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Digital Humanities

Humanity vs. Technology (in 5 minutes)

July 31, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Biotech, Blog2024+, critical thinking, Democracy, Digital Humanities, Emergent Tech, Ethics, Internet, Justice, Labor Issues, Machine Learning, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, Social Media, Surveillance, Teaching, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Uncanny Valley Comments Off on Humanity vs. Technology (in 5 minutes)

Dr. Leigh M. Johnson summarizes the challenges technology poses to humanity (and the humanities) in 5-minute PowerPoint.

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Paying It Forward

July 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Blog2024+, Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Professional Academy, Public Philosophy, Teaching, Uncategorized Comments Off on Paying It Forward

Are you a recent grad student who just got hired or a junior faculty member stressing out about your Fall syllabi? I’m here to help.

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Anonymity

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 4 Comments

Listening to the Digital Dialogue conversation about Identity the other day, coupled with reading way-too-many of the “comments” sections on the Skip Gates’ arrest story, has gotten me thinking a lot about the merits and demerits of online anonymity. Anyone who spends more than a second on the Internet surely knows the drawbacks– “flame” wars,…

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Five Reasons Why I Am A Techno-Optimist

May 6, 2019 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on Five Reasons Why I Am A Techno-Optimist

Since I posted my list of tech book recommendations a few weeks ago, several people have asked me to explain why I describe myself as a “techno-optimist.” I get this question a lot, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to give a quick account (and defense) of my position. But, first, a few preliminary remarks about…

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Why We Need YOUR Help to #SaveTheInternet

December 12, 2017 Leigh M. Johnson Democracy, Digital Humanities, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on Why We Need YOUR Help to #SaveTheInternet

Did the image above give you a little bit of a dystopic shiver? It should. This Thursday, December 14, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai plans to roll back the Obama-era Title II regulations governing net neutrality. We can’t let that happen. You’ve no doubt heard the words “net neutrality” a lot in recent months (including on…

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Not Every Idea Needs a Tool, But Every Tool Needs an Idea

May 3, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on Not Every Idea Needs a Tool, But Every Tool Needs an Idea

Last semester, I conducted a test-run on a new assignment I had devised for my courses– the “Technology and Human Values” project— and I was, quite frankly, floored by the work that students did for it. The basic assignment is for students to work in groups of four or fewer to devise a merely-possible technological solution…

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Anonymity

February 8, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Digital Humanities, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive Comments Off on Anonymity

What difference does a signature make? I’ll assume that the phenomenon of trolling is one familiar to most of us on the interwebs, a phenomenon that is, in turns, infuriating, exasperating, unpleasant, and often genuinely hostile and threatening. There’s much to abhor about trolls– their pettiness and vitriol, their disregard for basic conversational decorum, their…

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Forgetting

February 6, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on Forgetting

I dedicate a significant amount of time in my courses to thinking with students about our “digital selves” and our “digital lives.” Most students– most people, for that matter– tend to think of the aggregate data that constitute their digital selves (social media profiles, Google searches, Netflix or Amazon preferences, banking transactions, medical records, online…

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Risk

February 3, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Democracy, Digital Humanities, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on Risk

In the January edition of the New Yorker, there was a story (“The Hit List”) about the so-called “Islamist war” on secular bloggers in Bagladesh.  It begins with the murder of blogger Avijit Roy: atheist, rationalist and advocate of scientific understanding.  (Roy: “The vaccine against religion is to build up a scientific approach.”) It is a…

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Technology and Human Values

December 3, 2015 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Ethics, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on Technology and Human Values

If this were a post on Buzzfeed or Upworthy or some other such listicle-driven site, the thumbnail caption would read: “You won’t BELIEVE the AMAZING things these COLLEGE STUDENTS did in their PHILOSOPHY class! Check it out!” That would be a 100% true description, but I will attempt to be more measured in what follows….

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