Tuesday 8 October 2019

Published: 30 September 2019

Digital Infrastructure: New Frontiers for the Public Intellectual

Digital Infrastructure: New Frontiers for the Public Intellectual

Professor Laura Mandell
Professor of English and Director of the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) at Texas A&M

Tuesday 8th October at 5.30pm The Fore Hall (Gilbert Scott Building)

The lecture will be followed by refreshments

In this talk, I discuss the importance of infrastructure for the future of scholarship in our fields and the ways that the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) in collaboration with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) are positively intervening in infrastructural development. If, as Alan Liu maintains, "the experience of infrastructure at institutional scales . . . is operationally the experience of 'culture,'” it is also the most important terrain for interventions by public intellectuals. I argue to redefine the notion of the public intellectual, and also that ARC's BigDIVA and scholarly communities, as well as CWRC and CWRC's HuViz, desperately need the engagement of our scholar peers as we hack a place for humanities in the larger stack of digital technologies. My goal is to outline conceptual lacunae that only humanities researchers, theorists, and critics can fill.


First published: 30 September 2019