Confessions of a Recovering Humanist

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confessions of a recovering humanist Sebastian Deterding (@dingstweets) Digital Creativity Labs, University of York October 18, 2019 c b

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know, dear listener, that i, too was once a young humanities scholar …

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… taught by my mentors …

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… that all possible knowledge is already contained within the walls of the library.

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to venture into the world outside the library was to flirt with temptation and the eternal damnation of my very soul.

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out there were the people that our texts referred to.

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the people that read our texts.

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the people that wrote our texts.

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but we must never speak with these people. for the meaning of our texts are never revealed by the people; they are revealed only by other texts.

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this my mentors and their texts taught me. Wimsat & Beardsley, 1949 Barthes, 1967 Foucault, 1969

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i felt lost and alone in this prison house of language.

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i wanted to burn it all down!

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and so ventured into the world outside its icy confines.

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research: comms, hci, cs digital design: games, web, apps

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15 years later …

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thinking back fondly of some unsuspected lasting lessons.

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n of 1, comp lit, ymmv (caveat)

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lesson #1 a license to poach

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“it’s all just text!”

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example: embarrassment

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embarrassment keeps adults from engaging in serious games

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then how is this possible?

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then how is this possible?

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poaching all the fields Brown, shame resilience (social work) Goffman, face work (micro-sociology) Granovetter, threshold effects (macro-sociology) Wouters, honeypot effect (HCI) Olson, alibis (Law) Moran, adulthood (Education) Miller, embarrassment (Psychology) Caillois, play (Philosophy) Montola, play alibis (Games)

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lesson #2 code switching

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code-switching and re-framing as essential skills

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lesson #3 pattern spotting

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doing qualitative research

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recognising different rhetorics and how they parse the world

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lesson #4 power- sourcing

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what’s the source - then

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Concrete vs abstract attitude ≈ Renaissance similarity vs Classicist identity and difference Object/episteme ≈ Figure/ground what’s the source - then

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what’s the source - now

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