In this class, we will continue to examine the questions and challenges raised by attempts to define the Digital Humanities, in particular, by looking at the position of the Humanities in today’s intellectual climate and the impact of the increased use of technology by humanist scholars and students. In the second half of the class we will begin to look at the history of computing and its implications for cultural and cognitive theory. We will build up to an assessment of how technology relates to our understanding of reality.

Prior to the beginning of class, please read the texts and watch the videos listed below:

• A Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
• C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Also, view the video “Are We Beyond the Two Cultures: 50 Years Later” from Seedmagazine.com:

• Jerome McGann, “Information Technology and the Troubled Humanities”
• “The Future of the Digital Humanities” (Interview with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities)
• “Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge”
• “Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology (New York Times)
• “Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We’re All Digital Humanists Now — Backward Glance”
• “DH: The Name that Does No Favors”
• “ada”. Also, watch “Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace” from The My Hero Project.

• Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (The Atlantic Monthly)
• “Marshall McLuhan Playboy Interview” (Phillip Rogaway, UC Davis)
• “Hypertext and Critical Theory” Not all of this PDF is legible. See the section below this bullet list.
• “History, Theory, and Virtual Reality” (you can also read a version on Google Books)
• “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!”
• “Is Google Making Us Stupid”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

“Hypertext and Critical Theory” is an excerpt from George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Read pp. 1-18 of the printed edition. You can find this section online at http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/jhup/contents.html. For your convenience, the table of contents is reproduced here with links to the sections I want you to read.

• Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructuralist Nelson?
• History of the Concept of Hypertext
• Annotation in a Print Text
• Roland Barthes and the Writerly Text
• Reading and Writing in a Hypertext Environment
• Jacques Derrida: Textual Openness and Assemblage
• Hypertext and Intertextuality
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Hypertext and Multivocality
• Hypertext and De-Centering
• The Memex
• Bush’s Memex as Poetic Machine