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This event is postponed until further notice.

Join us for a talk with Lisa Gitelman (NYU, English and Media, Culture, and Communication).

Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and was published by Duke in 2014. Before that, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught at the Catholic University of America and at Harvard University.

Abstract: 

In the big tech ecosystem of today the Wikimedia Foundation—parent of Wikipedia—is an interesting outlier in its explicit focus on knowledge rather than on information. This work-in-progress aims quixotically at a reading of Wikipedia. Even though Gitelman is a fan (both contributing to Wikipedia and donating to Wikimedia), she calls her remarks “Blame Wikipedia,” because she wants to start with the following provocation: Mark Twain famously blamed the novels of Sir Walter Scott for the American Civil War. He thought that “Sir Walter disease” had seduced Southern grandees, granddames, and white wannabes into a sham sense of nobility. The South was caught in a feudal romance inconveniently at odds with modernity and with justice. If Twain were around today, where would he lay the blame for the divisions we presently experience as a nation? What shared literature underwrites the red-state/blue-state divide of the Trump era? A partisan press is nothing new. Social media are easily the culprits for the unprecedented dissemination of “fake news,” but how can we explain the power of so much fake news to be believed? Gitelman’s idea: Blame Wikipedia. In short, she invites us to think about knowledge and its production in this heyday of information.

 

Event Details

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