Jeffrey Schnapp

The phrase Knowledge Design describes the situation that animates much the most advanced work in the so-called “digital arts and humanities”: the fact that the form that knowledge assumes can no longer be considered a given. The tools of humanistic inquiry have become as much objects of research and experimentation as have modes of dissemination. Statistical methods press against one edge of the qualitative human sciences; graphic, information, and experience design press up against another. Laboratories arise with a team-based ethos, embracing a triangulation of arts practice, critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication, and practice. The once firm boundary line between libraries, museums, archives, and the classroom grows porous as scholarship, deprived of its once secure print-based home, moves back and forth between the stacks and the streets. This talk will provide an overall exploration of this situation and single out some key domains of experimentation: the re-mediation of print, data portraiture, bridges across the analog/digital divide, and the redesign of knowledge spaces from classrooms to museums.

Jeffrey Schnapp is a cultural theorist, media historian, designer, and experimentalist. He teaches at Harvard University and is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and CEO of Piaggio Fast Forward. Among his recent books are The Electric Information Age Book (2012), Modernitalia (2012), The Library Beyond the Book (2014), Blueprint for Counter Education — Expanded Reprint (2016; a reprint edition of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s 1970 work of radical pedagogy); and the bolted book FuturPiaggio. Six Italian Lessons on Mobility and Modern Life (2017).