listening to repeating

“You might call me an experience center.”

I know it’s Halloween, yet I cannot resist nerding out on some sound history.  After all, sound is always the key to resonating horror, engaging weirdishness, and pipelining the otherworldly. E.g., from The Twilight Zone:

“I Sing the Body Electric” (1962, written by Rad Bradbury and inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name), where three children learn to love their new robotic grandmother, who can (but of course!) record and store everything she hears and then play back clips through the palms of her hands!  When she becomes obsolete (that is, when the kids go to college), she ventures to the “room of voices” (or robot heaven) and shares everything she’s heard with a network of electric grandmothers just like her. Watch the entire episode.  It’s fantastic on so many levels.

And… Read the rest of this entry →

So Brooken and I have been using a Flip Mino HD to record snippets of our stay in Chile thus far.  At first, I was reluctant to adopt the thing.  I don’t know what it is, but I’m generally not a fan of video (watching or taking).  Perhaps it’s a bleed of book fandom into visual culture.  That is, I like still things. Read the rest of this entry →

On Sunday, I returned from Computers and Writing 2009, which was held at UC-Davis.  The conference was great, and I met a number of people who are asking some really interesting questions about the use of new media as scholarship,  the role of code and platforms in composition studies, and collaboration and expertise in technology-focused research and writing.

I was also almost convinced to start using Twitter.  Almost.

I also talked about Latour a lot.

This year, C&W uploaded all sessions—including the keynotes, the panels, and the town halls—to iTunes U.  Check it out.  There’s video and audio provided.  My first  panel was in Session A1, “Publics, Intellectuals, and the Digital Humanities,” where I gave a talk entitled, “The Emergence of Collaboration and Expertise in the Digital Humanities.”  There, I reviewed three different interdisciplinary collaborations that I’ve been involved in, and I quickly (all too quickly) articulated what I learned about collaboration, expertise, and project sustainability from those efforts.  Throughout the talk, I referenced the work of Franco Moretti, Chris Kelty, and Bowker and Starr, and I also touched on the recently released “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.” Read the rest of this entry →

Here’s some video (shrouded in some ugly) of the Mostly Dimes show on Friday. It’s the whole thing, including the sound check. That said, you’ll want to skip about one fourteenth into it (at around 6:06), unless you like the checking.

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.