I finished drafting this post back before the extent of the coronavirus pandemic was becoming known. And now, of course, the impact of the virus around the globe—and on higher education in particular—continues to evolve. So I had been sitting on this post for some time; I wasn’t sure how a rapidly changing landscape of…
3D modelling as a digital humanities tool has existed for a while, with very detailed projects like the Pudding Lane Production of Tudor-Era London, 3D Saqqara, and Virtual Angkor. But how can it be used on a smaller scale, and are the tools too difficult for individual people to learn and use? As someone who…
While many of us might look to the 1918 pandemic as the last analog to this current crisis, the reality is that many marginalized communities have in the century since have endured systemic disease, hunger, and violence at degrees unimaginable to folks of privilege. It’s for this reason that I’ve found the Native community a…
Cheating is on the rise, we can’t trust students, and the best strategy to protect academic integrity is to invest in massive surveillance systems. At least, that’s the narrative that ed-tech companies catering to higher education are selling based on their products and marketing campaigns. One of the products that’s currently being adopted by colleges…
Last month, I gave a talk about my new book, Intentional Tech, at the University of Waterloo. The night before my talk, I dreamed about the talk, as I often do. Usually in these dreams, I go over every bit of the planned talk and worry whether or not I should include it. It’s not…
It will take a very long time for us to fully understand the long-term impact of the current COVID-19 crisis, and all the horrors it has bought to the world. By “us” I mean Higher Education, but of course this applies globally. Last month, in the space of a week many universities (including of course…
This post for Women’s History Month 2020 explores the Bluestocking Corpus of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters, created by Anni Sairio.* This first version of the Bluestocking Corpus consists of 243 manuscript letters, written by the ‘Queen of the Blues’ Elizabeth Montagu between the 1730s and the 1780s. Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson, 1718-1800) was one of the…
… Technoscience is a term I’ve used occasionally on this site, particularly in reference to the kinds of knowledge represented in tech trees, though without delving too deeply into its implications. As noted in the preceding article, the model of science and technology as two complementary and inexorably linked pieces of the military-industrial complex does…
Imagine being suddenly told that you cannot research online when writing history. No electronic journals, no ebooks, no Internet Archive, no Wikipedia, no search engines. You will instead be forced to rely exclusively on available print copies of books and journals, on microfilm, and, most important of all, on archives scattered across the country and…
Shifting forces in the UK Higher Education sector call for a new distinctive role for a university to enhance its prestige and intellectual endeavours – a new idea of a university. But at the present moment there is also a need to manage what appears to be a new landscape opened up by huge exogenous…