Epistemographer

Topic at hand is less digital tools than digital epistemologies

“Digital” – candidate for trendiest word (1.5 million books use it in their title), but very ill-understood.

Revisionist history of epistemology:

• Descartes’ turn from the “messy stuff” of the processes of understanding the world to the mechanistic explanations of it
• Late 19th-century: people started to think that the mechanical world-view could explain everything, “fusing the world that Descartes sundered through an expansionist ploy on the part of the mechanistic side.”
• Computers grew out of the project of fusing “meaning” and “mechanism”

• Implication that computers are somehow “special”, bridging this chasm

“There aren’t any computers; we’ve been misled”

• It’s not that there are no physical devices, but rather that the notion of computers as occupying a special and unique place in the epistemic landscape is fundamentally wrong

• Being “digital” doesn’t make a computer special

5 examples of the impact of “Computers aren’t special”

• It was a claim of the “fusion” agenda that computers could be fully explained by a mechanistic account
• Wrong: meaning is inextricably bound up with computer functionality and use
• We should hold our systems accountable for their dimensions of “meaning”
• Ontologies are contingent on local culture and perspectives
• Every piece of metadata is a political act

• We as humanists shouldn’t be party to the re-institution of the dualism between physical and mental that’s bound up by how many use “digital”

Computers represent a historical moment in which we have sufficient power and sense of complexity to allow back into our analysis all the stuff that Descartes swept away.

* Cute phrase: “Computing reunites the world of matter with the world of things that matter.”

Idea: “Digital” fundamentally points at the abstraction of information from the physical medium on which it’s encoded. It’s not that it has no physical presence, but rather that this very presence is one step removed from its corporeal form. (Kind of a neutrality of physical presence, like speaking through a filter that makes all voices sound the same.)

Technorati Tags: 2005 Digital Tools Summit

…yeah. So, not much to say at the moment. Heaps of coding, swamped with both Center work and outside projects. Oh, and I’m getting married in a week and a half. Hence, not so much with the blogging, even though I’d planned to make a spectacular re-entrance after a summer off¹.

Sigh.

Well, on the brighter side, I’ll be spending the next few days at a workshop that promises to offer all sorts of food for thought and chewy discussion; I’ll blog my notes and any other crazy hijinks that ensue. Promise.

¹ That blogroll? Totally a work in progress. Just need to find time to import my bookmarks. Meanwhile, please don’t point and laugh.

Been on a bit of a blog sabbatical for the past few months. All’s well; just didn’t have much of substance to say, so I figured I’d take a break and build up some motive energy (well, not entirely true, but close enough). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the peculiar transition between grad school and life post-PhD, and I think this lull had a bit to do with my new status catching up with me, leaving me needing some time to figure out exactly how to move forward. More on that soon; in the meantime, enjoy the funky new Wordpress goodness, and let the template tweaking begin!