Symposium on Renaissance and Digital Humanities
Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 11:03AM I will be participating in a symposium (abstract of my talk below) at the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, University of Alabama, March 5th, 2011
Boyle: Hacking the New Humanities: The virtual sovereign in Thomas Hobbes and militant video games.
This talk (and accompanying demonstration of early modern frontispieces and visual texts alongside animations of contemporary militant gaming environments) examines some emerging modalities of contemporary digital objects in relation to early modern studies within the humanities. Beyond access and convergence – two terms that inform large-scale digitization projects across the humanities -- what can digital studies offer us in thinking about a renewed interest in the early and pre-modern periods. Specifically, this paper looks at animations of the idea of the “distributed sovereign” in contemporary digital network theory. Network theory has explicitly re-appropriated the idea of the sovereign in exploring how power and control are now embedded in the executable codes that make up our networked databases and digital objects and interfaces. What kinds of comparisons can be made of the image of the sovereign in early modern textual interfaces and the image of the distributed sovereign in digital network theory (re-imagined in terms of protocols, codes, and exploits)?
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