Moving from a cooperative to collaborative model in the production of humanities scholarship would not only allow students and professors to move beyond what John Unsworth calls, “the limitations of our own knowledge” but would also, I think, discourage the reproduction of the same self-referential narratives that scholarship often produces.  Instead of 25 historians individually researching and writing books about a given topic in one year, perhaps, a collaborative process would lead to a richer text that would also decrease number of works out there. Is this a good or bad thing? I’m not quite sure, but perhaps collaboration is a way to address the overproduction of intellectual work by ensuring that scholarship is relevant, useful, and not repetitive.

This week’s reading also reminded me of this NY Times Op-Ed in which Mark Taylor calls for a complete reorganization of the university. Would collaboration make us more effective scholars, thinkers, and citizens?

For my final project, I am planning to research the recent history of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay — from its use as a detention center for Haitian refugees in the 1990s to a military prison for ‘enemy combatants’ of the War in Afghanistan beginning in 2002. I am particularly interested in the media and visual representations of the detention center and detainees, and the ways that torture and terror have become synonymous with these images. I also hope to explore the testimonies from detainees themselves, some of whom have gone on to share their experience with the media after their release.

I found Wright’s claim that the internet is, “the most well-documented—and self-documenting—phenomenon in human history” really compelling (183). While Wright and Rosenzweig both maintain that current methodologies of historical preservation do not adequately address the complexities of archiving digital materials, I think Wright points out a really significant trend in thinking about the place of digital content in our culture — that it does not exist in isolation. We turn blogs into books, quote websites in newspapers , and print out online articles (of course, with the increasing popularity of the iPhone, Kindle, and Sony Reader, printing may decrease dramatically). While these formats do not preserve the interactive capabilities of digital materials (hyperlinks, for example), they do document the ways that we interact with the online world and demonstrate how content continuously loops through different media. So while the deletion of the Bert Is Evil site, “dramatically illustrates the fragility of evidence in the digital era,” aren’t we documenting digital materials in other ways?

And just because my background is in independent book publishing, in considering the Long Tail, what are the implications for the local, independent video/book/record store if the global market is prioritized over the local? What will happen to building communities around media in these physical spaces? Will concerts, author readings and signings, and even museums become archaic?

My delicious name: AManghnani

The texts assigned this week present diverging analyses of the freedom and liberation that technological advancements including computers and the internet can, and do, provide. Vannevar Bush extrapolates that increased mechanization would free academics from “laborious detailed manipulation.” In Electric Dreams, Ted Friedman asserts that the, “technological cutting edge continues to be the place where the shackles of doxa can be escaped, and new visions may emerge.” (209)

How is technology liberating? How is it oppressive? And what role does subjectivity play in one’s experience with technology? How has the computer come to be the site of our leisure and work?