Inventing the Medium as a Humanistic Practice

The advent of digital modes of representation has been changing humanistic practices for three decades, most recently in the emergence of a new cohort of scholars identifying themselves as “digital humanists,” while simultaneously problematizing the term. I will suggest a framework for thinking about these disciplinary and methodological confusions, by looking upon everything made of bits as part of a new medium with still emerging genres, and asking what role the humanities have to play in the collective effort to invent that medium, and, conversely, how that process of media invention is provoking a radical re-examination of humanistic practices. Can we see the current moment as a significant turn in the humanities toward an embrace of the power of representation, as a result of the new representational power that has come into our hands? As an illustration of an unconflicted approach to digital humanism I will briefly show some recent projects of my group and connect them to the collective project of inventing new narrative conventions in order to capture and share more complex understanding of the world.