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February 1, 2008
A 20th century academic narrative held that there are definite cultural differences between the humanities and nature because the two offer different forms of knowledge. In the humanities, a big part of the mission is to preserve, transmit and interpret the inherited cultural archive. In the sciences the job is to make new discoveries about how nature works. This duality of two cultures was premised on a print culture and its sensory modes.
This has been undercut by the newly forming world of the digitalized humanities with its online archives, electronic communication, online journals, new forms of scholarship as well as new forms of publishing. Instead of going to the library I can access material from anywhere, and then learn how to interpret the value of what I find online.
So how do we interpret these changes? One way was briefly explored in this post on Kevin Robins article, ' will image move us still'?, in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (edited) by Martin Lister and the debate on post-photography with its concern with the ‘digital revolution’ and how it is transforming epistemological paradigms and models of vision.
The new information format is understood in terms of the emancipation of the image from its empirical limitations and sentimental associations; it is a matter, that is to say, of purifying the image of what are considered to be its residual realist (positivist?) and humanist interests.
The blurb for Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular says that 'it maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence.' The Perception issue explores the way that digital media model multiple perspectives in ways that push beyond the sensory modes supported by print. I'm not even sure what the sensory modes supported by print are.
Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft may help as it is concerned with how the world is framed as well as what is in the frame. The book's blurb says:
In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen.In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective--Alberti's metaphorical window--has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple "windows" coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end.
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Gary,
I'm not sure about the sensory modes supported by print means, but one assumption is that the dominant modes of teaching, learning and reading are literate and will continue to be so. That is, all knowledge is mediated via either typographic or chirographic words on a page, or even on a screen.
It's hard to a square this 'literacy' with the centrality of our visual culture. Doesn't literacy” only apply to reading and writing. Or is this being too pedantic? Can we talk in terms of visual literacy? Or digital literacy?