New Ways of Seeing: New Media and
the Humanities, Theory, and Practice

Overview

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"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak."

So begins John Berger’s 1972 collection of essays, Ways of Seeing. Berger’s text and the accompanying BBC television series—with its emphasis on the mystification of art and art history, the gendering of images, and the commodification of culture—juxtaposed canonical works of art with images from popular culture. In so doing it challenged traditional disciplinary paradigms and lay the foundation for interdisciplinary scholarship focusing on the centrality of vision and visuality in the construction of meaning. Distilling complex Marxist ideology into clear prose and coherent examples, Berger and his contemporaries ushered in new ways of seeing across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Thirty years later, we live in a world saturated with screens, images, and objects, all demanding that we look at them. The world of images and new media technology is the everyday life of those of us who regularly annotate social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and post videos on YouTube; yet there is a disconnect between the way that scholarly research in the Humanities is currently conducted and presented and the world it attempts to describe. Cries that the Humanities are becoming obsolete abound. For example, the New York Times recently announced that "in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency." The article concluded, "The essence of a humanities education—reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming to grips with the question of what living is for—may become "a great luxury that many cannot afford." (2/25/09). Perhaps we need new ways of seeing.

This project consists of a series of talks, workshops, and symposia on the topic of "New Ways of Seeing: New Media and the Humanities, Theory, and Practice." Among the issues we will address are how to integrate new media in the Humanities classroom to enhance teaching and learning, how humanists can take advantage of new digital technologies to enrich their scholarship, and how we can use technology in innovative ways to transform meaning without losing academic integrity.