Digital Humanities
podcamp boston 4
kabren levinson
www.kabren.com

I study classical and modern philosophy at Bard College.

interdisciplinary study: socrates, feminism, nietzsche,
technology, jewish spirituality.

A classical person who is involved with technology.

Ancient Greece “turns me on.”
So does the Internet.

I am concerned about how
technology is used on our lives.

What are the “Digital Humanities”
and how do we study technology
and technology study?

So-Crates.
http://bit.ly/socratesdude

Humanities:
Studying the Human Condition

What does it mean to be “human”?

analytic
critical
speculative

philosophy
history
social science
art
anthropology
religion
etc.

Technology is a new part of the human condition.

living in public
everyone can publish and make themselves known
new types of communication
new ways to create community
redefine what “friends” are
challenging the power structures of society.

Technology in the past 100 years has been let loose in
both good and bad ways.

Good:
more innovation
more ideas
more technologies
fast-moving and quickly-developing community

Bad:
less thought
less critique
lack of analysis
no recognition of technologies

Digital Humanities

Introduces
thought into technology
and
technology into thought.

computing + humanities
classical and modern
use of media in life and use of life in media
involve technology in study
invite collaboration and analysis

Knowledge Making. How we know,
both in the past and in the future.

As humanity becomes both digital and analog,
the digital humanities create new ways to
study these new human cultures.

How does technology affect knowledge?

Dynamic interaction with scholarly work.

New ways to process and understand knowledge.

Problems

Old/New worlds colliding.

Preservation: how does a “digital” artifact survive?

Value: does the value of a scholarly work change
when it can be reproduced “forever”?

Knowledge

Techne Poiesis
rational method making something out of
nothing
know how to do
poetry
bringing-forth
(Heidegger)

Socrates and the Symposium.

What is the “digital symposium”?

For the Digital Humanities to manifest, we must
continue to rely on open standards. Access is key.

Resources
plato.stanford.edu: stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/
wikipedia (yes, it’s good)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/

Kabren f Levinson
k@kabrenlevinson.com
http://kabrenlevinson.com