Yesterday morning I read a couple articles that, in relative juxtaposition, conspired to trigger this response. One was an innocuous piece about some high schooler getting suspended for asking the school’s visiting lecturer to prom during an assembly. The speaker happened to be Miss America. The other was a well-intentioned New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman …
Telling Our Story, Part 2: Jennifer Bown, Affect, and the Thought of Feeling
Cognitive theories have long informed various aspects of study in the humanities, often emerging as a corrective to arguments that accord too great a role to environmental influences. The study of language acquisition was one of the first subjects to accommodate serious study of the brain. For example, when in the 1950s B. F. Skinner …
Telling Our Story, Part 1: Mark Davies, Billion-Word Databases, and “Big” History
That the present era of “big data” should be characterized by a spirit of pragmatism may seem surprising after so many decades of “big theory” about the impact of new technologies. Scholars have grown familiar with arguments concerning the effects of the information age on what it means to be human: Donna Haraway’s 1985 treatise …