Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 17, 2008, 12:54 PM

A whimsical piece I wrote on "The Art of Fudging" appeared this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link courtesy of the Duke News Service: Commentary: The art of fudging (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Cathy N. Davidson, a professor of interdisciplinary studies and English, on ?the deep roots of disciplinary fudging.?

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i17/17b00501.html.

The clip is also included with a live link in the Duke in the News section of Duke Today, www.duke.edu/today.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 16, 2008, 07:14 AM
Yesterday I was telling someone about the book I'm working on, a new model of mind for the digital age, and she asked how I spent my days. Was it at a lab conducting experiments? Or interviewing subjects? Doing ethnography? Sorting through archives? It was an excellent question. If I had been one notch more pretentious, I think my answer might have been: I've spent the last eighteen months making like Kant.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 03, 2008, 09:52 AM
I've been thinking more about disciplines after posting a few days ago on "tricking oneself out of disciplinary biases" (http://www.hastac.org/node/1454). Now I'm thinking about disciplinary shame and fudging. Is that one of the most important (unspoken) rules a discipline has to teach? Where to blur the lines?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 28, 2008, 10:43 AM
What is a discipline? Maybe it is the space-time of slowing down and going inward, having a conversation of such specificity and reference that only others in one's group understand. In the reading I'm doing this year, it is fascinating to see how often researchers move in and out of disciplines, sometimes addressing a wider audience and then, at others, being unable to resist the temptation to dally, linger, probe, analyze, scrutinize, challenge, and caress the disciplinary object.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 26, 2008, 09:57 AM
At the end of yesterday's HASTAC 08 conference, TechnoTravels/TeleMobility: HASTAC in Motion, one of HASTAC's founding leaders as well as one of the conference organizers, David Theo Goldberg, made inspiring parting words. During his closing talk, he coined a new term: "Mobile Humanities." This adds a new dimension to the traditional "digital humanities" by emphasizing not only the digitizing of the enormous range of cultural documents across time and place, but also HASTAC's goal to ensure that humanistic thinking is crucial to how we think about the information age, new technologies, the academy, disciplines, and learning, not only in formal education but lifelong. Mobile Humanities isn't just about technology but about all of the social arrangements changing as a result of mobile technologies, past and present. And, in the end, Mobile Humanities are about inspiring humanists to think about their charge as educators, to take seriously the challenges their students face and the future that those students will help to shape.