Gradcam
The first Digital Studies Seminar of the 2016/17 academic year will take place in the Trinity Long Room Hub this Thursday 27 October, at 9am. It will finish at 10.50am, sharp.
1. Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick will present his paper entitled, ‘A possible Hermeneutics: Digital’, which will be followed by a discussion. Please review the abstract below.
2. A discussion about, firstly, the book (or edited collection) that is currently being reviewed by Palgrave Macmillan Publishers and, secondly, the programme for this semester.
Abstract: The impact of digital technologies on disciplinary epistemologies within the Humanities is posing substantial questions about how knowledge is constructed within fields of inquiry which are by their nature heuristic. The integration of forms of computational linguistics and cognitive computing (supervised machine learning) within the traditional humanities research needs to be addressed by the development of new disciplines which enable a critical understanding of these technologies (critical software studies, digital studies). This paper sets out to postulate that these digital technologies could lead to the development of new forms of interpretation and hence new forms of hermeneutics if they were harnessed in new ways.
By revisiting definitions of hermeneutics taken from the work of Paul Ricoeur and new forms of hermeneutics that are under development by the Bernard Stiegler and the research team at IRI, this paper will demonstrate how to develop new forms of hermeneutics made possible through an expanded understanding of the digital as a form of organology and an awareness of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies. It will also demonstrated that the revelation of the structure of the text through computational analysis should not be dismissed but incorporated into higher levels of interpretation which move from the semiological, numerical towards the semantic.
