulting claims have garnered attention, both in academic circles and in the popular media, we have spent less time examining the methodological assumptions behind these studies. As a method, culturomics presupposes certain relationships between language and culture; those of us who study rhetoric and digital humanities should be conscious of and prepared to interrogate those assumptions. Drawing on network studies as well as what Hayden White once described as the “tropics of discourse,” this presentation offers both an examination and critique of culturomics as method.

Bio:

Collin Gifford Brooke is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses in digital rhetorics, research methods, and social media. He is the author of Lingua Fracta: Towards of Rhetoric of New Media (Hampton Press, 2009), which won the 2009 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, as well as numerous essays and chapters in a range of online and print venues. He served for a time as the Associate Editor of College Composition and Communication’s Online Archive, and is currently the Director of Electronic Resources for the Rhetoric Society of America. He blogs at http://www.cgbrooke.net and microblogs as @cgbrooke.

We are delighted to announce the schedule for our Spring 2013 speaker series, kindly sponsored by the GC Digital Initiatives Program.

All events are free and open to the public, and take place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Thursday February 28: Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College)
“Never Mind the Body, Here’s a Gamepad? Considering Embodiment in The Age of Play”
Sponsored by the English Student Association, Doctoral Students’ Council, GC Digital Initiatives, and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative
Time & Place: 4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center

Opening keynote for “Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents,” an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center.

This keynote presentation explores a pervasive onscreen/offscreen split of identification and the body in what we could now call The Age of Play. Citing examples from artists’ work and popular culture, with a focus on games, Flanagan leads the audience on an investigation of current trends that are in diametrical opposition: on the one hand, a hunger for embodied, resonant experience; and on the other, a desire for control for the body, a recurring motif in fields from psychology to public health, manifesting in plastic surgery and digital manipulation of the body.

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of Tiltfactor Laboratory. She writes at Grand Text Auto; see also her work on Values at Play.

Wednesday March 20: Anne Balsamo (The New School)
“The Cultural Work of Interactive Memorials: Lessons from the AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3212

Anne Balsamo is Dean of the School of Media Studies and Professor of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. She is a national leader in media studies, scholar and media-maker whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities, and interactive media. See more about her work at her site, Designing Culture.

Thursday April 4: Kari Kraus (University of Maryland)
“Experiments in Design Fiction”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6421

Kari Kraus is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies.

Wednesday April 10: Rita Raley (University of California, Santa Barbara)
“Towards a Critical Digital Humanities”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6417
This event has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.

Wednesday April 17: Arienne Dwyer (University of Kansas)
“Using Languages as Historical Sources”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3212

Arienne M. Dwyer is a Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, affiliated with Linguistics and Indigenous Nations Studies, and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Her work focuses on language change; she has conducted 20 years of local research with individuals and communities in Inner and Central Asia and has directed a number of collaborative documentation and archiving projects.

Thursday May 2: Beth Harris (Khan Academy)
“Art History Education Goes Digital: The Problem (& Promise) of the Digital Image”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6421

Beth Harris is dean of Art and History at the Khan Academy. She and Dr. Steven Zucker are Executive Editors of Smarthistory at Khan Academy, an open educational resource for art history that they co-founded (as smarthistory.org) in 2005. Before joining the Khan Academy, she was Director of Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art, where she started MoMA Courses Online.

Please join us on Wednesday, December 1, when The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and The CUNY Digital Studies Group will welcome Tom Scheinfeldt, Managing Director of George Mason University’s Center for History & New Media (CHNM), who will be speaking about “Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values.”

At a time when the number and scope of digital humanities projects are growing, Tom’s talk represents an effort to step back and attempt to understand what differentiates successful and unsuccessful DH projects. What lessons can be drawn from projects that fly and those that fall flat? What inferences can be made about the DH community itself based on the types of projects it supports?

This will be our last talk of the semester, so please be sure to join us. We will be gathering for a final meal with CUNY Pie on Thursday, December 2 at 6pm, when we’ll visit John’s Pizza on Bleeker Street.

Time & place: December 1st , 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 9207.

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TOM SCHEINFELDT is Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media and Research Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.

Tom received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford, where his doctoral thesis examined inter-war interest in science and its history in diverse cultural contexts, including museums, universities, World’s Fairs and the mass media. A research associate at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and a fellow of the Science Museum, London, Tom has lectured and written extensively on the history of popular science, the history of museums, history and new media, and the changing role of history in society, and has worked on traditional exhibitions and digital projects at the Colorado Historical Society, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, The Louisiana State Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress. In addition to managing general operations at the Center for History and New Media, Tom directs several of its online history projects, including Omeka, THATCamp, One Week | One Tool, the September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives.

Along with his blog Found History, Tom co-hosts the podcast Digital Campus with colleagues Dan Cohen and Mills Kelly. You can follow Tom on Twitter, Linkedin, and Zotero.