Tag: Humanities
Don’t Eat The Flatware: Balancing Instruction and Interpretation in the Classroom
For this month’s posts, I will focus on how engagement with social media, popular culture, film, and video games can inform the work we do in humanities classrooms. This week, I look at how criticism of humanities instruction on Reddit might help us understand why the practice of interpretation leaves some students with a negative
Coda: The Human in the Humanities
My first semester of grad school was kind of a wreck: I was constantly sick, my nerves were bound tight with anxiety, and my back and wrists were in pain from the Soviet-era metal chair-desks in a basement classroom. None of this was helped by the ideological distress I found myself in. Two pieces of
A Match Made in the Archive: Reading and Poaching Through Ngrams and Rare Books
On a hunch, I went home after the DH events last September and typed “Jesuit” into the English corpus of Google Books’ Ngram Viewer. The tool is more powerful than what I used it for, but my search revealed how popular the word was in the English-language books that Google has digitized and made searchable.
Common Knowledge?: EEBO, #FrEEBO, and Public Domain Information
If you work in the humanities and you’ve used a database, a dictionary, or Google Docs in the past ten years, congratulations! — you’re already doing digital humanities. This was a point emphasized by Syracuse University professor Chris Hanson in a panel discussion on the digital humanities that I attended after the Six Degrees of
Changing The World From Within to Without: My Take on the Importance of Critical Theory
The fact that there is a so-called “crisis in the humanities” is old, though persistent, news, with many theories behind its impending demise. The main culprits are understood to be funding cuts at the state and national level as well as an overall cultural shift toward valuing professional degree paths in the private sector, spurred