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Thank you, everyone, for an energizing and thought-provoking weekend!

Here are some of the follow-ups I’ve seen so far:

Mia Zamora’s excellent notes from Saturday

Michelle Moravec’s Storify gives a non-attendee’s perspective by showing what a “crazy day on the Twitterverse” we produced when combined with concurrent events like NEASA and THATCamp OHA.

The session on “failure,” convened by Andrew Ferguson, produced a collaborative Google doc.

The session on “THAT theories,” theories that can help students develop a critical framework for understanding how humans and technology interrelate, convened by Maria Cecire, also produced a Google doc.

What have I missed? Link other follow-ups in the comments!

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I would like to propose a collaborative workshop to develop a common language or vocabulary between scholars of race studies (critical race studies, postcolonial studies), computer scientists and the digital humanists. What are some common terms that we use that we think in different ways? (Modularity comes up as one.) What are some of the assumptions that we share/do not share about how cultural constructs are replicated in code, and what are its implications?

During the workshop, participants can draw up lists of common terms, explain how we all understand them, and suggest how we can use these terms to inform our digital humanities projects. How does the digital humanities change or become inflected by race studies? Issues of representation—recovery of works by people of color—are important, but what else would be relevant here? What are some theories and methodologies that a race scholar can use in projects such as topic modeling and other types of text mining; geospatial mapping projects; and issues of gamification in the classroom? What are some examples of DH projects that can be nuanced with race theory, and how can this be specifically done?

Image Credit

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Folks! Many kind people have offered rides to Murray Hall on Saturday morning.

Super-local (from near Hwy 1): Patrick Murray-John

From Brooklyn/lower Manhattan: Kyle McAuley (see my earlier email or email thatcamptheory@gmail.com to be put in touch)

Alex’s car is full.

If anyone else would like to organize ride-sharing, please do so in the comment thread below, or email me to be put in touch with particular people.

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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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Inspired by Latour et al’s “The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads,” I’d like to have a discussion about monads. Latour and his co-authors claim that “monads dissolve the quandary [of describing individuals vs. describing the wholes to which they belong] and redefine the notion of the whole by relocating it as what overlapping entities inherit from one another.” They further claim that databases and modern statistical techniques make a monadological approach practical.

This interests me on a couple of levels. First, I find monadology intriguing as a theory of categories, though I can’t really claim to fully understand it at this point. One of the things that originally drew me to digital humanities was the apparent contradiction between the humanities focus on the unique and particular, and the digital imperative to group under categories. I wonder if monadology actually does suggest a way out of this quandary, or describes it in a more nuanced way. Second, I don’t think that current databases actually do what Latour et al claim that they do, but I’m interested in investigating whether they could.

This could also be an excuse to geek out about functional programming.

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Writing has always been mediated, mostly physically. There are things that can and cannot be done in a cuneiform tablet that differ from that for a scroll, and that for a codex, and that for runes on bark, and that for a printed book, and that for a web page.

When we get to the web page, we move from physical mediation — forms or practices or means of production based on the physical properties — to forms or practices or means of production based on the code (another “text”!) that makes that mode of textuality possible.

Let’s talk about how expression of ideas is mediated by the code, analogous to how expression of ideas has been mediated by earlier means of production.

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Everyone who has applied to THATCamp Theory to date has now been added to the site. If you applied but have not received a confirmation email giving you access to this site, send the organizers an email at thatcamptheory@gmail.com.

If you’ve received your confirmation email, then you should be able to post to this blog. Post your session ideas! Exploring YOUR ideas is, after all, what THATCamp Theory is for.

I’d also like to encourage everyone who can afford it to donate to THATCamp Theory. THATCamps are intended to be accessible and inexpensive for all participants, which is why there is no registration fee, as there would be at a regular conference. We do have operating expenses, however, and in addition, we very much want to offer travel assistance to those who need it. In lieu of a registration fee, there is a suggested donation of $30.

Questions? Concerns? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line: thatcamptheory@gmail.com.

See you soon!