Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, Experimental Humanities Program, Art History and Visual Culture Program, and Science, Technology, and Society Program Present
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan '01, King’s College London
Monday, April 24, 2023
Olin Humanities, Room 102
4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory
How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and cultural theories taking root at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on speaker Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan's recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (and with a nod to his undergraduate studies at Bard College in the late 1990s), this talk explores how data-driven exercises from Dutch Bali to MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) inspired these varied and diverse audiences in a common dream of “learning to code.” The result is a new history of the obscure ties linking Progressive Era technocracy and the prestige of engineering to the rise of “theory” in the humanities and social sciences.
For more information, call 845-752-4388, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102