Abstract

How will the culture of books and print shape and be shaped by the emerging culture of cyberspace and hypertext? Too often this seminal question has been framed by frightened technophobes or by naive futurists. In actuality, the ongoing relations between emergent technologies and their ancestor systems are more complex and often more congenial than are dreamt of in such apocalyptic philosophies. This Forum will examine, and demonstrate on screen, several new forms of publication that exploit elements of print technology and cyberspace. Our speakers and moderator are eminent humanities scholars who have done pioneering work at the interface of traditional scholarship and digital media.

Dean of the School of Architechture and Planning at MIT, William Mitchell is the author most recently of City of Bits, which has been published in a cyberspace version as well as a printed version. George Landow, Professor of English and Art History at Brown University, has written influential studies of nineteenth-century literature, art and religion and has explored cyberspace in a series of innovative scholarly and educational projects. Edward Barrett teaches in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and is the editor of Sociomedia and, most recently, co-editor of Contextual Media: Multimedia and Interpretation. He is general editor of the MIT Press Series on Digital Communication.

Speakers

George Landow
Brown University
William Mitchell
MIT
Moderator: Edward Barrett
MIT