Category: Uncategorized
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Inside Higher Ed Interview on “Organizing Enlightenment”
On May 8, 2015, Scott Jaschik interviewed me for Inside Higher Ed.
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Mapping the “Enlightenment Index”
Huge Digital Project Maps Explosion of Print During the Enlightenment April 3, 2015 Jane Kelly If the World Wide Web existed in the 18th century, how would the seminal work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant fare? Would there be lots of…
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In Defense of Specialization
To judge from the jeremiads of some of academe’s elite scolds, the specialized scholar is an anachronism. Disciplinarity is dead. Or it should be.
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Algorithmic Cultures Workshop
Despite the snow Frank Pasquale, Kevin Hamilton, Bethany Nowviskie, and Siva Vaidhyanathan made it to our workshop on “Algorithmic Cultures.”
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Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, A Review
Twilight of an Idol Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz, a former professor of English at Yale University, is not a fan of American elite education.…
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Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern University
Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university…
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Recovering Philology: A Review
Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities James Turner Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction Jerome McGann Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. In the not-too-distant past,…
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Nietzsche Transformed: How the Philologist Became Modernity’s Philosopher with a Hammer
It’s hard to read the old-fashioned way, slowly and deliberately. Few of us have the patience, the concentration, or the time. When we do read, we skim, trying to get a quick “take” on the topics of the day, often conveniently…
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Twilight of an Idol: College, Purpose, and Zombies
In “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” William Deresiewicz lambasts a pitiful American elite education system that “manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity…
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The Humanities in Full: Polemics Against the Two Culture Fallacy
The New Republic does not like the digital humanities. Following Leon Wieseltier’s earlier diatribes, Adam Kirsch recently warned that the digital humanities and their “technology” were taking over English departments. Kirsch posed some reasonable questions: Are the digital humanities a form of technological solutionism? No,…
Chad Wellmon 