Lecture
Friday, May 7, 2021, 2:00 PM

Dennis Mischke

Potsdam

Digital Humanities. New Literacies between Culture and Data

The rapid digitization of culture is producing data upon data. In archives, libraries, museums, universities, and research departments, in addition to countless companies and initiatives, a diverse array of actors is generating an ever-richer world of cultural data. While this raises new and pressing questions—about ownership, identity, access to name but a few—cultural data also opens novel ways of creatively providing, processing, communicating, negotiating, and exploring culture itself. In a way, the rise of cultural data gives way to new »data cultures« that are emerging around scientific, artistic, creative, activist and entirely new digital practices. Meanwhile, the »radical interdisciplinarity« of this knowledge and technology transfer requires an entirely new methodological knowledge as well as new skills and abilities, commonly understood as »Digital« and »Data« or even »Coding Literacies«. In my talk, I will discuss the function of the Digital humanities as a new field that is increasingly challenged to bridge the gap between culture and data by finding, exploring, and teaching novel forms of literacy.

Dennis Mischke is research coordinator for Digital humanities and research fellow at the University of Potsdam. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the Ruhr-University Bochum and degrees in Media Studies and Cognitive Science. He belongs to the research team of the project Network Analysis and Spatial Stylometry in American Drama Studies (NASSA) (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/digital-humanities/aktivitaeten/projekte/network-analysis-and-spatial-stylometry-in-american-studies-nassa).

Selected publications: The Cosmopolitics of Trust—Herman Melville and the Long Global Century (2015); Digital Scholarship in American Studies (Co-ed., 2018, special issue of Amerikastudien); »Deleuze and the Digital—On the Materiality of Algorithmic Infrastructures« (in press, Deleuze and the Material Turn. Special Issue of Deleuze and Guattari Studies).

Website:
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/iaa-amlc/associated-scholars/dr-dennis-mischke

The event will be held in English