Sawyer Seminar Lecture: "Beyond Borders: The Humanities in the Digital Age" by James Cuno

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Speaker: James Cuno, President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust

The world-wide web was developed and given the name – world-wide – because it aspired to go beyond borders, to be accessible beyond, even against, political borders, to be freely accessible to everyone with access to the internet, which today means more than 40% of the world’s population, a number that is steadily increasing, especially in the developing world. In the field in which I work, this has provoked us to think of ways to dismantle the false architecture of nationalism by which our field has been organized. The means by which we can reach beyond political borders to embrace the potential of the world-wide web includes free and open-source digital publication and dissemination, transnational research platforms, deep data bases, computational analyses, and image recognition software.  In this lecture, I will explore these tools and resources.

This talk is presented in connection with the HRC Sawyer Seminar, "Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation, and Politics".