Searching and/as Knowing

Monday November 24th

Arts Two SCR – 5:30pm

The QMUL Digital Humanities seminar is delighted to welcome Professor Lisa Gitelman, Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at QMUL.
Time: 5.30pm.

Professor Gitelman is a media historian whose  research concerns book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. Her books include Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (Stanford 1999), Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT 2006), and, most recently, Paper Knowledge (Duke 2014). She has also published the edited collections New Media, 1740-1915 (MIT 2003) and “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013).

The session, titled “Searching and/as Knowing”,  is aimed at questions of historical epistemology. How are ways of knowing culturally and historically contingent? How might we consider the ways that knowing might be changing amid the present ubiquity of digital tools? What is the best way to historicize search?

Prof. Gitelman will lead a discussion of recent two pieces that reflect on processes of knowing in a digital age, the discursive powers of the database, and the future of scholarship. To receive copies of the reading (short articles by Prof. Gitelman and Andrew Abbott), please contact m.t.whitehouse@qmul.ac.uk