Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth: If [...]
Continue reading about Should one mourn national literature(s)?
The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison? Our applications for dissertation fellowships are due at the end of February, which means that I’ve had my sole chapter on the mind quite a bit lately, even while wasting most of [...]
In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward. These sorts of projects engage [...]
(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!) I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation [...]
A friend of mine recently published a novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar, which one can buy on Amazon. I already wrote a pretty extensive “review” of sorts of it for Lithchat, but I think it might be interesting to the population of Donkey Hottie readers who don’t check out the other site. In brief, [...]
