John Bonnett: Thinking About History and Beauty in a Post-Secular World – Some Potential Intersections Between the Digital Humanities and Theology

The Digital Humanities—rightly or wrongly—have typically been identified with analyses of text and corpora, and with literary disciplines such as English.  The field has typically used computation to support the detection of patterns in texts.  However, there are other ways that the digital humanities can connect with disciplines such as History and Theology due to two other fundamental activities associated with the emerging discipline:  pattern replication, and design.  Over the past 20 years, improvements in computational power, graphics capacity and software have expanded the expressive and analytical forms available to scholars.  This expansion, in its sum, can be characterized as a Topographic Revolution, a revolution that extends formalisms that are topographic, dynamic and capable of performing autonomous behaviours.

Join us for this lunchtime public lecture, in which Dr. John Bonnett will explore two potential implications the Topographic Revolution will present for theologians and other scholars who have a faith commitment. To start, it will provide an additional way from them to consider whether teleological processes are implicated in history. Additionally, it will provide new fora, new media and new methods for artistic representation, and, for those seeking to, a new way to re-align art with the search for beauty.

All are welcome to bring their lunch and engage in a brief Q & A period afterward.

Dr. John Bonnett is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. Dr. Bonnett is an intellectual historian and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. His research interests include the writings of the communication theorist Harold Innis, and the emerging domains of history and computing and humanities and computing. Read more about Dr. Bonnett here.