Humanities seminar to explore the production and politics of knowledge

"Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web’s public debut, Rice University’s Humanities Research Center is hosting a 2015-16 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Titled “Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation and Politics,” the seminar’s organizers are bringing two speakers to campus this month to acquaint and engage the Rice community with the topic.  With its main activities — lectures and workshops — to take place during the upcoming academic year, the seminar will examine the proliferation of digital knowledge platforms such as Google, Wikipedia, edX and Coursera to understand their impact on culture and academia, said Farès el-Dahdah, center director and professor of humanities. He is leading the seminar together with Melissa Bailar, center associate director and professor in the practice of humanities, and Lisa Spiro, Fondren Library executive director of digital scholarship services. The seminar was made possible through a $175,000 award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ... To kick off the exploration of these issues, the center is hosting talks by two internationally renowned scholars of media and information studies: Siegfried Zielinski, a German media theorist and the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts, and Christopher Kelty, an associate professor in the departments of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a former member of Rice’s Anthropology Department. Co-hosted by the English Department and the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory ... "