3:30 PM Friday, April 16
Lownes Room, John Hay library

The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around

Humanities scholarship, by all accounts, now finds itself in what one prominent center of activity calls “An Age of Abundance.” Prominent scholars are asking “What do we do with a million books?” and suggesting “far reading,” “distant reading,” and even “not reading” as hermeneutical frameworks for contending with this sudden surfeit of data and information. This paper examines these proposals, and suggests that because they are based on methodologies that arose in the already superabundant world of print libraries, they fall subject to the scientizing tendencies that led to the modern library itself — tendencies that are only partially applicable to digital media. This paper takes an alternative view and argues that computational tractability, rather than perfecting our attempt to organize and digest information, may instead force us to embrace methodologies based on serendipity and play.