ICT / Digital Technologies for Research in Humanities
Highlights of the talk:
ICT (Information and Communication Technology) or Digital Technology.
From using ICT tools for Research to researching literature generated by digital technologies.
From using ICT as tool to researching Digital Technology as an object of study.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been a vital tool for researchers in the Humanities for a long time. It has been used to research literature, review previous research, formulate hypothesis, collect data, and analyze information. ICT tools like Inflibnet, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR, and virtual libraries such as Gutenberg, Google Books, and online book stores have been used extensively.
However, with the advent of digital technologies, the possibilities of research in the Humanities have increased significantly. The digital technology is acquiring the ability to think and create like humans. Its artificial intelligence is getting smarter, and its ability to process natural language is getting closer to that of humans.
Digital Technology for research in Humanities has several advantages. For example, tools like the CLiC web app, nGram Google Books, and tools for corpus linguistics provide new ways to analyze literary texts. ELAN is another tool that provides multiple ways to view annotations and supports the creation of multiple tiers.
However, the use of digital technology for research in Humanities has its own challenges. For example, the question of morality arises when using AI and its potential for unconscious bias. The generative literature, being produced by computers, requires a new way of understanding and reading.
In conclusion, while ICT remains an important tool for research in Humanities, the increased capabilities of digital technologies open up new possibilities and offer new ways to analyze information. Researchers in the Humanities must be familiar with digital technology and take advantage of its benefits while addressing its challenges.
A #Pedagogical Shift from Text to #Hypertext: Language & Literature to the Digital Natives.
Silvio Gaggi has argued in 'From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media' that
-It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered.
In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level.
Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.
We can use this argument to say that:
The very tenet of Digital Pedagogy makes the subject unstable, fragmented, and decentered.
Here, the 'Subject' is 'Core Content, the teacher and the taught'.
This decentering of #learners and the notion of #Teachership may for all practical purpose be lost.
It is necessary for the leader to understand the nuances of language.
And at the same time, it is also necessary to see that when we celebrate powerful communication skills among the leaders, we do not miss a point that all those who get success through their leadership qualities and communication skills, may not be considered as leaders worth celebrating by history. It is also necessary to see what sort of society are they creating for fellow humans. Can we celebrate communication skills of a leader who discriminate on the grounds of religion or gender?
I was invited by The Rajkiya Government Engineering College, Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh to share views in this ongoing Online Faculty Development Programme. 9 Sept 2021
Marxist criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818–83) and his fellow-thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95), and especially on the following claims:
1. In the Marxist literary analysis, the evolving history of humankind, of its social groupings and interrelations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its “material production”— that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods.
2. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage.
3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology—that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class (Abram, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms)
1. They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords).
2. Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.
3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteenth century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, Tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working class'.
4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
5. A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstance. For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order. (Berry, Peter. Beginning Theory)
Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema (Gibson). In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation (Sikov, Ed. 2010. "Introduction." Pp. 1–4 in Film Studies: An Introduction. New York: Columbia UP. Print).
Kuleshov Effect: The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. It is a cognitive event in which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
