Digital Humanities

I've been away, and unfortunately I'll have to keep this post short for the moment. Today I went to one of our department's meetings exploring the digital humanities and how we might engage them in our department--or whether we should. There was a good mix of some healthy skepticism and outright exaltation (I'm closer to the latter, but appreciate the former--I need to be reigned in a bit), but overall I was pleased with the thought everyone put into it. It looks like people in the department are serious about moving forward with exploration and R&D in the digital humanities, and I'm proud to be in on the ground floor. I'm convinced that our profession is heading in that direction, so it's good that people are jumping on, but that they are doing so with an air of critical reflection.

I try not to comment too much on departmental concerns, but this move seems pertinent enough to the content of this blog that I might bring it up from time to time. I think this is especially the case because we discussed a lot of the concepts and practices that I have been interested in for my dissertation: genre, the circulation of rhetorics, pedagogy, and the like, all under the auspices of technology. Since I'm thinking about the ways genre inflects the rhetorics we encounter online, it seems only appropriate that I consider what others are doing with such interests. That's it for now!