I want to talk about how the evolution of the forms of delivery and analysis of text inherent in the creation of the online, problematizes and historicises the notion of the book as an object, and as a technology; and in the process problematizes the discipline of history itself as we practise it in the digital present.

First, it has allowed us to begin to escape the intellectual shackles that the book as a form of delivery, imposed upon us.  If we can escape the self-delusion that we are reading ‘books’, the development of the infinite archive, and the creation of a new technology of distribution,  actually allows us to move beyond the linear and episodic structures the book demands, to something different and more complex.

Teaching historical empathy through gaming is an important area in digital media and learning, but collaborations between university professors and game designers aren’t always easy.  Nonetheless, UC San Diego Theater and Dance Professor Emily Roxworthy, who leads a National Endowment for the Humanities funded project about Japanese American  internment camps in the American South during World War II that also used resources from the San Diego Supercomputing Center to bring the action to life, argues that the challenges are well worth the rewards.

One of the greatest hinderances for collaborative digital work is a cultural obsession with individualism. This is why I feel the digital humanities should essentially be about activism and advocacy. We need to not only assign and engage in collaborative digital projects, but also by create an environment where such projects are valued.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick already wrote an amazing article about the need for faculty to back graduate students who risk their graduate careers by engaging in digital work. I also really like what Natalia Cecire said about the political stakes of DH work in an already transforming academic labor market:
[D]igital humanities and ‘the job market’ as it now manifests isn’t a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior

The general assumption is that in the 2.0 era the user was at the centre, the produser took control and the cult of the amateur was born. The web was being flooded with what seems an infinite amount of user generated content. Big platforms, such as Flickr and Facebook managed to centralize and collect some of these efforts effectively. The result of is a big, fragmented and messy dataset. Enter web 3.0; the iteration of the web which can be read and understood by machines, where the dots will be connected and contribute to an open sphere of knowledge, something that the current pragmatics of the web don’t easily allow for. The philosophy here is, bluntly put, that this connected sphere is more than the sum of its parts.