How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies

Abstract

The emerging field of the Digital Humanities challenges many of the assumptions and practices of the Traditional Humanities. For those who are developing digital tools, resources, archives, and text and data mining algorithms, digital practices and theory mutually inform and modify each other. This talk will explore the implications of these changes and synthesize the results of nearly twenty interviews with scholars prominent in the Digital Humanities (including our own Jay Bolter). N. Katherine Hayles is a Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University, with a joint appointment in ISIS, Information Science Information Studies She writes and teaches on the relation of science, technology and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics won the René Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts completes the trilogy of Posthuman and Writing Machiness. Her new book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, surveys the field of electronic literature, offers theoretical frameworks for its interpretations, and explores connections between print and electronic narratives