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Please click link below to access a super-short survey to help me organize you into groups for our first group project–making an audiobook of Bartleby:
Since we’ll start discussing Melville’s work next week, I thought I’d mention two Melvillian manifestations in culture today. First, the excellent publisher Melville House, a scrappy outfit that publishes an amazing list and has had the courage to tell Amazon to go %$#^ itself. If that wasn’t enough, well looky here:
Some of you will get this on the way home, as it were, but trust me: it’s pretty funny.
Second, enterprising academics have created a (decidedly adult) game out of the text of Moby Dick. Especially interesting looking forward to our “playing” Billy Budd via the Ivanhoe WordPress theme in a couple of months.
As you may have noted, one of the hallmarks of “digital humanities” is that it expends a lot of energy trying to figure out what exactly it is. Is it a new discipline, emerging the way English emerged in the mid-19th century as a subject of serious academic inquiry? Is it a diffuse movement within academia, advocating for free and open access to scholarly and pedagogical materials and a democratization of the highly hierarchical structures of the academy? Is it an intrusion of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) into the humanities, replacing traditional humanistic methods with those of the hard sciences and technical fields?
One of my favorite ways to answer this question (besides the two pieces we’re reading for tomorrow) is the wonderful site created by Jason Heppler that displays random answers to the question “What is Digital Humanities?” compiled from answers generated by the annual “Day of DH” event from 2009-2014. Every time you refresh the site, you get a new response, and the net effect is of diversity, egalitarianism, and innovation (since the site itself is an example of what it’s talking about). So go ahead: let 1,000 answers bloom.
I look forward to seeing/meeting you on Friday, bright and early. In the meantime, I wanted to give you a sneak peek of the syllabus. You are not responsible for preparing anything for Friday, but many of the readings for the course are available via link on the syllabus, so feel free to get your feet wet. And you can learn more about my teaching/scholarly interests here if you’re interested.
I’ll also note that you can pick up the only book for the course, a collection of three novellas by Herman Melville, at Shakespeare and Co. across the street from campus. Again, feel free to start reading ahead: we’ll work with Bartleby, the Scrivener first.
I’ve sent invitations to join the blog (i.e., become an “author” who can write posts) to those who have taken courses with me before and are thus in my site already. We’ll have a session in one of the ICIT rooms next week to make sure the rest of you get up and going.
