Courses, Spring 2012
What can literary analysis tell us about emerging textual practices: cooperation and co-authorship on Wikipedia, the usage of Twitter during protest movements, self-fashioning on Facebook, review culture on Amazon.com, and fundamentally, about the deluge of information that accompanies the advent of the information age? In this course, taught in conjunction with a graduate seminar sponsored by Harvard’s metaLab, we will learn to think big about digital archives, information architectures, live data, and large-scale textual corpora.
Syllabus.
Talks, Spring 2012
April 3, 2012
12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Knowledge grows, but it also contracts as outmoded facts and theories are replaced with new ones. This talk will discuss our intuitions about knowledge domains and the methods by which such intuitions could be modeled empirically. Along the way, Dennis will unpack the “information as organism” metaphor, construct taxonomies of epistemological lifeforms, and consider evolutionary pressures on knowledge systems. The talk will conclude with a conversation about the health of the academic publishing industry, and about the challenges of doing comparative work between new and old media. Dennis Tenen is a literary scholar and a recovering software engineer. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, working with metaLab and the Cooperation Group.
