Submitted by Amanda Visconti on Jan 24, 2010, 06:09 PM

Thought I'd take a break from my thesis to post a video that always gets me thinking about the education side of digital humanities...

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 26, 2009, 01:12 PM

I think the conversation happened during my first or maybe second week in my job as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies but it changed everything about how i did my job, how I came to think about the collective actions on the Web, and how I think about real-world political process versus ideals and ideology.  Of course, the person on the other end of that conversation was our President at the time, Nannerl Keohane, one of the wisest, shrewdest, and most principled people I have ever been privileged to work with.  

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Nov 21, 2009, 12:34 PM

Cultural theorist, intellectual, and novelist Umberto Eco recently said:  "If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing.  And if nothing changes, you're an idiot."   He noted this in an interview in Spiegel On Line, which can be found at    http://tiny.cc/bXAcP

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Oct 27, 2009, 08:48 AM

If the twentieth-century paradigm for the brain is the hardwired CPU, I would argue that the new paradigm for the twenty-first century brain is the iPod or iPhone, with 75,000 possible Apps (and counting) available for downloading, some created by developers, others by users, all in constant need of updates and customising. There's an App for just about everything in the twenty-first century brain because a changing world needs a brain that is not a product but an interactive processor.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Apr 27, 2009, 12:02 AM
For anyone in the Ann Arbor arear on May 15, here's the info for a Symposiumon "Bookishness:  The New Fate of Reading in a Digital Age."  The way this is framed and the cast of characters suggest this might even get beyond the really, really tiresome "it used to be wonderful, now it is dreadful" nostalgic binarism of pre- and post-digital reading habits.  (Just ask Hawthorne or, for that matter, Thomas Jefferson about how terrible reading habits are because of "new technologies" . . . or women, or the non-elite, or . . . )

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 14, 2009, 12:01 PM
This is a link to a very thought-provoking piece by Clay Shirky. Key line: "Society doesn't need newspapers. Society needs journalism." What is interesting about Shirky is how he can separate nostalgia from functionalism and agency. By that I mean, many things that we decry as "bad" in the face of "new technology" (and this is true whether we live in 1790 or 2009) are really our resistance to change. Even if one does not agree with a statement like Shirky's underscoring a distinction between newspapers and journalism, it is crucial to be able to separate out the parts of what something like "newspapers" means in a functional way, that speaks to the needs of a society, not to the habits of a society. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthink...

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 16, 2008, 07:59 AM
You can't stop change.  And I don't want to.