Some years ago, a Trade Union leader, Thomas Nielsen, jubilated that the Trade Union movement was 'victorious like Hell.'
We might say the same about the humanities: the field has invaded and dominates linguistic phenomena like sociolinguistics and pragmatic linguistics. And as for studies in social and political areas, everything is understood and studied as a text.
However, the Victory seems unheeded by those who fund and decide over the humanities ...
Monday 9 November 2015
Sunday 9 March 2014
Memory has a paradoxical role in today's thinking:
I am the best witness to a personally experienced event.
But a historian may find an objective account more reliable than what I remember.
Recent historical research has been active in microhistory and the gathering and analysis of e.g. wartime testimonies. But we still have not answwered the question of the cognitive value of personal experience.
The Middle Ages answered the question by a kind of double projection (as we scientific people would probably call it):
First projection: the world picture was homocentric, and truth therefore defined as viewed from the centre of things as defined by man.
Second projection: Man is created in God's image, and God may therefore be viewed as the ideal man (or the je-ideal)
Therefore, God's book (Bible), God's book nr. 2 (Creation) and my truth are the same. The objectivity that the Enlightenment - boosted by the authority of the printed book's impersonal and transpersonal ideality - is not a medieval problem.
Today, we are once more getting restless about that problem.
I am the best witness to a personally experienced event.
But a historian may find an objective account more reliable than what I remember.
Recent historical research has been active in microhistory and the gathering and analysis of e.g. wartime testimonies. But we still have not answwered the question of the cognitive value of personal experience.
The Middle Ages answered the question by a kind of double projection (as we scientific people would probably call it):
First projection: the world picture was homocentric, and truth therefore defined as viewed from the centre of things as defined by man.
Second projection: Man is created in God's image, and God may therefore be viewed as the ideal man (or the je-ideal)
Therefore, God's book (Bible), God's book nr. 2 (Creation) and my truth are the same. The objectivity that the Enlightenment - boosted by the authority of the printed book's impersonal and transpersonal ideality - is not a medieval problem.
Today, we are once more getting restless about that problem.
Friday 13 December 2013
thegutenbergparenthesis: The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Definition and Motivati...
thegutenbergparenthesis: The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Definition and Motivati...: The Gutenberg Parenthesis is a research area that assumes that the era of the printed book is closely associated with cognitive issues that...
Digital omniscience and reinventing God
Knowledge, opinions and fads spin a net around the world. there is so much more than I could ever consult, and if I wish to know about something - anything - I just ask the Internet. With the sum being so much larger than any part may accommodate, a new superior being - virtual, invisible, omniscient, and omnipresent - and with a considerable degree of the prophetic riddling that erratic searching, posting and digital structuring produce - are we not in the felt presence of a new godlike being?
academic writing and digital media
At the Arts Department of my university (University of Southern Denmark) we have been issued with an I-pad so that we may mark papers and consult with one another without a lot of paper. I am not sure I trust the linear scroll as a means of getting an overall idea of an essay's cogency - its character as a product. It is a product resulting, of course, from a process, but academic writing aims, as far as I can see, at arguing a point in a way that has organised the relevant material so as to present the point most convincingly andsystematically. Its has an overall shape which is hard to keep in mind for the digital reader.
Some will say I am old and set in my bookish ways; that I need practice. But please consider if there is a problem nevertheless. Can scrolling offer self-conscious and reflective academic reading?
Some will say I am old and set in my bookish ways; that I need practice. But please consider if there is a problem nevertheless. Can scrolling offer self-conscious and reflective academic reading?
Thursday 5 December 2013
Academic approach to books on the screen - a problem?
Classroom use of books that are not books, but text on a computer screen
Recently I blamed students for not brining a text, and they pointed out that they had the text on theor laptop.
Can you read a book with critical awareness and analytic competence if you cannot move forwards and backwards in the same way as in a book? I can cross-reference and collate more easily in a book and thus get a sense of its overall shape and purpose. How does one find that other interesting spot if one has to scroll down or up whilst able to see only a bit at a time?
Is this a matter of getting used to the format, or is there not a real problem here?
However that may be, the new form of reading resembles the process of listening in an oral culture.
Recently I blamed students for not brining a text, and they pointed out that they had the text on theor laptop.
Can you read a book with critical awareness and analytic competence if you cannot move forwards and backwards in the same way as in a book? I can cross-reference and collate more easily in a book and thus get a sense of its overall shape and purpose. How does one find that other interesting spot if one has to scroll down or up whilst able to see only a bit at a time?
Is this a matter of getting used to the format, or is there not a real problem here?
However that may be, the new form of reading resembles the process of listening in an oral culture.
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