In December, I ran a Toolbox Dialogue Initiative workshop in Amsterdam for the Workshop + Master Class: Digital Humanities, Social Epistemology, & Virtue Theory in a Post-Truth Society, hosted by Mark Alfano and Digital Humanities & Experimental Philosophy Collaborative (DHEPCAT) at Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology.
Before getting to the details of the TDI workshop, it’s worth mentioning that this was quite possibly the coolest and oldest venue for a TDI workshop. The event was held at The Waag (Weigh House) in Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt square, a 15th-century building originally a gate in the city walls and later used to weigh house and meeting place for various guilds. Inside the Waag, the event was held in Theatrum Anaticum, which was built in 1690, held public dissections, and was the setting for Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The event–with its emphasis on fake news and a post-truth society–was billed as a modern dissection of the body politic.
The Toolbox workshop served as a bridge between the two days of the event. The first focused on talks about social epistemology and fake news. On the second, participants engaged in a Toolbox dialogue on digital humanities in order transition them to the master class on how to conduct various forms of digital humanities research. Robinson constructed a new TDI instrument for this purpose that focused on various forms of misunderstanding about of debates regarding the nature and methods of digital humanities. There were many philosophers present, but several other disciplines as well, including many computer scientists. Though the TDI session was short, the dialogue was fertile and generally regarded as useful for framing the rest of the event.