Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Academic
Description
Proponents of big data in the humanities embrace its potential for new insights, while opponents lament its encroachment, arguing that it marks the demise of rich humanistic traditions. This talk proposes that the turn to big data in the humanities signals a profounder issue haunting the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ neoliberal university. This issue finds its expression in the paradoxical claims that big data renders its object of analysis more superficial (unknowable) as well as more penetrable (knowable). The crisis of the university today consists therefore not simply of a neoliberalisation, but of the acceleration of the university’s unfinishable mission – a conclusion that has huge consequences for critical theory.