My talk which will consider "longing" within the context of a
psycho-philosophical approach to new media studies. The place of
longing will be discussed not so much in a material context (the
vanishing of analogue materials) but more in a spectral one: from
consideration of models of mourning and melancholia in relation to
the "loss" of analogue textual and cinematic formats to a
reformulation of the dynamics "analogy" in the digital age. In
considering a number of new media artworks and projects, the talk
will raise the possibility of a flexible model of "the fold," in
contrast to the mechanics of perspective, while positioning the
valence of longing in relation to the future pull of informatics
rather than the past lament of lost artifacts.
William Noel directs an international program to conserve, image, and
study the Archimedes Palimpsest, the unique source for three treatises
by the ancient Greek mathematician. After ten years of intense work, the
project to retrieve erased texts from the thirteenth-century Byzantine
palimpsest is nearing completion. The results have been extraordinary,
changing scholarly perception of Archimedes' contribution to the western
tradition of mathematical thought, and revealing entirely new texts from
the ancient world. In this lecture, Dr. Noel will discuss the project,
present the results, and discuss other digital projects currently
underway at The Walters Art Museum.
The internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities, this paper suggests, are not a product so much of the technology alone, but of the historical and sociological peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Most of what's happened around the internet in the past decades, in other words, tells us more about our times than about technology. Different cultural traditions played a role in the emergence of the internet, including flavors of managerialism and utilitarianism. But the internet was also deeply inflected by an American version or romantic individualism. Beginning in the 1960s an increasing number of engineers and policymakers began to reinterpret the act of computing, not as calculation or prediction, but as a form of expression, exploration, or art, to see themselves as artist, rebel, or both, and to find communities with similar experiences that would reinforce that view. People need to express themselves, they said, people want and need spontaneity, creativity, and dragon-slaying heroism. Direct, unplanned interaction with computers offered an enticing and safely limited unpredictability that would fulfill those goals. That is why we need small computers instead of mainframes, the argument went, why we need personal computers instead of dedicated word processors, why we need the open, end-to-end distributed networking of the internet instead of proprietary corporate systems, why we should invest in 1990s dotcoms, why we need open source software. These discursive habits, the paper argues, had consequences: for example, the 1990s dotcom stock bubble and the persistence of neoliberalism through the 1990s owes much to the linkage of romantic tropes to networked computing. By the same token, the assumption that the internet is inherently democratic has caused us to approach it as such, which has made the internet a context for substantial grassroots democratic experimentation and agitation; the internet is democratic, not because of anything inherent to the technology, but because we have imagined it as such -- and the fact that we have done so has had material consequences, many of them good ones. The story of the construction of the internet shows how the creation of a technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces: with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.
On a daily basis, we are exposed to a remarkable array of visual imagery. While we may have historically had confidence in the integrity of this imagery, today's digital technology has begun to erode this trust. From the tabloid magazines to the fashion industry, main-stream media outlets, scientific journals, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that land in our email in-boxes, doctored photographs are appearing with a growing frequency and sophistication. I will discuss some of these issues and describe forensic techniques which we have developed for detecting phototampering.
In this paper, I discuss a shortened tenure dossier that Susan Schreibman and I invented for an MLA workshop on promotion and tenure,
using the name 'Laura C. Haystack,' my avatar in Second Life. In it, writing XSLT scripts is described as an
activity worthy of being considered as tenurable research. In a sense, a script is publishable if it works, but is that enough?
I describe the desire of the workshop participants to see this programming activity as 'technical writing' or service.
Should programs that enable visualizing data be seen as serving researchers or themselves performing research?
This is a question raised by Haystack's tenure dossier and also the ontology of Haystack herself: is she mere means to an end or a shaper of thought? Tool or textuality?
Flanagan works as an artist, scientist, and humanist and directs the Tiltfactor research laboratory (
http://www.tiltfactor.org) at Dartmouth College. As a writer of electronic literature and critical studies, she has authored over 20 essays and chapters on digital culture. More recent books in English include re:SKIN (2007) and Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Her work has been supported by commissions, the NEH, the ACLS, and the NSF. Flanagan is currently interested in the intersection of games, social issues, and data gathering, such as using crowdsourcing to gather metadata for nonprofits or underserved communities.
http://www.maryflanagan.com
This talk will explore the current crisis in scholarly publishing and
project its digital future, focusing on the kinds of social and
institutional changes that will be required across US colleges and
universities in order for that future to come to fruition. Among
those necessary changes, I argue, will be profound shifts in the ways
that we approach peer review, transformations in our conceptions of
authorship, revisions in the structures of scholarly texts, increased
attention to preservation in our libraries, and new partnerships among
libraries, presses, and information technology departments in thinking
about the place of publishing within the university.
Featured Speakers
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Hany Farid
William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, and Director of the
Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College.
Hany's research reaches many different areas, from digital forensics to the digital reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian tombs.
Hany works and plays with digital media at the crossroads of computer science, engineering, mathematics, optics and psychology.
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor and Chair, Media Studies Department, Pomona College, CA.
Professor Fitzpatrick is co-coordinating editor and press director of MediaCommons,
a digital scholarly network that seeks to update scholarship and academic publishing to take advantage of the new media environment.
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Mary Flanagan
Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Dartmouth College.
Flanagan works as an artist, scientist, and humanist and directs the Tiltfactor research laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org) at Dartmouth College. As a writer of electronic literature and critical studies, she has authored over 20 essays and chapters on digital culture. More recent books in English include re:SKIN (2007) and Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Her work has been supported by commissions, the NEH, the ACLS, and the NSF. Flanagan is currently interested in the intersection of games, social issues, and data gathering, such as using crowdsourcing to gather metadata for nonprofits or underserved communities. http://www.maryflanagan.com
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Laura Mandell
Professor of English and Director of Digital Humanities at Miami University.
Mandell's research focuses on writing in British romanticism and 18th century British literature.
The Poetess Archive constitutes a resource for studying the literary history of popular
British and American poetry. She is currently developing new methods for visualizing poetry.
Mandell is an associate editor for the NINES and is
Director of 18thConnect--forthcoming in July.
Mandell is also chair of the committee on Information Technology for the Modern Language Association (MLA). Handouts: Workshop Case Study (pdf) and Abstract (jpg)
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Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English, and Director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
Prof. Murray's research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, as well as seventeenth-century studies and critical theory, with strong interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is Founding Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library, the Co-Curator of CTHEORY Multimedia, and curated the traveling exhibition, "Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom". He sits on the Steering Committee of HASTAC and is co-leader of the collaboratory between CenterNet and CHCI. He is currently working on a book, Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).
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William Noel
Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Dr. Noel received his PhD in 1993 from Cambridge University, England, and is on the faculty of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and is an Adjunct Professor in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Among the positions he has held are Director of Studies in the History of Art, Downing College, Cambridge University, and Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He has directed the Archimedes Palimpsest project since January 1999.
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Doug Sery
Acquisitions Editor for The MIT Press.
Sery is responsible for, among other areas, the Leonardo book series on art, science and technology and books on New Media.
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Tom Streeter
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, UVM.
Professor Streeter studies media, technology, law and culture. In his book Selling the Air he presents a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus. His latest book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology.
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