An Interview with Scott Z. Burns

I had a chance to interview Scott Z. Burns, screenwriter for Contagion, The Bourne Ultimatum and The Informant (not to mention producer for An Inconvenient Truth) for Slate last week. We talked about his deft ability to smuggle real science into Hollywood movies, the difference between Contagion and Outbreak, and his new comedy about mirror neurons.

Getting Past Dystopian SF

Another post up on Slate last week:

What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz, author Neal Stephenson criticized the dystopian cynicism that currently pervades the genre. Instead he calls a more optimistic, realistic approach—fewer zombies and man’s folly-style catastrophes, more creative inventions and solutions. In the spirit of being constructive, he’s also taking action. The first step is an anthology of optimistic, near-term science fiction, forthcoming from William Morrow in 2014, that will tackle this challenge head-on. Smithsonian describes the project, Hieroglyph, as a plan “to rally writers to infuse science fiction with the kind of optimism that could inspire a new generation to, as he puts it, ‘get big stuff done.’”

Digital Humanities Roundtable

I'm very excited to be participating in today's Digital Humanities Roundtable at the Institute for Humanities Research. If you'd like to follow along with my talk (or explore some more of my data and slides) you can do so below.

Contemporary Digital Humanities on Prezi

Revenge of the Nerd

Here are the slides for my upcoming talk, "Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and American Literary Networks." If the embedded code below doesn't work for you, try this link.

Science Fiction as the Conscience of Science

My review of Ridley Scott's Prophets of Science Fiction ran on Slate's Future Tense channel today! Here's a teaser:

Science fiction’s reputation for appealing to the nerdy and anti-social has long suggested that it has more to do with escapism than the real world.

Yet as Ridley Scott’s new Discovery Science show, Prophets of Science Fiction, chronicles, the genre deserves to be taken seriously for its ability to tease out the ethical and moral issues that accompany technological progress. Upon first hearing about Prophets, I expected the director of Alien and Blade Runner to get completely lost in space while discussing Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Philip K. Dick and how their work “foreshadowed” current technologies. Despite the name (we’ll get to that later), I am happy to report that Scott delivered this concept just as efficiently as he delivered that alien baby to the screen: The show successfully brings science fiction and fact into conversation with one another. 

Nerd Discourse and the Digital Humanities

In my talk at Emory yesterday I discussed nerds: the literary nerds David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, but also the ways in which their particular nerdish styles might tell us something about style and the digital humanities. Natalia Cecire wrote up a fantastic blog post fleshing these ideas out more fully and I think we're on to something really interesting here. Here's one really good bit, but I suggest you read the whole thing:

The term "nerdy," of course, was ripe for questioning. As Ed had remarked in passing (and doubtless explores more deeply elsewhere), Wallace's and Díaz's respective nerdy networks were overwhelmingly male. And there's a way in which DH's identification with "nerdiness" taps very much into the version of nerd identity—seen also, if differently, in both Wallace and Díaz's nerdinesses—that manifests as wounded (and defensive) masculinity. I argued in a previous post that the defensive posture at times characterizes discussions of DH, which occasionally even seems to borrow the language of struggle and resistance traditionally used by queer activists, activists of color, disability rights activists, feminists, etc., even while, in many institutional settings, magically turning out to be disproportionately white and male.

 As I'm about to post on Natalia's blog, I think there's more fuel to add to the fire here: the question of "serious" literature and gender bias in reviewing and criticism, a question I've tackled before.

Emory DiSCourses

I am very pleased to be the first speaker at Emory's new Digital Scholarship Commons. I've already had a great time meeting the DiSC crew and I'm really looking forward to the talk tomorrow.

For anyone there who'd like to follow along on their own machine, here's the presentation I'll be running through (also embedded below):

American Networks, American Nerds on Prezi