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“The world is on fire,” is, by now, a familiar phrase. It is often used when we feel overwhelmed about escalations in geopolitics or in response to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Humanists are human, including the “digital humanists”, and the weight of crises is a reminder to making our scholarly work “count”. In Jo Guldi’s recent visit to the Sawyer Seminar, this desire to do meaningful work was a consistent topic of conversation. We have touched upon questions of making archives public in other visits, such as that of Richard Marciano in the Fall. During this most recent visit however, we spent more time discussing what it means to “democratize” information. For example, how making records “public” relates to the goal of making information more “democratic.” Personal and Professional One argument against treating publically available records as a solution to the problem of democratizing information is the fact that even available information is not guaranteed to reach the “public” or be legible to most. Fortunately, contextualizing and creating a narrative from dispersed evidence across a variety of records is a skill with which humanists are well prepared. What role does activism play in the articulation research stakes within scholarly endeavors? While scholars may also identify as activists, there is a tension between the role of an activist and that of the researcher — concerns about how enthusiasm might affect the quality of one’s work. Scholarly rigor and passion can seem at odds, particularly valuing dispassionate rationality over emotionally grounded arguments. Nevertheless, extended scholarly engagement Read More

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Jo Guldi’s first book, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State, argues that Britain became an “infrastructure state” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period which saw an explosion in construction of roads, along with the accompanying surveying, management, and surveillance of that construction. Guldi’s work often deals with infrastructure, and when she turns her attention away from the history of the British Empire to the digital humanities, infrastructure is at the forefront of her mind there, too. Guldi spoke at the University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Information Ecosystems, on Jan. 9 and 10. She also sat down with me for an interview that is part of the podcast series, Information Ecosystems, and will be published soon. As professor of history at Southern Methodist University, Guldi teaches history classes with a few glimpses of the digital humanities, and runs the Guldi Lab, where she employs distant reading techniques to better understand historic texts. While interviewing Guldi and hearing her speak, I was struck by the way the concept of infrastructure — be it the analog infrastructure of roads and canals or the digital infrastructure underlying the Internet — recurs in her work and her thinking. She told me during the podcast interview that she considers it important that her scholarship be available online in open-access form. Many of her articles are open-access, as is her second book, The History Manifesto, co-authored with David Armitage. Like the miles and miles of roads that connected Britain in the nineteenth century, the Internet has the power to connect people and Read More