OOO and Politics

A response to Cameron Kunzelman

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly sure what blogging means to me these days. But whether by accident or design, I’ve been avoiding some of the back-and-forth debate that both helps and hinders the work of philosophy online these days. That said, this is one of those back-and-forth response posts, this on answering some of the… read more

My Spam Readers

...might be more interesting than my human ones

Yesterday I participated in a panel on the life and work of Alan Turing, for whom 2012 marks a centennial. As you’d probably expect, the discussion included conversation about artificial intelligence, what counts as “intelligence,” and when AI is “good enough.” The Turing Test, of course, is famous for reframing “thinking machines” as imitating machines. The machines must have been… read more

Aliens, but definitely not as we know them

In the New Scientist "Big Ideas" column

Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens? It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing. This essay appeared in the

Academic Professional Job Opening

Work with me at Georgia Tech Digital Media

We have a job opening for a staff position in my program at Georgia Tech. The job is for an Academic Professional, who will serve as assistant to the Graduate Program in Digital Media. You get to work with me and nine other core faculty in the program, as well as with others in the School and College, to help… read more

Overly Traditional, Overly Narrow

Nick Montfort on Digital Humanities

This week my Racing the Beam co-author and platform studies series co-editor Nick Montfort spoke at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. In addition to discussing the two new platform studies titles shipping this spring, Nick reports that he met Perry Collins, a a new program officer for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. Here’s Nick’s summary… read more

The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies

Call for Papers

Below is the CFP for a conference to be held by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on May 3-5, 2012. Confirmed invited speakers include me, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Tim Morton, and Steven Shaviro. Hope to see you there! This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has… read more

Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

Part 2: The Digital Humanities

If we accept the premise that the humanities should orient toward the world and not toward a private, scholarly sanctuary, then what trends are already facilitating that process? One candidate is the “digital humanities,” a topic about which I have remained silent for too long, despite the fact that I direct a digital media graduate program and teach in a… read more

Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

Part 1: The Humanities in Public

Recently, Stanford comparative literature professor David Palumbo-Liu made a case for why the humanities are indispensible. It’s one in a long history of such justifications, a task that seems as necessary as ever. Yet, as with so many such justifications, Palumbo-Liu’s speaks declaratively. Consider his closing charge—one I saw excerpted frequently and with enthusiasm in the days after he wrote… read more

A Sorrow Blind to Itself

On Bad Writing and Isolationism in the Humanities

In Friday’s New York Times, the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer wrote a scathing indictment of academic writing. An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece takes aim at the well-known art historian Michael Fried, but it could easily have been written about almost any scholar in the humanities, veteran or novice, successful or luckless. It lambastes the bad, turgid, unclear writing so… read more

Getting Real

On the Digital Humanities

Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, “How do you define the digital humanities?” Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple (“Humanities by digital means”) to definitive (“The application of information, computing, and communication technologies to humanities questions, problems, or data”) to vague… read more