Digital Knowledge and the Death of Certainty: Shakespeare, Joyce, and the OED

John Simpson will deliver the 2019 News UK lecture at Pembroke College on 20th February 2019.

Is there a difference between how we know things today, and how we knew things in the past? We remember (or perhaps hark back to) a steady state: Shakespeare was a fixed text that we read in school; Joyce was a difficult author we wanted to read but didn’t always get round to; the OED was a monolithic authority that could not be questioned. But the steady state has been disrupted by digital knowledge: it can be more fragmented, but also more dynamic. Things can change rapidly; old icons can fade, or we can understand them differently.  What should we be certain about today?

 This event is free and open to the public. Register interest using the form to your right.