listening to repeating

As part of the panel, “Gaining a Public Voice: Alternative Genres of Publication for Graduate Students,” I’ll be giving a talk at this year’s MLA Convention.  The talk’s titled, “Animating Audiences: Digital Publication Projects and Their Publics.”  Scheduled for Tuesday, December 29th, the panel begins at 7:15 p.m., in room 405 of the Philadelphia Marriott.  Here’s the abstract:

How do the authors and designers of digital publication projects in the humanities imagine audiences for new research, and how do the audiences who actually emerge differ, if at all, from the audiences initially imagined? With these questions in mind, this paper explores the ever-shifting role of target audiences and actual audiences in three of my current digital publication projects: a co-authored article and “geoblog” prototype published in the online journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; a co-authored digital book chapter on metadata standards; and a digital-only chapter of my dissertation, which is on the influence of sound technologies on Anglo-American literature.  I demonstrate how these digital projects altered how I perceive the writing and research process, namely because they resituate expertise as a phenomena shared between academics and their publics.  This shared expertise by necessity reconfigures how graduate students, like me, publish their work, keeping in mind how audiences access and feed back into humanities research.  I point to the relevance of the digital book chapter on metadata to technology professionals and of the Kairos article to geographers and non-academics in the Seattle area.  I then explain how the demands of these audiences map digital humanities research onto the public humanities, to conclude with an analysis—and a brief demonstration—of my digital-only dissertation chapter.   The chapter, which is the only chapter in my dissertation not intended for print, is an attempt to “animate” the other four chapters of my dissertation.  By “animating,” I imply not only visualizing the arguments and evidence from my print-oriented chapters through a blend of Flash, PHP, CSS, MySQL and XHTML.  I also imply engaging audiences, including non-academics, in ways that print may not necessarily afford.  Put this way, digital publication projects move beyond simply re-presenting information in new media.  They enable the production of new knowledge.

Looking forward!

As a new project, I’ve decided to start writing against my “Invisible Technologies?” dissertation.  By “against,” I don’t mean that I’m waging war on my own writing or the institutionalization of the dissertation.  I’m not adventurous or gutsy enough for either.   I’m also not creating an alter ego—the anti-academic to my academese—no matter how tempting that might be.  Instead, what I’m after is a way to attend to and archive the writing processes that are involved in diss-writing.  The everydayness of it all.  Things I’m thinking about while writing, as well as the actual writing practices, that won’t explicitly manifest in the object labeled “dissertation.”

I figure, for something called “Invisible Technologies?”,  such a project is only fitting.  Rather than bury what enables or frustrates the content of my work, I’d prefer to speak to it in a different forum and chronicle it through a different medium.  In this sense, I want to resist looking at the diss as an end-product outside of history and labor and design.  Plus, I’m finding that as I write, my questions about writing are just as relevant as the theoretical, disciplinary, and archival moves I’m making in the writing itself.

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About my preparation for the dissertation, one thing is for certain: I came to Mark Hansen’s work far too late in my graduate career.  I’m in the process of reading both New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code, and the returns I’m getting by the page are incredibly high. Ridiculously high.

For one, in New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen gives us the term, “affectivity,” which is “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7).  This term later intersects quite productively with the digital image, about which Hansen writes: “the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience” (10).  Both of these moves have basically given me more precise terminology for talking about affect, interfaces, and digital media.

At least for my project, chapters four and six of New Philosophy particularly provide concrete concepts for mobilization.  I especially like what Hansen does with Brian Massumi’s work, not to mention how he picks up Deleuze’s Cinema books and rethinks how “movement-vision” is articulated.  For instance, there’s a moment in chapter six (“The Affective Topology of New Media Art”) where Hansen parses out movement-vision from proprioception: “movement-vision names the bodily ‘underside’ of vision, a form of proprioception oriented toward external perception, whereas proprioception proper designates the body’s nonvisual, tactile experience of itself, a form directed toward the bodily production of affection (affectivity)” (230).  That’s just brill.  And so useful.

Predictably, when talking about sound technologies, I want to start unfolding how sound corresponds with the body folding in on itself.  Obviously, when you are working with literature as your primary material, locating such experiences in a text is quite difficult.  Nevertheless, in Hansen’s eloquent account of affectivity and proprioception, I think there’s a space that can be opened up through a genealogy of (to borrow from Hansen) affect as an interface—a genealogy that emerges by tracing and historicizing sonic technocultures.  Where this approach might differ from others is in its emphasis on bodily awareness (as opposed to projections of the body).  An emphasis on how a body hears itself and relates to space (including the space of the body itself), not how others hear a body and situate it in space.   The trick, it seems, is how to speak of a politics here.  Locational approaches to embodiment have always—it seems—been the most productive vehicles for technocultural politics.  Then again, I have a feeling that Bodies in Code might force me to reconsider those vehicles.

More on that soon.  For now, it’s been a good day for clarifying something as nebulous as affect.

Work Cited:

Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.

I’ve been working on a condensed version of my research interests before I flesh out the prospectus for my dissertation. That said, here’s a draft:

As a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, my research interests are framed around three primary areas of study: sonic modernity, the digital humanities, and science and technology studies. My dissertation research, in particular, emerges from the argument that most approaches to digital media and humanities computing are subtended by visual paradigms of knowledge-making, which tend to stress, for example, the stable space of the page, the architecture of typography, and the mass reproduction of images. With this premise in mind, I am in the process of writing a critical genealogy of sound technologies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in order to not only diversify and enrich approaches to literary criticism, but to also augment and make more complex our existing understanding of digital media and their relation to the senses. For this project, my primary artifacts are novels, poetry, and other forms of fiction, including 19^th century telegraphic fiction, Harlem Renaissance novels, and mid-20^th century experiments with magnetic tape conducted by writers. The time periods in which these artifacts materialize are crucial, if nothing else, because they correspond with the rise of specific sound technologies. My investment, however, is in exploring how these technologies—the telegraph, the phonograph, and magnetic tape, in particular—intermediated with new ways of writing, storing, and transmitting experiences, especially those experiences where the interpretive agent is ambiguous or difficult to locate. Indeed, in a post-press, pre-Internet era, new sound technologies did more than allow for the mass reproduction and circulation of sounds. They helped produce new forms of materiality, movement and embodiment. And by unpacking these new forms through a critical genealogy, I hope to conclude my dissertation with a chapter on what that genealogy suggests today for the creative and democratic uses of digital technologies.