Scholarship In and Beyond the Database

Tara McPherson
Associate Professor of Critical StudiesUniversity of Southern CaliforniaWebsiteRead Bio

"While digital humanists develop tools, data and metadata critically ... rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture." -- Alan Liu, Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?

As exemplified in the above quote, the subject of digital humanities intersection with cultural theory has been the subject of heated online discussions, conference panels, various publications, Twitter wars and more. Today’s talks considers some variations on this ongoing debate in the digital humanities around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities and its close analogs, in order to argue for a theoretically explicit form of digital praxis within the digital humanities.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is author Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (MIT Press, 2008.)  She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia journal, and is an editor for the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press.) Her new media research focuses on issues of computation, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. She also leads a software lab for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the NEH, and others.

Media

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).