Infrastructures for a Reimagined Humanities by Patrik Svensson

Abstract:

In this talk, I will address the relationship between academic institutions and their infrastructures. My interest is threefold: studying ‘infrastructure speak’ (the way that scholarly infrastructure gets articulated), providing a critical analysis of current infrastructures in and around the humanities (e.g. humanities centers, spaces, academic events and digital systems), and thinking about how infrastructure thinking can help us reimagine and enact the humanities in terms of scholarship, institutional agendas and societal action. The three case studies focus on humanities lab work, academic events and presentation software.

Bio:

Patrik Svensson (http://patriksv.com/) is Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at UCLA, Professor of Humanities and Information Technology at Umeå University, and former Director of HUMlab at Umeå University (2000-2014). Recent publications include Big Digital Humanities. Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital (University of Michigan Press. 2016), “The Why and How of Middleware” (with Johanna Drucker. Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2016), “‘One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at every Occasion for Speech” (with Erica Robles-Anderson. Computational Culture. 2016) and “Contemporary and Future Spaces for Media Studies and Digital Humanities” (In Sayers, Jentery (ed.), Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, forthcoming).