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I am proposing a session that I hope will call upon the collective interest of any members in the humanities whose work intersect with critical questions in science and the history of science in any way. As scholars in the fields of the humanities, including that of history, are turning increasingly to digital tools that they hope will help organize what is available so that what is missing can be more easily foregrounded, conceptualize arguments and directions especially when working in under-explored fields, and work out that interdisciplinary intellectual connections so as to make it more of a bi or multi-directional exchange.

There is no shortage of philosophers and critical theorist who are interested in interrogating science and using science objects not only to talk about  problems that are directly connected with scientific knowledge, but also to use the discussions arising from that to look at analogous and parallel problems in the other fields. Among the philosophers who write extensively about science, or whose philosophy draws on work analyzed in science, are Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, Husserl, that group of the Vienna Circle which included Popper, Lakatos, Deleuze, Bergson, Serres, Simondon,Whitehead, de Landa, Harding, Hacking, Stengers, Longino, Barad, are just among some in the long list of philosophers past and contemporary who work in areas of philosophy of science or in the critical interrogation of scientific objects and thoughts, and extending their discourse across disciplines.

Among the themes I would like to include for discussion, though they are by no means arbitrary:

• How much science do we need to know to create a productive philosophy without subordinating oneself to its master dialectics?

• Is there such a thing as a critical theory of science and how can it look like?
• How can critical theory in other areas such as in media theory and other areas of the humanities help bring new  and fresh perspectives for envisioning theories of science more creatively, even if they seem epistemologically in contradistinction?
• What are the concepts of symmetry and assymetry of information in science and the humanities, and how that helps us think through the existing and emergent medium for knowledge transmission, interaction and actualization?
• What are the existing and emergent forms of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, and even in the discourse of media ‘archaeology’ and trans.mediality, that lends itself to a more productive interdisciplinary exchange across epistemically dissimilar fields while enabling the complication of that exchange?
• What are the available digital tools for historians of science, and those who work in the interdisciplinary trading-zone between science and the humanities, that can help in creating multimodal interrogation of critical objects that can then be incorporated into the more traditional writing and publication process? How can we make such tools more amenable to the different disciplinary methods, and even interdisciplinary methods.
• What are the ethical issues involved in such interrogations and how do we include contents of culture, politics, and the social into the interrogation without over-extending that possibility?

Share your thoughts and ideas here critscitheory.tumblr.com/!

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Mapping the Network: Cybercartographies and Non-Zero Interfaces.

Let’s talk about how information visualizations (re)present, manifest, and/or create the network. In Galloway’s new Interface Effect, he suggests “Only one visualization has ever been made of an information network….Every map of the internet looks the same. A word cloud equals a flow chart equals a map of the internet. All operate within a single uniform set of aesthetic codes. The size of this aesthetic space is one…And where there is only one, there is nothing. For representation of one is, in fact, a representation of nothing. (84)

…it says nothing…no media is happening here (86)

There is quite literally an inability to render the network as an image differentiated from other images. There is a single image and thus there is none. (91)

I want to fiercely refute this by creating a collaboratively-curated digital museum of information visualizations that prove that NOT all cybercartographic maps reduce to one (or, to nothing…to zero). Let’s discuss information visualization, non-zero interfaces (interfaces that do not merge into the ‘single image’ scheme as suggested), and create a collaboratively-curated digital online museum. I’ll have a Tumblr ready for our en-action and we can populate it while we work.

Our Tumblr: Museum of Non-Zero Maps: museumofnonzeromaps.tumblr.com. Please post all non-zero maps!

Amanda Starling Gould, Duke University
texturalLiterature.blogspot.com
@stargould