Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 24, 2010, 08:14 AM

Why is the Information Age Without the Humanities Like the Industrial Revolution Without the Steam Engine?   That would seem to be a creaky analogy.  It's not.  It's a provocation--and simply, literally true.   Here's why.

 

Submitted by slgrant on Aug 25, 2009, 12:19 PM

In my field of information and library science, scholars like Tefko Saracevic have summed the past decades of information explosion into three ideas: information retrieval, relevance, and interaction. It is in this last idea, interaction, where some of the most fascinating problems -- and soluti

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 19, 2008, 10:04 AM
I spent the first part of my career as a social historian of technology whose original research was on the Constitutional-era and the role of mass printing, mass education, circulating libraries, and the new popular form of the novel in the creation of American democracy and American publics and especially unhappy counter-publics, many of which were despised and feared by the Founding Fathers. The novel was the blog and the video game and the social network?all of those in different ways?of the post-Revolutionary era in America. As with the Internet today, youth?especially late adolescents?were the single greatest demography of consumers then and were also the typical heroes and heroines of popular novels. This isn?t surprising; the contemporary entertainment, fashion, and many other consumer industries are specifically targeted at the 18-25 demographic. Youth, then and now, lead the way!