I’d like to try something a bit different tomorrow and wanted to tip my hand a little bit to get you thinking.

First, as mentioned previously, think of something to bring, or just a story to tell, about something you’ve fixed or hacked. It can be as simple as a mended shoelace or as complex as a broken website or bit of software.

Second, rather than march through the readings and sites as usual, I’d like to work more synthetically. So I’d like to break us into small groups for the first part of class and work on three separate questions, each of which might be addressed with several of the articles and sites on the syllabus. Might be a total fail, but might be really fun and inspiring. Here are the questions, which are also on this Dropbox Paper doc. We’ll use the latter to jot notes in our discussion tomorrow. You don’t need to do a thing before class, but I thought it might jog your thought process while reading to have these questions in your minds:

1. One of the foundational concepts of the traditional humanities is the “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), that is, a skeptical stance towards received ideas of the good, the moral, the beautiful, et al. and a boldness in imagining new and unprecedented scales of evaluation. What are some entrenched values that this weeks authors seek to “transvaluate” in Nietzsche’s sense? By all means suggest your own, but you might think about some of the following: innovation, disruption, novelty, progress. What terms recede in importance and what terms emerge to replace them in the authors’ analyses?
2. How do digital technologies and/or the digital humanities look different from the perspective of the Global South? How might close observation of “makers” and “inventors” in these “underdeveloped” spaces teach those of us in the “developed” world new approaches? How might humanistic study, and DH in particular, benefit from attention to seemingly marginal people and spaces who, in fact, comprise the global democratic majority?
3. What are some objects and processes discussed in this round of readings that are hard to see, hard to grasp, hard to comprehend? How do the readings/sites help us to think bigger or smaller or quicker or simply different? What research might emerge out of paying attention to ordinarily invisible aspects of our built landscape that ground the “clouds” we use in our everyday work and play?