Event overview
Roberto Simanowski (City University Hong Kong) discusses his research on media literacy as a challenge to and responsibility of the humanities.
Roberto Simanowski is Professor of Media Studies and Digital Humanities, City University of Hong Kong. His research bridges literary, cultural and media studies. Trained as a scholar of literature and history with a doctoral thesis on pop culture around 1800 (Massenkultur um 1800, 1998), he researched and edited two books on nationalism in German literature and the literary salon in Europe (1999).
Since then his interest has moved to the field of aesthetics, culture, and politics of digital media. In 1999 he founded the online journal of art and culture in digital media dichtung-digital.org. His German monograph Interfictions outlined the criteria of a digital hermeneutics for multilinear, multimedial and interactive text, a concept which he expands in Digital Art and Meaning (2010) as he discusses the status of interpretation in a "culture of presence.”
In his monograph on digital media in the event society (Digitale Medien in der Erlebnisgesellschaft, 2008) he addresses the aesthetic and cultural ramifications of digital technology. Dr. Simanowski’s methodology combines discourse analysis and case studies with the aim of assessing meta-theoretical discussions and thematic readings.
His most recent research focuses on the Digital Humanities with special regard to media literacy as a challenge to and responsibility of the Humanities. A series of interviews on digital culture and Digital Humanities will be released with Open Humanitiy Press in July (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/digital-humanities-and-digital-media), a monograph on media literacy is scheduled for 2017 with Matthes & Seitz Berlin as third part of his Media Studies Series; the first part, Data Love, was released in June 2014 (forthcoming in English with Columbia University Press in September 2016), the second part, Facebook-Gesellschaft (Facebook-Society), will be released in June 2016 (the English edition is scheduled with CUP for Fall 2017).
DATA LOVE (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/data-love/9780231542425) puts an affectionate face to the power house of digital information society: Big data mining - the computerized analysis of vast amounts of data in order to reveal patterns and connections. Data love is not merely characteristic of obsessive behavior by overzealous intelligence agencies and governing authorities; the economy has caught the bug, along with the sciences, and a significant proportion of the entire population. Measurement, motivated by rationality, is a grand project of modernism, and it is measurement of the social realm that now promises us knowledge, progress, better customer service, and an easier life.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Oct 2016 | 12:00pm - 2:00pm |
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