Launch of Digital Humanities in Practice

ISR's Communications Editor Julianne Nyhan and Editorial Board Member Melissa Terras have recently co-Edited Digital Humanities in Practice (Facet 2012)  

The book will be launched in London on 6 November and you can attend by reserving a place via Eventbrite:  http://dhinpractice.eventbrite.co.uk/  

More details about the book are available on the Publishers Website: 

http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661 

 It would be great to meet some of ISR's readers at the launch! 

Lecture: Machines of demanding grace

Prof Willard McCarty, Editor of ISR, will tonight (18/10/2012) deliver a lecture entitled 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'. It will take place in Senate House, London (room 246) from 17:30 - 19:30. Please do attend if you are in London town! 


Willard McCarty: 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'

The great anthropological question “What is man?”, raised by Immanuel Kant in 1800 and made the overarching question of philosophy, has been taken up in our time, for example, by Anthony Giddens’ exploration of the perilously negotiated process of “going-on being” in the reflexive construction of self (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991); Ian Hacking’s dissolving away of the singular soul by probing multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul, 1995); Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” evinced e.g. in Linnaeus’ homo sapiens, which he reads as denoting a creature in perpetual becoming (L’aperto, 2002); and G. E. R. Lloyd’s subtle navigations across cultures and centuries among the historical variants of “what counts as being human” (Being, Humanity and Understanding, 2012). If, then, the human is in perpetual re-formation, what is the role of computing and the technoscience it communicates? In this talk I will use Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “great outrages” perpetrated by the sciences on human self-love and the moral programme of science that it articulates to suggest tentatively a way in which the digital humanities might do better than supply data for interpretation that happens elsewhere by other means.

Biographical note: Willard McCarty, FRAI, is Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and Professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney. He is Editor of Humanist and of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and founding Convenor of the London Seminar (2006-2012). For more see www.mccarty.org.uk.

Now available for review: Understanding Knowledge Creation: Intellectuals in Academia, the public Sphere and the Arts (2012). Edited by Nikita Basov and Oleksandra Nenko. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in reviewing this book and have relevant expertise.  


 

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Editorial Board Member presents "Materials: How they Work" on BBC 4

ISR Editorial Board Member, Professor Mark Miodownik, is presenting a television series entitled, “Materials: How they Work” which is currently being broadcast on BBC 4. In the first programme, “Metal: How it works”, Mark travelled to Israel and learned how we first extracted copper from dull rock and used it to shape our world. He revealed how our eternal quest for lighter, stronger metals led us to forge hard, sharp steel from malleable iron and to create complex alloys in order to conquer the skies. You can still view this episode, along with Episode 2, "Plastic: How it Works", for a limited time at the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fm490

The final episode in the series, entitled "Ceramics: How They Work", is to be broadcast on Monday 16th April 2012 on BBC4. Don't miss it!

For review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage

Now available for review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker, King's College London, UK (Ashgate 2012). Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in reviewing this book and have relevant expertise.   

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Toma Tasovac

Toma Tasovac is currently reviewing for ISR e-Lexicography: The Internet, Digital Initiatives and Lexicography, edited by Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Henning Bergenholtz (Comtinuum, 2011) 

ISBN: 9781441128065 

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (http://humanistika.org), and chief programmer and editor of Transpoetika: A Digital Platform for Serbian Language and Literature (http://transpoetika.org). He has degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton.  Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin.  His research interests include complex lexical architectures in eLexicography, retrodigitization of historic dictionaries, and integration of digital libraries and language resources.  Toma is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He blogs at http://metapoetika.org and tweets as @ttasovac. 

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Graham McBeath

Graham McBeath is currently at work on a review of Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen (Duke University Press: 2009). Graham is senior lecturer in Sociology and Media at the University of Northampton and has particular interests in the history and development of cybernetics. His review will be published in ISR later this year and a summary of it will be posted here too.