Hi!

My name is Kevin and I am a second-year PhD student in History, a Mellon Science Studies Research Fellow, and a new HASTAC scholar. My work explores the political and economic uses of computer simulation modeling in the 1960s and 1970s, paying close attention to the interrelationship between human-computer interaction, emotion, experience, and scientific credibility. In my past work, I’ve looked at the early philosophical reception of cybernetics in East Germany, its reconciliation with dialectical materialism, and the discipline’s uneven organizational implementation by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. I can be found in a variety of places: on Twitter, academia.edu, my website, and on the historiography wiki Videri.

I come to the digital humanities from, perhaps, an uncommon direction; I’ve been digital for quite a while longer than I’ve been a humanist. Before I became a history major in my late undergraduate days, I had worked for a several years on the grunt end of the IT sector, repairing computers, managing servers, and mostly doing the unglamorous work of removing spyware and viruses from factory-floor computers. Since the very beginning stages of my training as a historian, digital methods and tools have been the often invisible background assumptions in the way I approach research, writing, and organizing information. Maybe for these reasons, my definition (insofar as you can call it one) of the digital humanities is, like Josh’s, a pragmatic, process-oriented one: DH is the kind of work humanists do with when they have access to an expanding digital toolkit (while never abandoning the critical reflexiveness of our disciplines). For me, it also involves a political commitment to open access, copyleft, and transparency.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to meeting all of your tomorrow and working with everyone this academic year!