Important Reminders and a Lecture Invitation

REMINDER: in order for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences to verify the completion of academic requirements, students must apply for degree conferral (graduation) in advance to have a degree posted and to receive a diploma.

If you plan on graduating in June of 2013, the deadline to apply for degree conferral as well as the Commencement ceremony is this Friday, February 1st.

Applications for degree conferral and Commencement are both done online. Please visit the English Graduate Student Resource Page for links to the applications for both degree conferral and Commencement, as well as other useful information about graduation requirements.

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Registration for Spring and Summer courses begins next week! Please note that although Spring 2013 and Summer 2013 schedules have been posted on Ex Libris for some time now, they have recently been updated with course descriptions and last-minute changes. You can register for classes via Campus Connect.

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ingeman 02-6-13The DePaul Humanities Center would like to invite you to the next event in their ’12-’13 series exploring Digital Humanities. On Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 at 6:00 pm in room 314 of the DePaul Student Center, Steve Ingeman will present: “’Frequently the Messages Have Meaning’: What Claude Shannon and Neil Postman can tell us about the Digital Humanities.”

Advances in the Digital Humanities—the “semantic web,” high-throughput computing, affective computation, etc.—hold out the promise of exciting new avenues of research and scholarly activity. But they also call into question what it is that we do when we do humanities scholarship. New technologies generally have an effect on their culture which is not additive but rather ecological, as they reorder power relationships, import hidden assumptions, and change the questions we ask. Drawing from Walter Benjamin, Michel Serres, Neil Postman and others, we find that the Digital Humanities’ emphasis on collaboration and on the processing of large volumes of data changes—for better or worse—not only what we think the humanities are or should be, but also what we think information is. This change is dramatic enough to unhinge information from human meaning and the human life world, with wide-ranging repercussions.

Steve Ingeman received his MA in philosophy from Indiana University and his MLIS from the University of Tennessee. Now a professional librarian, he still works in areas of ancient Greek philosophy, critical thinking, information theory, and the philosophy of technology. He currently lives in Falls Church, Virginia.