Digital Culture and the Humanities

Transcription

1 Instructor: Ben D Harlingue bdharlingue@ucdavis.edu Digital Culture and the Humanities Course Description: In thinking digital culture with the humanities, this course pursues two main lines of inquiry. First, we will consider how new media and digital technologies have been discussed in the humanities. With what terminologies and investments do scholars inquire after new media and digital technologies? How are new media and digital culture thought to reconfigure (inter)disciplinary fields in the humanities, affect the humanities place in the university, inform theories of culture, and determine the shape of intellectuals conversations with broader publics? Second, we will consider how, as humanities scholars, we are to read the cultural texts of new media and digital technologies. What are we to make of academic and non-academic cultural productions that have new digital technologies as their medium? What is the work of representation in the age of digital cultural production? To pursue these dual lines of inquiry, we will examine scholarship about digital technologies and new media, and we will examine too scholarly projects using new media. We will discuss new keywords to humanities treatments of the digital, and we will interrogate how old keywords in the humanities are being redeployed, reworked, or disregarded in discussions of the digital. Toward this latter end, during some weeks, we will place scholarly works that are not explicitly about the digital, alongside those works that are. Throughout the course, we will pay critical attention to the ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and language categories of identity, power, representation, and social organization play in discussions of the digital. Because of concern for these categories, we will dwell at some length on the meanings and repercussions of the digital for several fields that have centrally thematized these categories: American studies, black studies, women s studies. This course is open to graduate students and upper division undergraduates. This course is cross-listed in American Studies, Cultural Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Media and Communications, and Technocultural Studies. Assignments: 1. Keywords: In the first week of the course, students will be given a list of keywords from which each student is to choose three to pursue throughout the quarter. Posting to the course blog, students are to trace the varied meanings ascribed to these words by different authors. What theoretical work are these words made to do? Consider the relationships between the three words under consideration. Students blog entries will form much of the basis of our

2 conversation in class. Length of entries for any given word may vary from week to week. 2. Reading Digital Texts: This assignment is meant to develop students skills in analyzing texts on digital media and texts about digital media. Students will choose a particular media internet, GPS, cellular phones, digital film, databases, etc., or even some cross-use of several of these media to analyze. Students will either pick one particular textual manifestation of this media (for example, a particular internet site, browser, or communication tool, or a particular GPS interface, or a particular make of cellular phone) and analyze it, or they will take the entire category of a media type as a text for analysis (for example, all cellular phones or the cellular phone as a figure; or the internet as such). Next, students will choose several scholarly sources (some but not all of which may be drawn from assigned readings) with which to analyze these media texts. Even as students draw from scholarly sources for their analyses of texts that are examples of digital media, they will also be analyzing the scholarly texts they have chosen that are about new media. Pursuing the dual lines of inquiry for the course, the main questions to bear in mind are, then: How do we read scholars engagements with new media and digital technologies? How do we read texts using digital technologies or how do we read digital technologies/new media as texts? 3. Proposal for a Digital Project: By the end of the course, students will submit a proposal to carry out a project of their own that uses new media technologies. Students might consider writing a proposal for a new pedagogical method that uses new media. Students might write a proposal for a project that uses new media to connect academic and non-academic publics in intellectual conversation. Another possibility might be to write a proposal for how the humanities should relate to new media, digital technologies, and digital culture more generally. Or, one could write a proposal for an academic piece (an article, for example), to be published on a digital medium (like those we saw from Vectors, for example). These are examples, and not the only options. Students must clear their idea for a proposal with the instructor, before proceeding to carry out the assignment. Reading Schedule: Week 1: Genealogies for Digital Humanities? Hockey, Susan. The History of Humanities Computing. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, Dec Sconce, Jeffrey. Introduction, and Simulation and Psychosis. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, ,

3 Nakamura, Lisa. Keeping It (Virtually) Real: The Discourse of Cyberspace as an Object of Knowledge. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, Week 2: Treating Rhetorics of the Digital Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. Classification and its Structures. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, Dec Derrida, Jacques. Signature, Event, Context. Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago, Poster, Mark. Derrida and Electronic Writing: The Subject of the Computer. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Polity Press, Week 3: Powers, Technologies, States Poster, Mark. Databases as Discourse; or Electronic Interpellations. Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy. Eds. David Lyon and Elia Zureik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Puar, Jasbir K. Intimate Control, Infinite Detention: Rereading the Lawrence Case. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, Rodríguez, Juana María. Welcome to the Global Stage : Confessions of a Latina Cyber-Slut. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, Spivak, Gayatri. Pax Electronica: Against Crisis-Driven Global Telecommunication. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Ed. Geert Lovink. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Week 4: Representation and Capitalist Democracy Daniel, Sharon and Eric Loyer. Public Secrets. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 2.2 (Winter 2007). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

4 Karl Marx. The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, Poster, Mark. Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere. Reading Digital Culture. Ed. David Trend. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Kann, Mark and Alessandro Ceglia. Deliberative Democracy and Difference. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 3.1 (Fall 2007). Week 5-6: The Social Construction of Race and Digital Aesthetics Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction, and Race in the Construct and the Construction of Race: The Consensual Hallucination of Multiculturalism in the Fictions of Cyberspace. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, , Hammonds, Evelyn. New Technologies of Race. Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. Eds. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert. New York: Routledge, Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong and Raegan Kelly. Programmed Visions. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 3.1 (Fall 2007). Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (selections) Gómez-Pena, Guillermo. The Virtual the Other Frontier (or the Chicago Interneta). Reading Digital Culture. Ed. David Trend. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Week 7: Digital Places, Space, Geographies, Mapping Technologies Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, (selections) Kaplan, Caren. Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity. American Quarterly 58.3 (September 2006): Nakamura, Lisa. Where Do You Want to Go Today : Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge,

5 Holmes, David, Ed. Virtual Globalization: Virtual Spaces/Tourist Spaces. New York: Routledge, (selections) Chow, Rey. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham: Duke University Press, (selections) Week 8: Pedagogy & the Politics of the University Hayles, N. Katherine. Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes. Profession (2007): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Explanation and Culture: Marginalia. From In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, Davidson, Cathy N. and David Theo Goldberg. A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age. The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review (February 13, 2004). 12 Dec Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and Philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Marginality in the Teaching Machine. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, Week 9-10: Interdisciplinary Formations American Studies Crossroads Project. American Studies Association Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University. 12 Dec Pease, Donald E. and Robyn Wiegman. Futures. The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, Castronovo, Russ. Nation dot com: American Studies and the Production of the Corporatists Citizen. The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, eblack Studies Workshop. The Next Movement in Black Studies: eblack Studies. Alkalimat, Abdul. The African American Experience In Cyberspace: A Resource Guide to the Best Web Sites on Black Culture and History. Pluto Press, 2003.

6 Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, (selections) Wiegman, Robyn. Introduction: On Location. Women s Studies on its Own. Ed. Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, Shohat, Ella. Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press, Terry, Jennifer and Raegan Kelly. Killer Entertainments. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 3.1 (Fall 2007). Moallem, Minoo and Eric Loyer. Nation on the Move. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 3.1 (Fall 2007).