disciplines

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?

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.

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.