Digital Humanities Summer Institute
Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Day 1. June 4, 2012
Laura Mandell, Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Texas A&M
“Does It Work: Where Theory and Technology Collude, or the disciplinary machine”
References Lisa Spiro.
"advocating that the liberal arts are essential bc teaches critical thinking has not worked / will continue not to work"
Focus on where digital humanities are
Austen, “A Plea for Excuses” – essay.
Notion of breakage.
Text-focused digital humanities
Example of Texas A&M. Funding strong for digital humanities. Center to work in co-teaching with faculty.
Cf. King’s College.
“strategic reallocation plan” at Texas A&M. Profs. Asked to compete for this as a means to envision re-structuring.
Alan Lui’s 2012 article in “Arts and Humanities…” : text-based dig hum to save humanities (not his words).
Ref. to Scientific Revolutions
Ref. to Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author. Criticizes those who invoke the author as a means to give final interpretation
Mandell: "what could be more important than studying the past that shapes our current lives?"
Excessive disciplinary is always a problem, according to L.M.
e.g. TEI encoding. Semantic mark-up system. TEI not concerned with what texts look like. HTML is the alehouse of TEI. With XSLT, you pull information from TEI that goes beyond HTML-appearance. References an example of one of her TEI texts.
Alan Lui – “Transcendental Data” Critical Inquiry 31:1 (Autumn 2004): 49-84.
“tag-abuse” argues for the necessity of human intervention (goes beyond bibliographic data, MARC).
“look for what works by looking for what’s broken”
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