Adventures in Digital Humanities and digital cultural heritage. Plus some musings on academia.
Thursday 29 October 2009
btw
Result.
Saturday 24 October 2009
DRH Domain Name Fail
Update; Lou Burnard (who is currently secretary) says DRHA 2010 will be at Brunel, London. London-tastic for the digital humanities this year!
Wednesday 21 October 2009
Complicated Links Between Things
One of the things I've been working on, behind the scenes, includes grant writing. I've been involved with four grants in the past two weeks. Which reminded me, today, of the brilliant work of the artist David Shrigley, who aims to articulate complicated links between things in his cartoons. This is a good map of how my brain feels just now.
Tuesday 6 October 2009
REF Madness
...this greater emphasis on making academics justify their work in terms that results-obsessed government bodies will understand is worrying.And that's where the talk of research of social value comes in. It's a sop to the arts side. They're trying to find a way to quantify the usefulness of a greater insight into paintings, books or historical events because they know they're not of much economic value, other than to get the odd documentary commissioned, but have a vague memory of someone saying at a dinner that they mattered. They're trying to squeeze them into a plus column in their new spreadsheet of learning. Well, if that's their only way of according knowledge worth, then they're the wrong people to be making the decisions.
What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We've advanced as a species because we've wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on – that's why, for better or worse, we've got DVD players, ventilators, nuclear weapons, global warming, poetry and cheese string. And it's for better, by the way.
The Research Excellence Framework is starting to ask what sorts of curiosity our culture can afford, and that scares me even more than the demise of the silly survey because it strikes at the heart of what it means to be civilised, to have instincts other than survival. If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn't have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.