I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest. And now, I don’t get it. I think [...]
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient. After all, if one takes that waste of [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?
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)?
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 [...]
