If you missed our info session this past Monday, here’s a great blog post from our co-director Cathy Davidson about the vision of the Lab:
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We’re virtual this year. As I said at the infosession, everything we do this year is an experiment. Everything is new. Everything is premature. But it is a lab, we are testing, we are discovering, we are experiment, we are finding . . . If it weren’t premature, we would have failed before we’d ever begun.
We’re looking to explore what humanities mean in a digital age. Some of what we do will fit neatly in the “digital humanities” rubric and some will be about how the humanities become something else, transformed, by going beyond the walls of the academy, by going public. That’s true of controversial subject matter (race, class, gender, sexuality? we’re spending taxpayer dollars on THAT?), of esoteric subject matter that seems too specialized for “taxpayer’s dollars,” as they say (Classics in a digital age? we’re spending taxpayer dollars on THAT?), of theory (who is this Deleuze person anyway? . . . we’re paying taxpayer dollars on THAT?) With the humanities threatened and questioned, with some insisting that we’d bring down tuition costs by cutting out humanities departments, the public digital representation of the humanities has a vibrancy and urgency that is the future.
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How do we make the case for culture and context, communication and critical thinking, close reading and historical accuracy, the ability to take evidence and use it to make a convincing conclusion, the ability to sort out the strong argument from the weak, the truth from the lies, the misrepresentation from the accurate? And how do we make a case for the value of specialized, disciplinary knowedge in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts? How do we translate and collaborate and, together, make something beautiful or powerful, moving or thought-provoking? How does specialized knowledge change when it is communicated to a wider audience as part of its very mission?
Some of these are not new ideas but, when they take digital form, even the traditional becomes new. As [Lab Co-director] David Bell noted, we’re in a transitional time in the academy. And the PhD Lab students will be charting the transition to new forms of learning, new forms of research, new forms of publishing, new forms of multimedia communication, new forms of assessment, online teaching and learning, and new modes of collaboration and peer-to-peer learning.
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Read the whole post over at Cathy’s HASTAC blog. Prof. Adeline Koh, who teaches literature at Richard Stockton College and is spending the year at the FHI GreaterThanGames Lab as a Humanities Writ Large Visiting Fellow, live-tweeted the info session under the hashtag #DukePhDLab – check it out!