My colleague Liz Losh is organizing an event at UC Irvine next month in celebration of the opening of the Richard Rorty born-digital archives at that institution’s library. The event must have the best title in recent memory, “Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won’t.”

The schedule looks great, with folks like Christine Borgman, Mark Wrathall, Iain Thompson, Steven Mailloux, and Michael Bérubé joining a number of UCI locals. In addition, Mary Rorty will be speaking about “Memory, Ethics, and Literary Custodianship in the Era of Computational Media,” a title that also pushes all the right buttons.

I’ll be there giving a completely new talk entitled “We Think in Public,” about Rorty, public intellectualism, and pragmatism. The archive itself is full of fascinating public and private papers, and I wish I had the time to read all of them before landing in Orange County in May.

published April 15, 2010