Comply or Occupy?: The Digital Humanities in a Changing Academic Environment

Alex Gil will give a talk on February 27 at 12PM in Franklin Patterson Hall, Faculty Lounge-lunch is provided. Event hosted by the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies

Comply or Occupy?: The Digital Humanities in a Changing Academic Environment

Few will dispute that the Academy is in a period of transformation. In the humanities, a community of marginal practitioners operating since the end of World War II has recently become a centripetal force known as the Digital Humanities. The phenomenon owes as much to our institutional histories as it does to the simple fact that these folks have mastered the dominant discursive form of the 21st century, technology, while remaining staunchly entrenched in the preoccupations of history, literature, philosophy, media, etc. While other forces threatened to destabilize the academy—the decline of the academic press, the rise of the adjunct nation, the erosion of faculty governance, the rising cost of tuition, the decline of public support for education, the indifference of the general public to academic work in the humanities, and the list goes on— digital humanists have been tasked with leveraging their experience and knowledge as translators between our fast changing world and the worthy goals of the academy: education, engagement, preservation, research. In this talk I will outline some of the perspectives that the mainstream Digital Humanities offer, and will make some necessary distinctions between DH and other forms of online education and academic forces at play today. In general, I will discuss the Digital Humanities’ commitment to the ownership of the means of production of our own knowledge, collaboration, permeable hierarchies, public scholarship, project-based learning, and a deep engagement with our material and social lives.

Presenter Bio:
Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Division of the Columbia University Libraries. His current projects at Columbia include the re-skilling of subject librarians, a large data-mining project of a million-plus syllabi, a project to crowd-source marginalia, and other digital humanities initiatives. He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia, where he worked to develop technologies to analyze and visualize intertextuality in medium-sized corpora to elucidate cultures of reprint in the American hemisphere. He is currently also co-editor of the Critical/Genetique Edition of Aimé Césaire’s Complete Works.