“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
We live in a time of profound cultural change. One of the causes of this change is the transformation of our digital ecology from print and traditional broadcast media to networked digital media, characterized by the rise of database-mediated communication within a global sphere of information exchange. These changes in our media ecology are creating new forms of knowledge and alternative forms of social organization at a pace that is dazzling from an historical perspective. Businesses, governments, and grass roots communities are vigorously adapting to digital media, taking the lead in developing new ways of communicating and acting in the world. Our educational institutions, however, seem bound by habits of thought and structures of communication that resist changes introduced by the new media. Yet the academy is ideally positioned to create and embrace new forms of knowledge with the public interest in mind. In fact a sub-community of academics – dating back to the 1940s and now known as the digital humanities – has pursued exactly this mission, against a tide that seems only now to be turning. In this course, you are invited to join this community and explore the ways digital media are being embraced by scholars, artists, and scientists in the pursuit of knowledge and social change. We will explore the history and culture of the digital liberal arts from its birth in the years immediately following the invention of the first commercial computers through its various incarnations up to the present era of the late World Wide Web. Along the way we will examine specific examples of scholars using digital media to advance their research, and explore the aesthetic and epistemological significance of their work through readings-based discussions and hands-on work on a collaborative class project.
