In today's Inside Higher Education Phillip Barron writes in response to the recent "The Humanities and Technology" conference (THAT Camp) in San Francisco. He talks about the way in which the "humanities’ pattern of professional anxiety" has had deleterious effects on digital humanities projects. Along the way he mentioned PennSound as an instance of an alternative mode. Here is a link to the article. Phillip Barron is a digital history developer at the University of California at Davis, trained in analytic philosophy.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
state of digital humanities
In today's Inside Higher Education Phillip Barron writes in response to the recent "The Humanities and Technology" conference (THAT Camp) in San Francisco. He talks about the way in which the "humanities’ pattern of professional anxiety" has had deleterious effects on digital humanities projects. Along the way he mentioned PennSound as an instance of an alternative mode. Here is a link to the article. Phillip Barron is a digital history developer at the University of California at Davis, trained in analytic philosophy.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
