The following is the transcript of a short speech I contributed to the panel “Programming Humanists – What is the role of coding literacy in DH and why does it matter?” at the DH Benelux 2019 Conference, held at ULiège in Luik, Belgium. The organizers asked me to try to be provocative. That is, provocative …
Thinking and reasoning about what interpretation exactly is, is an endless source of joyful wondering. I was just rereading my own Screwmeneutics (2016) – while preparing my thesis conclusion, there was no vanity in that action! – and it struck me that there is a problem between Heidegger (2010 [1927]) and Gadamer (2013 [1960]). Heidegger …
Folgert Karsdorp, a colleague of mine over at the Meertens Institute doing impressively experimental work in the application of computing in the humanities voiced a recognizable unease yesterday by tweet (see on the left). It has become my understanding the past few months that the number of people active in the field of DH with …
Introduction This is the text of a paper I presented during the conference “Digital Hermeneutics in History: Theory and Practice”, organized by the C2DH of Luxembourg University on 25 and 26 October 2018. I have been toying with the idea for a Domain Specific Language for textual scholarship for over a decade. Manfred Thaller—not aware …
Geert Lovink who does wonderful work at the Institute of Network Cultures yesterday tweeted a cry of horror on finding out via TechCrunch that Google is funding the development of software that writes local news stories. Media the world over have parroted the same news which seems largely based on a press release from the UK …
Willard McCarty on Humanist pointed me to a, quite silly, article in the Economist entitled “March of the Machines”. It can almost be called a genre piece. The author downplays very much the possible negative effects of artificial intelligence and then argues that society should find an ‘intelligent response’ to AI—as opposed, I assume, to uninformed …
There is a trope in digital humanities related articles that I find particularly awkward. Just now I stumbled across another example, and maybe it is a good thing to muze about it a short bit. Whence the example comes I don’t think is important as I am interested in the trope in general and not …
There exist several recurring debates in the digital humanities. Or rather maybe we should position these debates as between digital humanities and humanities proper. One that is particularly thorny is the “Do you need to know how to code?” debate. In my experience it is also frequently aliased as the “Should all humanists become programmers?” …
There is no better way to acknowledge that you are an academic or digital humanities arrival than finding yourself on the receiving end of a class act hatchet job on your work. This year at DH2014 Stefan Jänicke, Annette Geßner, Marco Büchler, and Gerik Scheuermann of Leipzig University’s Image and Signal processing group and Göttingen’s …
At the Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing 2013 conference Peter Robinson made a statement that he repeated a week later at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference. This statement is going to be taken so far out of context, going to be misused, abused, perverted, and corrupted so much that we had better deal with it now. …