“Against the Cultural Singularity: Toward a Critical Digital Humanities.” Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures, University of California, Davis. 3 March 2015.

  • Abstract: Following up on the question asked in the title of his 2012 essay “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, Alan Liu will present early drafts from a book that imagines modes of cultural criticism appropriate and native to the digital humanities. His talk focuses on the role of technology in (and between) neoliberalism’s major “knowledge work” institutions (including higher education). Can digital-humanities research and development be redirected from being primarily instruments of institution work to becoming also ways to act on institutions and their wider social impact? What methodological framework can assist the making of a revisionary “enterprise technology”? What kinds of scholarship, projects, and tool-building might constitute a critical digital humanities?
  • Jenae Cohn, “A Recap of Alan Liu’s Talk, ‘Against the Cultural Singularity: Toward a Critical Digital Humanities.'” (HASTAC blog post reporting on the talk, 12 March 2015)