Insofar as the public sphere becomes writable, the university classroom needs some protection; a certain contingent erasure from the public sphere. While students ought to do work that is alive in the world– indeed, they report feeling more engaged when they do so– there is also an important need for a buffer zone, since undergraduate education gives students the freedom to take risks, to experiment, and to fail.

Virginia Kuhn & Vicki Callahan, “Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis”

We argue that the radicality of the digital humanities is the potential it offers to expand our understanding to the vertical plane, or more precisely, planes of research. In vertical interdisciplinarity, there is a rich layering in both the method and the practice of teaching and scholarship, and this poses challenges to the very discursive categories employed. The disruptive components are the creative, aesthetic, and non-alphabetic elements, which once deployed vertically within a field radically transform its formal properties. If horizontal strategies make us imagine new narrative lines within a field, then the vertical approach forces us to rethink the narrator, what narrative form could be, and how we think, reflect, critique and express.

Virginia Kuhn & Vicki Callahan, “Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis”

The term ‘interdisciplinary’ typically refers to a kind of additive component, history plus literature, history plus art, and so forth. The perspective is essentially a horizontal one, linking fields without any fundamental change to the formal structures of any one discipline.

Virginia Kuhn & Vicki Callahan, “Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis.”

But the generative humanities are emphatically not about training for a market. They are, instead, like all great pedagogies that preceded them, education for an environment. The social, political, and ecological challenges of the 21st century demand significantly more than textual analysis or recitations of inherited content. These problems (and opportunities) will need people trained to create synthetic responses, rich with meaning and purpose, and capable of communicating in a range of appropriate media, including but not limited to print.

digital_humanities, p25

Just curious… How are they using “generative humanities” as a term?Is this meant to be a substitution for digital humanities, a way of sidestepping DH backlash?

From audiences sitting in the dark of the theater, to impassioned fans at conventions, there are many ways for us to engage with media. Popular culture inspires our passion, our anger, and sparks public conversation. 

This class explores different ideas about audiences, viewers, and fans. The class will look at a variety of film, television, and digital media texts, including: Hard Days Night, The Blair Witch Project, Battlestar Galactica, and the Harry Potter franchise. We’ll also check out what’s happening on YouTube, play digital games, and look at remix projects like Wizard People Dear Reader

The class asks students to take an active role in discussions by reflecting on their own experiences as viewers and by producing their own creative/critical digital projects in response to different media texts.

more info & registration ]

From audiences sitting in the dark of the theater, to impassioned fans at conventions, there are many ways for us to engage with media. Popular culture inspires our passion, our anger, and sparks public conversation. 

This class explores different ideas about audiences, viewers, and fans. The class will look at a variety of film, television, and digital media texts, including: Hard Days Night, The Blair Witch Project, Battlestar Galactica, and the Harry Potter franchise. We’ll also check out what’s happening on YouTube, play digital games, and look at remix projects like Wizard People Dear Reader

The class asks students to take an active role in discussions by reflecting on their own experiences as viewers and by producing their own creative/critical digital projects in response to different media texts.

more info & registration ]

5 Ways of Understanding the New, Feminist MOOC That’s Not a MOOC

5 Ways of Understanding the New, Feminist MOOC That’s Not a MOOC

Yesterday, we received word of the newest innovation in higher education. Across the world this fall, it was said, students and professors would sit down at computer screens, breathe deeply, and plunge themselves into open learning.

But they would not be taking a MOOC.

They’ll be taking a DOCC: a Distributed Open Collaborative Course. Its name rhymes with “lock.”

It is a feminist MOOC.

Here are five ways of understanding it.

[read more]