Representing Digital Spaces: Videogames and the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This book’s introduction presented a concise summary of the Snow-Leavis controversy, and in the first chapter it was asserted that “the divisions within and across the disciplines associated with the most inclusive iteration of urban studies do little more than perpetuate the disconnect between the humanities and the sciences famously addressed by C. P. Snow in a lecture delivered over 50 years ago.” Building on issues of interdisciplinarity raised in that controversy, the first section of this chapter (“From Videogames to the Spatial/Geo-Humanities”) posits study of the videogame as one area in which we might address the “antagonism” between the humanities and the social sciences. Specifically, the notion of (urban) space in the videogame presents an opportunity for the humanities scholar that both coincides with and diverges from the study of cinematic space. This section also argues that Lefebvre and the literary humanities are being left out of disciplinary collaborations, and notes one more time how Lefebvre’s urban thinking complements the contemporary push to bridge geography and the humanities. The second section of this chapter (“Digital Humanities, Verso”) builds on this broad discussion to advance a Lefebvrian take on the growing prominence of the Digital Humanities (DH), indicating that this new development may not be as emancipatory as some of its practitioners claim.