DATE: October 28, 2020
TIME: 9:30am – 10:45am
LOCATION: Zoom
A keynote presentation for COLLABORATION: A Digital Humanities Conference.
Dr. Tara McPherson is the Chair of Cinema and Media Studies at University of Southern California and author of Feminist in a Software Lab.
How did a feminist film scholar trained in post-structuralism and critical race theory end up collaborating on software design? In answering that question, this talk engages various histories in the development of computational systems in order to argue that we need more humanities scholars to take seriously issues in the design and implementation of software systems. Humanities scholars are particularly well suited to help us think through such topics as the status of the archive as it mutates into the database, the possibilities for less hierarchical computing, and the cultural contexts of code. In short, this talk argues that neither theorizing media nor building new technologies is sufficient onto itself; we must necessarily do both. As a concrete example of the relationship of theory to practice, McPherson will discuss the work that her University of Southern California team has undertaken over the last decade, including the digital journal, Vectors, and the new multimodal authoring platform, Scalar. Their research has always been in direct dialogue with key issues in the interpretative humanities, including discussions of race, gender, sexuality, memory and emotions, and social justice and power. How can such themes come to shape the practice of software design?