4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2017
    1. Paper Machines allows the reader to identify and pursue particular moments of dissent, schism, and utopianism – zeroing in on conflicts between the pesticide industry and the Appropriate Technology movement or between the World Bank and the Liberation Theology movement over exploitative practices, for example. Digitally structured reading means giving more time to counterfactuals and suppressed voices, realigning the archive to the intentions of history from below.

      wow this sounds really cool but I don't understand4! hopefully I'll understand this better as the course progresses

    2. anyone, scholar or citizen

      hmm... I'm skeptical that these tools are really that accessible to anyone outside of academia.

    1. But doing so runs into problems of selection and representativity. I’d be loath to say that any argument could be made from the satires that Isaac Cruikshank designed, but many differing and contradictory interpretations could be made depending on the hand curated corpus of prints that was chosen

      I'm not sure if this is relevant/comparable, but it kind of reminds me of an episode of Revisionist History I listened to a while back http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox. I remember Gladwell talking about how the Colbert Report was interpreted differently by Republicans and Democrats and both groups liked and thought the satire presented supported their political beliefs. I wonder if any studies of historical satire have come across similar ambiguities and how possible it is to interpret the author's intended meaning?

    1. A digital archaeology that sat within the digital humanities would worry less about that, and concentrate more on discovery and generation, of ‘interesting way[s] of thinking about this’. So too with digital history.

      I love this idea. So much of my time as a student has been spent seeking sources as justification for a particular (and established) historical argument- I hope learning about the field of digital history will help me explore the past in a way that allows me to question without having an answer already in mind.