Digital Humanities

This article in the New Yorker about the end of genre prompts me to share a theory I’ve had for a year or so that models at Spotify, Netflix, etc, are most likely not just removing artificial silos that old media companies imposed on us, but actively destroying genre without much pushback. I’m curious what you think. This aligns to the most important rule for thinking about artificial intelligence, which is that it’s deleterious effects are most likely in places where decision makers are perfectly happy to let changes in algorithms drive changes in society.

Critical Inquiry has posted an article by Nan Da offering a critique of some subset of digital humanities that she calls “Computational Literary Studies,” or CLS. The premise of the article is to demonstrate the poverty of the field by showing that the new structure of CLS is easily dismantled by the master’s own tools. It appears to have succeeded enough at gaining attention that it clearly does some kind of work far outsize to the merits of the article itself.