The Digital Turn had promised to ‘free’ knowledge from subjectivity. But as the reassuring promises of objectivity and accuracy based on notions of quantitative, computational, automated, and unsupervised turned out to be illusory, is digital scholarship even more biased than the
interpretative act itself? As there is no such a thing as ‘neutral data’ or ‘objective methods’, what is now the role of the digital scholar? Is Critical Digital Humanities the answer?
In this talk, Viola first analyses different ways in which reality has been transformed by technology; she then argues that the digitisation of society has added levels of complexity to reality that our model of knowledge creation can no longer explain. In arguing for a new model of knowledge creation, Viola proposes a novel conceptual and methodological framework, the « post-authentic framework“ for which digital objects are living compositions that react to societies and bear consequences. Beyond our current rigid model of knowledge creation, the post-authentic framework ultimately aims to address the increasingly pressing questions: how do we create knowledge today? And how do we want the next generation of students to be trained? Viola proposes a novel way: knowledge creation in the digital.
Speaker
Lorella Viola, Postdoctoral Research Associate, C2DH
Discussant
Christoph Schommer, Associate Professor, FSTM
Contact
cucolab@uni.lu
Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash