Living with the Pharmakon: On the Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts
The lunchtime keynote address, will be given by Dr. Mark Sample, professor and founding chair of the Film, Media, and Digital Studies department at Davidson College. Dr. Sample’s teaching and research focus on digital culture, computational creativity, and interactive media. Since at least 2010 he has been active in Digital Humanities and liberal arts pedagogy with early contributions to ProfHacker (a feature at the Chronicle for Higher Education that focused on pedagogy and scholarly productivity) and to Play the Past, a collaborative blog that explores the intersection of cultural heritage and games. He is on the board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, and his work uses the procedural rhetoric of video games and computation to comment on 21st century America. His recent projects include a workplace horror game about content moderation, the pandemic-themed Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams, A Million Random Acts (2025) with content ripped from today’s headlines, and No Time to Discourse (2025) ripped from tomorrow’s.