ACDH Lecture 2.1

Jeffrey Schnapp
Harvard University, USA

‘Knowledge Design’

The phrase Knowledge Design describes the situation in the contemporary arts and humanities that most engages Professor Schnapp as a ‘digital humanist’: the fact that the form that knowledge assumes can no longer be considered a given. The tools of humanistic inquiry have become as much objects of research and experimentation as have modes of dissemination. Statistical methods press against one edge of the qualitative human sciences; graphic and information design press up against another. Laboratories arise with a team-based ethos, embracing a triangulation of arts practice, critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication, and practice. The once firm boundary line between libraries, museums, archives, and the classroom grows porous as scholarship, deprived of its once secure print-based home, starts shuttling back and forth between the stacks and the streets. In his talk, Professor Schnapp provided an overall mapping of this situation and single out some key nodes: the re-mediation of print, data portraiture, bridging the analog/digital divide, and the redesign of knowledge spaces from classrooms to museums.

Introduced by Michael Rössner.