Author: Colleen Nugent

Perhaps there are historical reasons why, at this particular moment, the humanities are so self-reflective. No perhaps about it, actually. We are somewhat lost at sea and the “digital” is part of the reason. This does not mean, however, that reflection is productive, and certainly not all reflection is productive…. I am particularly interested in the problem of rethinking rhetorical education to address shifting literacy practices. This, to me, is not narcissistic, though it does involve looking at the rhetorical practices of humanisits since it is fairly clear that what we will teach students is a function of what we do ourselves.

…Composing is a networked phenomenon because thinking is always already relational. I mean you are composing/thinking in words right? You didn’t invent that language, right?

Lecture at King’s College London, 25 January 2012

….A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth.

In previous posts, I’ve shown how WordSeer can be used to explore small, well-defined questions:what word did Shakespeare use for ‘beautiful’? Is the occurrence of the word ‘love’ the same in the comedies and tragedies? This post is different. WordSeer has now developed enough to support a simple, but complete, exploratory analysis.

The question we’ll think about is this:

As one answer, we’ll see how WordSeer suggests that when love is a major plot point, the language referring to women changes to become more physical, and the language referring to men becomes more sentimental. You can watch a screencast here, or just read this post.

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The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?

The longer I work in DH, and the more I consider what the digital medium makes possible the more the idea of me standing up and telling people what I think and thus by implication what they might think seems frankly bizarre. I increasingly dislike the idea of the single voice speaking with some kind of a spurious authority. One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion. In what follows, therefore, I propose to look carefully at this apparent contradiction.

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