Thanks to a Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) plugin, you can now “bibliomap” your Zotero library. Fun! Er . . . wait . . . useful!
Click for a Larger Image
After a cursory go (about thirty minutes) at it, I’ve been able to:
Burroughs and Gysin wrote The Third Mind. Sometimes, I wish I’d never read the thing. For one, that book—or
perhaps the formulaic depression I endured after trekking through Pynchon’s generic Inherent Vice—is likely responsible for my recent inability to read a print novel. Not because novels are long, or that I lack the requisite attention span, but because I want to see language do something other than construct a story, a character, a point of view . . .
Elsewhere, I’ve heard it. The kids. With their low attention spans, they don’t read books anymore. Or, if they do, they consume vampirish texts destined for filmic adaptation. So the last thing to advocate is a move away from the literary novel. Because, if you do, then you are simply endorsing the abbreviating thumbs of a multitasking generation. Cursory thinking and micromedia (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) take over.
On Friday, I returned from the 2009 Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which, from day one forward, was great times. The Institute was held at the University of Victoria—indeed, not a bad spot to study in June. For one, there’s the rabbits. But there’s also the near-perfect weather (especially at nite).
For a week, I attended the “Digital Tools for Literary History” seminar, taught by Susan Brown and Stan Ruecker. With their help and support, I had the chance to flesh out a project for my “Invisible Technologies?” dissertation. Through the use of Simile’s Exhibit (especially some cereal source code), I created the framework for a site that affords a means to search what could become a rich and wonderfully contradictory history of sound technologies and their technocultures. Right now, with only twelve entries entered (using a blend of Javascript, XHTML, and CSS), you can search images, dates (of patent and publication), quotes (from patents, literature, and cultural objects like advertisements), people (authors, inventors, and other public figures), and descriptive metadata (related to concepts in my dissertation). And you can do so through either a grid or a timeline view. Read the rest of this entry →
This Friday (the 22nd), at noon in CMU 202 on the University of Washington-Seattle campus, I’ll be giving a talk at the 2009 Graduate Conference for Interdisciplinary Studies, “Transcendent Ecologies, Immanent Economies?”
I think I can safely say this: The talk will be my second formal go at speaking at length about a portion of my dissertation project (specifically, the first chapter, on magnetic tape and electronic literature). It’s entitled, “Layered Engagements with Electronic Literature: Media Ecology and the Materiality of Sound,” and I’ll be taking about twenty minutes or so to chat about the cultural histories of sound storage, how social constructions of new media are imbricated in those histories, and what is sound’s role in humanist conceptions of technology and media.
The gist of the talk: To demonstrate, through an emphasis on sound and its reproduction, how readings of new media as ephemeral or fleeting are largely misguided by humanist perceptions of media, perceptions which tend to privilege data transmission over data storage, thereby rendering technologies invisible and data immaterial.
I’m happy to present on a panel, “Material Worlds,” with a Madonna reference and with two other graduate students: David Stentiford (Literature and the Environment, U. of Nevada-Reno) and Pete Schweppe (Germanics, UW).
View the program for the conference (in PDF).
Per an announcement on their website, the Undergraduate Research Program at the University of Washington has posted the schedule for this year’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, which occurs this Friday, May 15th, from noon until 5, in Mary Gates Hall. Come check it out if you can! It will be a great event.
Presentations consist of posters and talks, and nearly 700 undergraduates, from a wide variety of disciplines, will be presenting.
Starting at 3:30, I’ll be moderating a panel in Mary Gates Hall 242. Below are the details.
“The Digital Humanities and Technology-Focused Cultural Research”
3:30-5:00, MGH 242
And here’s the schedule for the Symposium itself:
I’m still in the process of digesting HASTAC III, which was a fantastic conference on a variety levels, including how it so productively blended the work of digital humanists with new media artists and computer and information scientists. Often, conferences that traverse so many disciplinary boundaries risk a stalemate: no one knows how to communicate with each other and investments are too varied or even conflicting. Not the case—or so it seemed—with HASTAC III.
Case in point: one of the panels that I found most interesting consisted not of digital humanists, but rather new media artists and scholars. In the panel, Thecla Schiphorst, Mikel Rouse, Anne Balsamo, and Donna Cox all gave talks; and as Veronica Paredes points out in her wonderfully thorough account of the panel over at HASTAC.org: “All in all, the panel pressed its audience to consider the ‘matter’—the practices, the tactility, and the communities—of ‘New Arts Media’ in original and exciting ways.” In her post, Veronica also provides a link to Balsamo’s HASTAC presentation, “Mapping the Technological Imagination.” Prezi: finally, some presentation software that isn’t based on slide-by-slide navigation. When I saw Balsamo use Prezi (apparently for the first time), I was intrigued by both the content of her talk and how she was able to navigate it. To boot, and as Veronica notes in her post, the combination of engaging content with scalable media invites re-reading. While I generally take notes at conferences and sometimes return to them, I rarely revisit people’s PowerPoint presentations (even if they are made available online). However, Prezi—by offering a distant reading of Balsamo’s presentation and multiple ways of navigating it—seems like an inviting option for conference presentations in the future.
But let me not get caught up in the gadgets. In her presentation, Balsamo provides “An Interactive Map of DIY Technoculture: A Taxonomy of Tinkering.” Tinkering, modding, DIY—all of these words are being bandied about quite a bit as of late in the digital humanities. And there’s also some affiliations here with “Edupunk.”
What particularly interests me about Balsamo’s taxonomy is how it traces a history of shaping technology as a material, as stuff, and essentially being unsatisfied with what’s given and improving it—of saying this isn’t working and creating a workaround, or what Julian Bleecker calls a “theory-object.”
Put this way, tinkering is not just a DIY style or an idea; it’s a set of practices, often with a public and a politics emerging with them. I also think tinkering is another way of arguing for how new media can become theory-objects, with students and scholars producing media as they historicize and theorize it.
On another register, in response to the panel’s emphasis on practices, tactility, communities, and embodiment, I asked them what they thought of DIY biotechnology, where people begin to tinker with organisms and their own bodies. I’m glad to know that Veronica provided a video of Schiphorst‘s response to my question:
Thecla Schiphorst response at HASTAC III, 21 April 2009 from 412 on Vimeo.
listening reading zotero-ing tweetinggo back up top + listening to repeating
This is my personal portfolio. It does
not represent the views of the University
of Washington. 
.
Yashfa ver. 1.7 created by WP GPL
Theme modified by Jentery Sayers.
Image of typewriter cut from Lucien
Bernhard's Sachplakat poster for
Adler Typewriters (1908). Title,
"Listening to Repeating," from
Stein's The Making of Americans.