International Conference April 24-26, 2009 MIT

abstracts and papers

[Arranged alphabetically by author(s). Abstract titles linked to full papers when available.]

When Art Creation Is Ephemeral: Digital Migrations of Contemporary Time-Based Media and Obsolete Space-Based Media, Lanfranco Aceti
Ephemerality characterizes a great part of the preservation effort in the field of contemporary digital media. The issues of ephemerality, deterioration and disappearance affect relatively recent artworks, less than 10 years old, that have been based on digital media formats suddenly obsolete, costly to preserve or simply no longer reproducible. This paper analyzes the opportunities and challenges that these conflicting parameters – ephemerality vs. durability and time vs. space – offer in the analysis of the history of media as well as their influence on contemporary artistic and curatorial aesthetic strategies.

What the Buzz?: Blogging and Distribution and the Experiential Products in the Age of Social Networking, Tim J. Anderson
The internet has changed the music industry and the shift has influenced every aspect of distribution. This includes those practices concerning the mediation of promotional materials such as advertisements and review copies, and generation of publicity, i.e. “buzz”. By analyzing blogs with the focus on independent music that express interdependent sets of relationships via blogroll listings, links and acts such as cross-posting, the paper will explain how these media entities operate as social assemblages by drawing from the assemblage theories of Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, and more traditional network theory.

Reading in Russia: Is it out of Fashion?, Maria Anikina
General focus of surveys in the base of this paper is reading of printed media and reading as a process in contemporary Russian society. It also strongly deals with youth as future consumer of printed information sources and the future reader but at the same time is takes into account general situation in reading.

History in Motion: Digital Approaches to the Past, Paul Arthur
This paper surveys the digital history field, highlighting trends across historical, cultural and literary studies, heritage, archaeology and geography, as well as library information, screen and media studies, multimedia production and interaction design. This broad field is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience.

Analysing User-Generated Content for Social Science, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Fabio Giglietto
The goal of this paper is to present an innovative methodology to exploit user generated content as a data source for sociological research. The methodology will be presented by discussing a specific research case study project. The discussed research project goal is to describe the role of media contents in the construction of generational identity through a two step question. May specific media-products get user generated generational discourses started? If so, may those discourses be used to investigate the shared generational we sense?

Work that Bootie: Mashups and Musical Politics, Ben Aslinger
Studies of mashup culture and DJ practices have discussed the role of software, the mainstreaming of the remix, the challenges that underground mashups pose to intellectual property law regimes, the role that definitions of transformative value may play in constructing new models of intellectual property that allow for remixing practices to flourish, and analyses of how the aesthetics of collage and juxtaposition are used in specific mashup tracks. Most studies fail to acknowledge connections between mashup culture and dance music, and in so doing, mashup culture has been largely disembodied, an odd echoing of the disembodied cyberpunk influences on early new media studies.  I argue that mashups frequently draw upon musical genres, performers, and tracks with overdetermined gender, class, racial, and sexual significations in order to foreground juxtapositions between disparate musical values and experiences of dancing/listening. 

Why Remix Culture Is More Copyright Friendly Than You Think, or, The Perfectly Legal Mashup, Pat Aufderheide
Feel like you're in legally dangerous waters when you make a mashup, a remix, a vid, an unauthorized translation, a parody? Time to take off that pirate eye-patch and learn your rights. In this workshop, participants will learn about the most important balancing feature of copyright, fair use. They'll also learn how to use it in the online video environment to grow new culture, help students make work they can share, and talk back to takedowns.  

Poaching Lonelygirl15, ARG-Style , Burcu Bakioglu
This paper will investigate how Lonelygirl15, the Web show that was launched in the form of vlogs (video blogs) and quickly gave birth to numerous fan-driven side plots, not to mention related alternate reality games (ARGs), exhibits a type of materiality conducive to performative narratives that affords the collaborative development of fiction on Web 2.0 platforms.

Doing Media History in 2050, Gabriele Balbi
The change in the substance and in the storage of information is affecting media historians: in order to study the history of mass media, telecommunications and new media of the late 20th-century, scholars will have to interact with digital sources and this raises serious concerns and questions. It’s not clear if, how and in which format digital data will be available. What is the relation between “old” and “new” sources? Who should be responsible to conserve data? What should we conserve? How should we conserve? All these questions are crucial for doing media history now and especially in 2050.

The Next Big Thing: Hollywood Labor and Digital Technology, Miranda Banks
I am interested in exploring how labor-based film and television turned communities to digital outlets to gain visibility and voice during and since the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike. While the growing interest in digital modes of distribution was the impetus for this strike, it was also the medium that enabled writers to successfully communicate with each other, with the media industry, and with audiences and fans. This paper asks questions about effects of technological changes in the distribution and circulation of Hollywood narratives on economic structures and labor relations within the industry.

Integration of Actual, Virtual and Augmenting Realities of the Optical Mediascape of Quiapo,
Brian S. Bantugan
Quiapo, in the Philippines, has long been associated with folk culture and much of it revolves around the Catholic Quiapo Church. Wikipedia describes it first and foremost as “a well known district of old Manila, Philippines, and a place which offers cheap prices on items ranging from electronics to native handicrafts.” But Quiapo Church is no longer the sole cultural center of Quiapo. The Golden Mosque of the Muslims on the other side of Quezon Boulevard, just across Quiapo Church, has also become a center of a distinct culture that is more linked to media and digital economy. The emergence of this “other” side of Quiapo brought about by the proliferation of the optical media economy now renders it a case that goes beyond traditionalism.  With the “digitalizing” Quiapo, new territories for investigation should emerge. But what are those territories? This study hopes to start the navigation of this fast expanding domain. While studies in new media have started exploring the new ways by which identities are constructed by human beings, this study explores the expanse of the Quiapo’s new identity which includes virtual representations that mediate its reality to others in new ways. By so doing, it is expected to redefine one’s understanding of the place, and as a consequence, change one’s paradigm of culture that has long been attached to geographically bound communities. This research hopes to help redirect attention away.

On the Digitisation of Historical Photographic Archives, Gail Baylis
What is the relationship between online access to historical photographic archives and use: in what ways does access correspond to use and how can we understand this relationship?  Is the problem with digital culture, as Michael Lesy contends: ‘not that there are too few images, but too many’ (2007, 144), and, if this is the case, on what grounds should we apply criteria of worth? This paper aims to address these issues by focusing on the digitisation of one photographic archive.  It bases its findings on research undertaken on the Larcon albums held at the New York Public Library that can be freely accessed on that institution’s digital gallery (http://nypl.org/digital).

Typosquatting, Transmission, and the Globalization of Error, Paul Benzon
In this paper, I argue for a critical reading of typosquatting as a point of entry for mapping the politics of global data storage and transmission. Typosquatting in particular plays upon the possibility of error in the typing of Website addresses—for example, registering yuotube.com as a way of profiting from online traffic intended for youtube.com. In playing upon such potential errors, typosquatting sheds light on the textually grounded arbitrariness of the World Wide Web as a structure of storage and transmission. I address the implications of typosquatting on both microscopic and macroscopic levels.

Digital Editions of Literary Journals in the Austrian Academy Corpus, Hanno Biber, Evelyn Breiteneder, Anne Burdick, Karlheinz Moerth
The AAC is a corpus research unit at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna concerned with establishing and exploring large electronic text corpora and with conducting scholarly research in the field of corpora and digital text collections and editions. This paper presents an innovative digital edition and the potential of word searches within this edition as well as the basic elements and features of the corpus research approach followed by the Austrian Academy Corpus (AAC). Among the sources are more than 350 million running words of various forms.

Linking Narrative and Locative Media, Robert Biddle, Brian Greenspan  
We will demonstrate how locative media alter the biases of narrative texts through the example of StoryTrek, our prototype spatial hypertext system.  StoryTrek originated in an Australian initiative to develop digital interfaces for aboriginal songlines.  Songlines are a nomadic people’s narrative database, an archive of stories accessed by traveling the land. We will describe the StoryTrek system and our project to document how urban development and migration in Melbourne, Australia, have affected aboriginal populations.

The Fragmented Frame: the Poetics of the Split-Screen, Jim Bizzocchi
The split-screen has a long, yet relatively under-theorized, place in the history of the moving image. The use of this technique has never disappeared, but despite a brief flowering in the late sixties and early seventies, it has generally remained a minor trope in the poetics of the moving image. There is little theoretical work, however, on the poetics or cinematic design of the split-screen. This paper argues for a robust approach to the deconstruction and analysis of split-screen sequences. This approach examines the phenomenon at three levels: the narrative, the structural and the graphic.

Will Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing System Change Media Production?, Mats Bjorkin
BitTorrent is becoming one of the most important distribution system of moving images. Many torrent search sites have a very limited classification system (“movies”, “TV”, “music” etc). What does it mean to browse and search without the possibility of using genres or nations, as in “traditional” media archives or merchandise catalogues? Most searches have to be based on titles, but the titles of individual media files are chosen by the uploader, and is thereby dependent on choice of language, spelling etc. What happens with the idea of a media product as an object or an artistic work when it becomes so difficult to predict what the media file includes already at the outset?

Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention,” David Bogen, Eric Gordon
The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and cellular technologies.  Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or for another live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to pay attention when sending a text message or surfing the web? For that matter, does distraction always detract from the learning that takes place in these environments? In this article, we ask questions concerning the texture and shape of this emerging economy of attention. 

Mass Media, ‘Me Media’ and the New Business Models for the Digital Media Economy, Goran Bolin
With digitization, media producers are again starting to adopt market models from the mass media. It has become increasingly difficult for the music business, for example, to charge for content (i.e. records). This phenomenon is not only restricted to the music business, but extend also to the on-line gaming business, where texts become a means to reach users who can then be sold to advertisers. This paper discusses – from a historical perspective – similarities and differences between ‘old’ broadcast business models, and new digital network models.

Truth and Trust: Voice and Epistemological Crisis in Seventeenth-Century Publications, Marianne Borch
The dissemination of texts in the format of printed books radically changes the epistemological premises for the authorial voice. Using Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as my main point of departure, this paper will investigate the available ‘voice’ options prior to the commercially disseminated book, the problems inherent in the search for a trustworthy voice in print, and subsequent attempted and lasting solutions to the problem.

Strategic Agency in an Age of Limitless Information, Jonah Bossewitch, Aram Sinnreich
To what extent is it possible – or desirable – to disengage from the growing cultural database? How do surveillance and “sousveillance” play a role in the policing of individuals by institutions, and vice versa? Can we disentangle the issues surrounding localized record keeping from globalized control over the archives? In this article, we discuss a range of cultural practices, epistemological regimes and intellectual discourses that have emerged to cope with these questions, and we assess the strategic options for communitarian and individual agency in an era we describe as “the end of forgetting."

Gatekeeping in New Media Contexts, Joshua A. Braun
New media spaces and traditional journalism share far more qualities than are usually appreciated in the literature. Since the 1950s, both scholars and practitioners examining the gatekeeper function of the news media have sought to explain why some issues and events become newsworthy while others remain obscure. Galtung and Ruge based their twelve original news values on principles from psychology and human behavior research. The way journalists select and publish news items is not so different from the way the rest of us perceive and discuss the world. The mental processes that unfolded in the press as gatekeeping were, in some sense, just manifestations of our universal human condition. Following this logic, many of the same sorts of decisons about what’s worthy of discussion, what’s not, and why, would seem likely to recur in online spaces—and I present some evidence that they do.

Sports Fans, Media Technology, and Participatory Texts, Mark Bresnan
The promise that technological advances would put fans themselves in control of sports broadcasts remains unfulfilled. I argue that the advent of a more autonomous and participatory sports fan culture has in fact occurred; however, it has not been enabled not by advances in television technology, but instead by renewed interest in a decidedly low-technology media format: the single-author text.

Novel Obligations: The Future of Fiction in the Digital Age, Jonathan Butler
This paper analyses the kinds of transformation the novel undergoes—and might undergo, in the future—from print to digital form, and sets forth a number of caveats for the future of the fiction novel—and a number of responsibilities for writers to sustain and challenge the collective imagination—in the framework of Fowles’ still-relevant remarks.

What Not to Save: The Future of Ephemera, Alison Byerly
Librarians and archivists know how valuable ephemera can be to scholars, particularly cultural historians. By looking at changing notions of how we categorize, and ascribe value to, different forms of text, this paper will explore the increasing complexity of decisions about what is or is not worth saving.  It will suggest that the social, aesthetic, cultural, and legal implications of decisions that are currently being made by default warrant a more deliberate approach to these questions.

From Barbershop to BlackPlanet: The Construction of Hush Harbors in Cyberspace, John Edward Campbell
This study confronts the question of whether online spaces can satisfy the political and cultural functions hush harbors have historically played in the African-American community. To address such a question, this study draws upon data gathered during a three-year study of the largest commercial community site targeting the African-American community – BlackPlanet.com with an estimated membership of 19 million – in an effort to find online those discursive practices conventionally defining hush harbors in the physical world; discursive practices Nunley identifies as “hush harbor rhetoric.”

Art Micro-Sites:  A Manifesto!, Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabel Meirelles
This paper will examine the ways in which websites have been used as devices to present, contextualize, reflect, and document artwork. The goal is to discuss to what extent the medium (the technology) is affecting the means of production of websites dedicated to art exhibitions. It is unquestionable that a major result has been the expansion of access (free and open) to information beyond the art milieu, reaching audiences across cultures, geographies and interests. But, are these web sites giving rise to other forms of experiences? And as we wait for technology to catch up can a multi disciplinary collaborative approach between designers, artists and curators serve as a catalyst to create, mediate and disseminate in new and thoughtful ways?

University Students and New Digital Media:  Results from Field Research
Nicola Cavalli, Elisabetta Costa, Paolo Ferri, Andrea Mangiatordi, Stefano Mizzella, Jessica Paganoni, Andrea Pozzali, Francesca Scenini

Experientially Pollinating Virtuality and the Living Transcripts of Escape Space, Erik Champion
How does place-based virtual action affect civilization and culture? Architectural historians and philosophers aren’t qualified to tackle this writhing new field unless they are also experienced in the areas of interactive entertainment, user experience design, and learning / cognition theory. Where to next? Imagine biofed virtual worlds where the passive, subconscious and otherwise unpredictable embodied responses of the audience affect both the virtual world, and future players. I suggest the zenith of this development will be when we have genuine living scripts in virtual worlds: where players experience augments the [virtual] world history. So the concept of media transmission and storage changes to media pollination. I can illustrate this development with two case studies/projects, but I would like to spend more time asking the audience how we designers should tackle the issue of counterfactual creativity versus the traditional virtual of authenticity and authorial narrativity.

Virtual Worlds for Education: River City and EcoMUVE, Jody Clarke, Chris Dede, Shari J. Metcalf
River City and EcoMUVE are two research-based Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for middle school science education. We began development of River City in 1999 with National Science Foundation funding, and for almost a decade over 15,000 students and 250 teachers have used various versions. EcoMUVE is a project recently funded by the Institute for Education Sciences to support ecosystems science learning in middle school. In this talk, we will describe our research with River City and EcoMUVE. We will discuss findings about student learning, lessons learned about the use of MUVEs for education, and our plans for future research. We will also suggest design heuristics for others building virtual worlds for education.

The Durability of Scripture in the Time of Portable Media: Innis, Scripture and Semiotic, Francis D. Coffey
Bringing scripture into a cultural-religious formation of adolescents of a developed country quickly requires close attention to that interface between sacred texts and media. On one hand there is clear evidence in their interest with the Bible of that ‘persistence of religion’ defying all predictions of its demise. On the other hand, their media facility would be expected to diminish that interest. As Innis so carefully showed, text favours durability while modern technological media magnify transmission. But the interest in scripture at a moment where digital media with all its speed and volume is omnipresent belies such evisceration.     

Unknown Territories, Roderick Coover
Unknown Territories (unknownterritories.org) is a scrolling interactive digital environment that engages the question of how differing media arts shape ways that places are pictured, imagined and used. This first work in the series concerns John Wesley's Powell's explorations of the Colorado River Basin and subsequent representations of it. Users join Powell on the 1869 voyage in a work blending fact, fiction, illustration and photography. The presentation about this work includes a discussion of how differing media have been used to shape popular perceptions about the environment and environmental issues.

Early US Postal Routes and the Communications Infrastructure, Bob Cullen
My paper examines the early United States postal system and the roads it designated and used for transporting mail. By 1828, that network of roads crisscrossed the entire nation and its territories and kept individuals throughout regularly connected with each other through newspapers and other correspondence. My paper explores that legacy, and the major influence of those routes when it came to boundary-spanning capabilities, the rapid sharing of information, and sustained linkages between far-flung population centers.

Youth and Media Consumption: A New Reader Arises, Magda Rodrigues da Cunha
The ways youth currently relate to communication technologies may provide evidence regarding the appropriations of media among youth in the near future. This text reflects upon the history of media appropriation by youth and considers Hobsbawn’s thinking (1995), which describes the scenario in the middle of the technological development of the 1970’s. In the pursuit of such evidence, we initially investigate the history of media appropriation by youth. Furthermore, this research analyzes the use of portable technologies by some of these people for the consumption of the same contents mentioned.

Digital Screens in Public Space: Advertising, Actors, and the Remaking of Place, Leif Dahlberg
The paper takes looks at advertising and screen culture, focusing on the increasing display of moving images on screens (all sizes) in out-of-home advertising, and the implications this has both on lived, social space and on old and new media. The paper discusses the movement of advertising from media used and consumed primarily at home (printed newpapers and television) to media consumed in public and hybrid spaces.

Radical Potential: Social Aspects of Cinema 3.0, Kristen Daly
Filmmaking has been one of the most expensive art forms. But traditional barriers to entry and hierarchies are crumbling with falling costs and a growing literacy in rich media.  The ubiquity and accessibility has changed how we use moving images.  From a form of ritual entertainment and art, moving images are increasingly becoming a means for interactive communication and means of negotiating power.  In this paper, I will present some examples of who is making movies, what they are making and for what purposes in order to demonstrate how the potential for moving image communication is changing.

Interdisciplinary Vocabularies at the University of Toronto’s Culture and Communication Seminar, 1953-1955, Michael Darroch
This paper belongs to a project to excavate the vital collaborations and experiments that developed during the landmark interdisciplinary Culture and Communication Seminar, a graduate-level course initiated at the University of Toronto from 1953 to 1955. Funded by a Ford Foundation grant, the weekly seminar was organized by the little-known English professor Marshall McLuhan, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, political economist Tom Easterbrook, and urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. In this paper, I examine the organization of the weekly seminar, their use of art and architectural historian Sigfried Giedion’s writings to guide weekly discussions, and finally the development of a shared vocabulary between studies of literature, anthropology, urban planning, political economy, and psychology to understand the changing medial conditions of the 1950s.

Neuro-Media and Preservation, Ben Howell Davis
The application of imaging technologies that are producing a new understanding of the nervous system - an emerging “Neuro-Media”- is opening up new scientific understanding of human behavior once the sole domain of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Because this is a revolution in our understanding of the nervous system and its environment, the revolution will work both ways - from the arts to science as well as from science to the arts - as we incorporate the application of these discoveries back into the creative process and the technologies that support them.

The Ephemerality of the Apparatus: Preserving Television’s Material Culture in an Age of Convergence, Max Dawson
Since the release of the Librarian of Congress’s 1997 report “A Study of the Current State of American Television and Video Preservation,” libraries, museums, and private foundations in the U.S. have redoubled their efforts to archive America’s “television heritage.” In the same period, media conglomerates reawakened to the economic value of their television libraries, and began selectively reissuing programs on DVDs and online. Meanwhile, private collectors have taken advantage of digital technologies to compile their own DIY television archives. Thanks to these developments, researchers now enjoy unprecedented access to the television of the past. But efforts to preserve the artifacts of television’s material culture—in other words, its receivers, cable boxes, remote controls, cameras, and video recording and playback devices—have not followed pace. My goals are to inaugurate a dialogue between archivists, historians, and collectors on the topic of what is archivable, and to encourage all three parties to broaden their conceptions of the objects of television history.

One Code to Rule Them All? Re-Constructing Knowledge through the Digital
Suzanne de Castell (lead author), Jennifer Jenson, Nicholas Taylor
The technological developments of the last two decades—during which time digital technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous, mundane, and intertwined into almost all aspects our daily lives—has brought about a fundamental epistemic shift, a transformation not only to our notions of what constitutes work, play, learning and sociality, and what separates these activities (if they remain separate at all: see de Castell and Jenson, 2003), but to our notions of what counts as knowledge. In a world where print is only one of many modes through which meaning is produced, communicated, and shared, we are invited to rethink the notion that our means of mapping and understanding the social must “always be writing,” and instead pursue research methods of inscribing, analyzing and sharing ethnographic knowledge that are similarly multimodal. This paper describes the affordances of a multimodal research tool capable of taking the measure of the re-mediated subjects and objects of interdisciplinary study, and the pedagogical call for the resuscitation of ‘play’ as inseparable from and indispensable for teaching, learning and the advancement of knowledge under unprecedented conditions of uncertainty. Our focus is on describing and illustrating a digital research tool, MAP, which seeks to bridge qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Notebooks, Videogames and Blogs as Evocative Objects: Building Digital Schools, Hector del Castillo, Pilar Lacasa, Rut Martinez, Laura Mendez
According to Turkle (2007), evocative objects place theories in a concrete spatial and temporal dimension, embodied in widely distributed institutions and socio-cultural relationships among individuals.  “Evocative objects bring philosophy down to earth. When we focus on objects, physicians and philosophers, psychologists and designers, artists and engineers are able to find common ground in everyday experience” (p.8). Acting in classrooms as ethnographers, we observed evocative objects that are rooted in specific practices and agglutinate mental representations and values. This presentation explores how school children, their teacher and the researcher’s team together transformed a classroom into a digital world, in which evocative digital objects replaced other evocative material and many other traditional tools.

Mobile Memento's: Expanded Archives, Fragmented Access, Imar de Vries
Personal wireless communication devices such as mobile telephones are regularly presented as enabling technologies with emancipating powers, giving instant and ubiquitous access to people and information resources which would not have been as easily — if at all — available previously. The emphasis is often on reaching harmony and agreement through the exchange of knowledge, and on making progress through the fusion of ideas. What easily becomes 'depresented' in such imagery, however, is that, while an enormous amount of visual, textual and aural data is captured by millions of mobile device users every day, only a small fragment of that data is made available for query on a large scale. My aim in this paper will be to conceptualize this fragmented archive of mobile memento's as a phenomenon that prompts us to reconsider the more traditional meanings of storage and transmission, and to investigate the ways in which new forms of data disclosure (such as geotagging, geocaching and mobile-augmented reality) are to be understood in relation to popular ideas about omniscience and ever-present data clouds.

The Digitization of Memory: Blessing or Curse?, Andre Donk
In the ages of type and print, every new media technology meant more memory capacities and a faster circulation of memory contents. But now there is some empirical hint that digital media is a threat to memory. Software and hardware evolve in such a fast way that incompatibility between formats seems inescapable; digital media storage media like CD, DVD or even hard drives do not last for more than 20 years and can be easily deleted; and internet and mail communication tend to be elusive as internet sites vanish without being archived. If these developments prove to be true “we are now in period that may be a maddening blank to future historians – a Dark Age – because nearly all of our art, science, news, and other records are being created and stored on media that we know can’t outlast even our lifetimes” (Brand 2003). In which ways does digital media effect cultural memory and how can these changes be explained through media theory?

Historical Infrastructures for Web Archiving: Annotation of Ephemeral Collections for Research, Meghan Dougherty, Charles van den Heuvel
There is a growing gulf between policies shared between global and national institutions creating web archives and the practices of researchers making use of the archives. Each set of stakeholders finds the others’ web archiving contributions less applicable to their own field. The current search paradigm in web archiving access tools is built primarily on retrieval, not discovery. We suggest that there is a need for extensible tools to enhance access to and enrichment of web archives to make them more readily reusable and so, more valuable for both institutions and researchers.

TextFlows: A New Kind of Reading, Dennis Downey
The structural conventions of traditional text, including paragraphs, sentences, and punctuation, evolved to serve the communication requirements of a pre-digital, pre-electric, static medium. Presently, most text on screens continue to employ these same, inherited conventions even as the presenting medium is natively more fluid and dynamic. This paper examines a new approach to presenting text on a screen and the new type of reading that results. Composed for a device that “turns on”, text can slide, pop, fade, sequence, layer, and spin in combinations that enhance meanings and transfix the reader.

Surveillance as Mass Media, Jesse Drew
It is increasingly apparent that at any moment of day or night, our voices, images, actions and coordinates can be observed, recorded, networked, digitized, stored and shared.  Surveillance is a double-edged sword, however. The modern means of surveillance have often been used to repress, harass, exploit and subjugate citizens and workers across the planet, especially those who refuse and resist their assigned roles and status in life. But in many instances, these same tools have also been used to fight back against those same powerful forces, in an attempt to reassert free association, open the democratic process and promote social justice. Thus, it is not a question of the technology that obtains, records and analyzes visual aural and informational data, but the planned intent, the use and the control of such means. It comes down to a question of power. When citizens generate communications power, they begin to articulate their own media agenda and determine what their issues are that require investigation and discussion. This process, which began decades ago as a little stream and is now a torrent, is one of the prime factors leading to the decline of the centralized and monopolized system of state/corporate information power.

YouTube Decay, Kevin Driscoll
In its three years on the Web, YouTube has gathered perhaps the largest, most diverse collection of video ever assembled. From official documentation of a presidential debate to covert recordings of high school classrooms, the site has become an essential platform in the contemporary media ecology. Unfortunately, despite its significance, the data stored by YouTube is terribly unstable. Of the 283,091 videos tracked by MIT Free Culture's YouTomb project in 2008, nearly one quarter have already vanished. What challenges confront scholars who rely on this data? How can the rich cultural resources stored in YouTube be preserved and protected?

Virtual Tourism in Habbo US, Peter Durant, Marjoriikka Ylisiurua
In virtual Habbo world consisting of 32 internet hang-out sites owned by Sulake, over 10 million monthly teen-aged users around the world lead virtual avatar lives. If one enters the US-based site, it can be seen that of the site’s over 2,000,000 monthly unique visitors, many originate from countries other than US. There are several reasons for non-US teens to visit Habbo US, as indicated by a survey executed in Habbo US. The respondents of the survey are the cosmopolitan teens who like and want to familiarize with other nationalities, instead of hanging out in their local culture and/or Habbo. Respondents of the survey are teens embracing real-life tourism in virtual world, as well as virtual life tourism in the virtual Habbo world. Of the survey respondents, 13 % indicated they visit their local Habbo UK site as least as often as the Habbo US site.  These users lead Habbo lives mainly elsewhere, but also come to Habbo US site because of their Habbo US friends, because of curiosity to see what is happening in other Habbo hotels, and because of their Habbo US specific activities. Those respondents who told they visit mainly Habbo US, come to Habbo US because of their Habbo US friends, because they are leading a successful avatar life in Habbo US, and because they prefer the atmosphere in Habbo US.

Terrorizing Istanbul's  Memories: Architectural Media Stories between Storage and Transmission, Meral Ekincioglu
The argumentative core of this paper is to discuss how digital architectural archives, communication platforms and their transmission capacities create a shift in the durable forms of memory stored in time and help us to to trace the historical past in the present. This presentation will discuss the architectural stories of two modern buildings in Istanbul and their fates with respect to the different roles of printed and digital formats of knowledge: Taslık Coffee House designed by Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Ataturk Cultural Center designed by Hayati Tabanlıoglu.

Acts of Translations: Digital Humanities and the Archive Interface, Madeleine Clare Elish, Whitney Trettien
This paper analyzes a range of digital humanities projects that have originated at universities and museums during the last five years, including CHNM's Object of History, NINES: nineteenth-Century Studies Online, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s MONK, SFMoMA’s ArtScope, and Hyperstudio’s US-Iran Relations, a project with which we have been involved as research assistants. In this survey we examine the impact of digital humanities on contemporary notions of the archive and the shifting relationship between researchers and historical objects. Each project uniquely demonstrates the limits and possibilities of this act of digital translation. Comparing and contrasting the approaches of each project not only reveals the urgent need to better understand visual representations of information in digital environments, but also helps to establish a set of best practices for future digital archival projects and the scholars who use these archives in their research.

Archiving the City, Adeola Enigbokan
The mobile phone, with its media content of text, sound, photo and video, is an archive or database of highly personalized, yet inherently linked, information about affective experiences of the city. The images and sounds, captured as people traverse the city’s expanse daily could be understood as both residues of, and active responses to, everyday urban experiences. Archiving the City is an attempt at thinking through the practices through which people, including researchers, might come to “know” and understand the “everyday” experiences and spatialities that characterize living in a city today. I would like to consider some alternative ways of describing, cataloguing, having and creating affective experiences of urban areas, which take into account the ubiquity of people’s interaction with mobile screens as they move about the city. I have labeled these practices “archival,” in order to extend or disrupt both traditional theoretical notions of urban space and urban experience, and traditional notions of archives.

Narrative Techniques for Mobile Devices, Michael Epstein
For the past six years, I have been working in the mobile media industry, developing location-based projects delivered over mobile devices and playing out in conjunction with the social and visual surroundings. In this paper, I deal with narrative challenges in transcribing activist media to location-based formats.

Flickr Documentarians: Presenting the Physical in the Virtual, Ingrid Erickson
New hardware such as mobile handheld devices and digital cameras, new online social venues such as social networking, microblogging, and online photo sharing sites, and new infrastructures such as the global position system (GPS) are coming together to promote new ways of thinking and acting. Use of location-based applications, particularly in social settings, is beginning to establish a new set of practices—what I refer to as ‘socio-locative’—that combine data about a physical location, such as a geotag, with virtual social acts, such as sharing photographs online. In this paper, I present a selection of findings from a larger piece of research that investigates two emergent socio-locative broadcasting practices: microblogging and online photo sharing.

Death at Broadcasting House, Staffan Ericson
Death at Broadcasting House is the title of a detective novel, first published in 1934. It is written by a pair of BBC insiders, one of them Val Gielgud, Head of Production for Drama at the time. The genre is the “whodunit”, or classical detective story (Cawelti 1976), often associated with Agatha Christie. In this one, however, there are some interesting departures from the rules. While the crime of a classical detective story is situated within the private sphere, disrupting order by placing dead bodies in the midst of our family circle, this one involves a murder at the heart of a mediated centre: the studios of Broadcasting House, i.e. the first purpose-built headquarters of the BBC, inaugurated in London in 1932. During the live broadcast of a radio play, one of the actors, isolated in one of the talk studios, is strangled to death.This detective faces an intriguing dilemma: While millions have listened in to the live performance of a murder, no one has seen anything, not a single clue was left in the studio. To explain what happened, detective Spears must reconstruct the locality of a crime that has registered only in the ether.

Information Cartography:  Visualizations of Internet Spatiality and Information Flows, Jason Farman
This research seeks to connect the visual process of cartography to the lived spaces of the Internet, a frontier that has gone largely unmapped throughout its existence.  While many maps exist on the Internet, maps of the Internet are more difficult to locate; thus, this project asks what such a visual representation might look like and how it might serve the purpose of representing the inequalities present in the transmission of information on a global scale.

Analyzing Online Communities: A Narrative Approach, Andrew Feldstein
Marketing intelligence companies such as Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, J.C. Power’s Umbria and Motivequest tell us that “there is gold buried in the mountains of data” accruing on blogs, online forums, and other forms of social media.  The analytical services offered by these companies treat the various social media as one large database with which they decode “the language of the consumer” (http://motivequest.com).  Semantic Network Analysis offers an alternative approach that “extracts and analyzes links among words to model an authors “mental map” as a network of links” (Carley et al. 2006). This paper suggests that this type of analysis can lead to a detailed and informative conceptual map of online conversations that will preserve the narrative context and offer a greater understanding of what motivates and holds these communities together.

Peer-to-Peer Review: Authority in Digital Scholarly Networks, Kathleen Fitzpatrick
This paper focuses on the future of peer review in networked environments. The current pre-publication system of peer review, which presents many benefits for the development of scholarly work, but which functions primarily by gatekeeping, is in several ways antithetical to net-native modes of determining "authority"; in this paper, I thus argue that transplanting this system into online publishing models will ultimately work at cross-purposes with the ways that readers and writers actually use digital texts.

The Impact of Convergence Culture on Live Performance, Sarah Florini
Our understanding of live performance is now deeply colored by our experiences with media. However, the rise of convergence culture has created a shift in this complex relationship between electronic media and live performance. This has created new modes of engagement with media and, by altering the media environment, has altered the relationship between media and live performance. I examine the Black August Hip Hop Concert to argue how convergence culture has altered how audience members engage with live performances and how this shift has significant repercussions for the possibilities of politics and resistance.

Weaponized Media and the “Book” of Beowulf, Martin K. Foys
There are no books in Beowulf, but printed books now shape modern understanding of this pre-print expression. One of the most significant of these “Books of Beowulf,” the recently revised 4th edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf (the canonical textbook of the poem for almost a century), does more than simply remediate the poem through a later typographic dispositif. Rather, the conventions and culture of the modern, agglomerating edition produce a new, yet curiously static version of the poem: one that blanches non-literate aspects of earlier residual media, and yet also resists the convergence of media / erosion of media boundaries that newer media forms of Beowulf, such as Gaiman-Avary-Zemeckis 2007 digital film, enact as they retell.

Oral Tradition and Wireless Technology, Ieuan Franklin
This paper concerns two recent experiments in promoting oral communication through modern technology, namely 'Hidden Histories' (2008), which has 'narrowcast' oral history through a wireless network, and 'Telephone Trottoire' (2006-), which has adapted a particular model of African oral tradition for use in mobile telphony. Both these 'secondarily oral' projects divert from the unidirectional, space-biased media model, and seek to create micro-public interfaces, which have the potential to reconfigure the spatial and experiential qualities of the city. Such experiments demonstrate that vernacular expression and electronic media should be removed from their polarisation in a linear historiography, and instead placed in a syncretic framework.

'Where 2.0' and Virtual Geography, Jacob Gaboury
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the spatial and geographical metadata of digital communication. Through satellite imaging and geo-locative technologies the where of digital communication has once again become important to what is being communicated.  In this paper I will discuss the implications of this return to the spatial as an overlay to the virtual and the way in which this comes to affect our understanding of the world itself and the stories, art, and social structures we construct.

Reconstructing Two Immersive Multimedia Pavilions from Expo ‘67: The Christian Pavilion and the Telephone Pavilion, Monika Kin Gagnon
This paper will engage two multimedia pavilions from Expo ’67 that were dramatically different in character in order to explore the pragmatic approaches and strategies available for researching and analyzing multimedia pavilions. Case studies, proceed from the particular to the general, departing from the specificity of these pavilions to more general issues about the constitution of multimedia archives, how to effectively preserve, research and analyze them.

Sports Journalsim in Israel as a Case Study, Yair Galily, Ilan Tamir
As traditional means of communication have adapted to a new media and social reality, with the threat of modern communications hovering above their heads, they have come to be treated as a self-developing living organism.  In an attempt to examine the dynamics of communication means' adaptation to one another and to the needs of the general public, research has focused its attention mainly on technological and content aspects. The current study wishes to present a unique initial contribution to models dealing with the historic development of means of communication by turning attention to the parallel process taking place among the journalist community itself.  By means of in-depth interviews with sports journalists in Israel who reported at different periods, breakthrough, institutionalization, defense, and adaptation mechanisms to the new journalism reality can be identified, as part of the generational and social changes taking place in news rooms. 

Personal Experience Narratives and ePortfolios, Sean Galvin
Unlike other narrative genres such as folktales, legends, or ballads, which feature practitioners who possess a particularly specific type of lore, personal experience narratives are a vital part of everyday social life that exemplifies how people without that huge reservoir of lore or tradition can also be storytellers. Instead of seeing these stories as merely autobiographical statements, I find that a majority of them can be organized by content and thus identified as part of recognizable folkloric subgenres: immigrant lore, family lore, coming-of-age narratives, college lore, or anecdotes, to name just a few.  In the case of ePortfolios, these proto-narratives are orally created by budding storytellers and become more polished with in-class re-writes and practice. They are chosen to make a specific point to an unknown audience, unlike the more traditional narratives which are generally told within or to a group of intimates.

The Message of the 'Pensieve': Realizing Memories through the World Wide Web and Virtual Reality, Michelle K. Gardner, Katie Del Giudice
Utilizing an immersive virtual reality environment as a digital archive for storing and sharing individual memories is an idea present in many books of science fiction and fantasy. For example, in the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, Albus Dumbledore’s Pensieve is a device that allows one to add “excess thoughts from one’s mind . . . examine them at one’s leisure . . . [and] spot patterns and links . . . [better] when they are in this form.” (p. 597) In the real world, technology is close to realizing the idea of the Pensieve by presenting individual computer users with tools such as Microsoft’s “My LifeBits.” Encouraging users to capture every moment of their lives and digitally archiving the information, My LifeBits demonstrates Pensieve-like behavior and allows users to share all aspects of everyday life. This paper will examine some of the many potential implications for Pensieve-like applications at both the individual and societal levels.

Vinyl and MP3 Storage Formats in the Sharing and Creation of Music, Heidi Gautschi, Emilie Moreau
The way music is produced, circulated, accessed and consumed has undergone a fundamental change as digital storage has become both the industry and the individual’s standard.  New uses and new social norms have evolved as new technological advances have been made.  With the advent of MP3 digital storage, musical content has been disassociated from the object that contains it.  And this, in turn, has made music potentially more durable, but also more ephemeral. With this paper, we aim to shed some light on how the ongoing transformations of music storage are changing our society’s relationship with music.

Building a Blog Cabin during a Housing Crisis, Robert Gehl
Blog Cabin is an American television show in the home-improvement genre airing on the DIY Network. The show documents the building of a log cabin in rural Tennessee and uses a website to solicit design ideas from the audience. In this way, Blog Cabin combines the home-improvement genre with the convergent/participatory viewer-vote genre (as seen in talent shows like American Idol.) The television show Blog Cabin and its website offer evidence to support the growing research on immaterial labor in digital networks and how that labor and the surplus value it creates is being extracted by capital. Given the political economic and historical context of the housing crisis in the United States, the participants in Blog Cabin's 2008 season have expressed resistance and concern that their labor will result in no tangible benefits for the individual audience members, and they repeatedly note the irony of participating in the building of a massive log cabin at a time when many Americans were being evicted from their homes.

The Future of Democracy, Economy, and Identity in 21st Century Texts, Chris Gerben
In this paper I will explore the effects that the design of new media texts—mainly popular websites—has on adolescents and their literacy practices in and out of the classroom. By analyzing the design of three websites that are both representative of popular culture and of their respective genre, my paper will demonstrate how the privileging of new information at the top of each page may have long-lasting effects on attitudes and practices of literacy in the 21st century. I will show how new pieces of information on The New York Times website (24th most popular), Craigslist (11th most popular), and Facebook (5th most popular) are privileged at the top of each page, only to slip to the bottom of the page and/or to secondary pages once they are no longer seen as “new.”

Canonical Text and its Modification: From New Forms of Distribution to New Forms of Literature, Rahilya Geybullayeva
This paper will be focused on how technical development influenced on forms of existenceand distribution of text, one of the main terms of literature. This requires consideration of canonical text from oral form till written and visual, electronic forms (distribution forms), text types depending of content (sacred books, literary text, etc.). For this I will also apply to these forms on an example of holy books, demonstrated at exhibition “Sacred: Discover what we share: The world's greatest collection of Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy books” by British Library, and allowing to trace the ways of text spreading through changing technologies.

Hypertext and the New Book : (Re) Reading as (Re)Writing, Ananya Ghoshal
The activities of rereading described by Barthes, Iser, Riffaterre, Ricoeur, or more recently by Thomas Leitch and Matei Calinescu that focus on the reader’s attention on the text’s discursive ideology usually missed in first reading seems to be in support of hypertext technology. In today’s hypertext library, readers are invited to completely explore the relationship between text, culture, author and reader, intervening actively in the process of meaning-making and reconfiguring the world of the text from all alternative points of view.

The Politics of “Platforms,” Tarleton Gillespie
This essay examines how online content providers such as YouTube are positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers, and policymakers. “Platform” has been deployed by these content providers in both their populist appeals to users and their marketing pitches to advertisers and media providers, not just as technical platforms but as platforms of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek legislative protection on the basis of facilitating user expression, yet also claim limited liability for what those users say. As these providers increasingly become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the criteria they set by which they hope to be judged.

Technology as a Bridge in the 21st Century Classroom, Julio Gonzalez-Appling
Modern technology with antiquated ideology simply enhances the classroom but not the education. Reflecting upon personal experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, face-to-face and online instructor, and educational technology technician for students and faculty, this paper examines how established educational models require re-assessment to be effective in the 21st century classroom.

Biases of Digital Communication: Obscured Realities and the End of Frontier, Michael Grabowski
This paper demonstrates the neurological mechanisms that influence our perceptions of reality as mediated through digital technologies. Understanding electronic media as extensions of the neuroperceptional system, the paper posits two counter-intuitive outcomes: 1) the supplanting of the space-bias of print media with holistic electronic media have blurred the categorizations of fiction and non-fiction genres, despite accusations of technological determinism by those resisting this development, and 2) the Internet is by no means a “new frontier” as suggested by many, but the end of frontier by means of its commingled time and space biases.

The Promise of Nigeria’s Digital Movie Empire and the Blemish of 4-1-9, Sharron Greaves
Nigeria’s film industry known as Nollywood, is the third most productive film enterprise in the world, with only the United States’ Hollywood and India’s Bollywood surpassing it in reported revenue. Technological advances in digital-image recording have enabled Nollywood to exceed Hollywood in monthly film production rates. Yet, Nigeria has also been ground zero for unprecedented fraudulent transactions fueled by the very force of digital prowess.  What is known in Nigeria as 4-1-9 is referred to in Western nations as Internet scams, and the government of Nigeria finds itself in the tenuous position of touting its status as a cinematic powerhouse while working overtime to deflect international scrutiny for the proliferation of residents that financially bankrupt scores of people via the internet.

Imagining the Contemporary Television Network, Joshua Green
This paper focuses on the contemporary branding strategies of US television networks as they adjust to a marketplace where the role for the broadcast television network is increasingly unclear. At this juncture, the core challenge US networks seem to face is a definitional one - what does a television network look like in a post-broadcast era? Comparing contemporary branding and trade-press discussion with historical efforts, this paper attempts to understand what the US broadcast networks imagine the future of television to be. It considers especially NBC, whose recent efforts have included the development of online delivery service Hulu as a destination brand separate from the network itself.

Mapping YouTube's Common Culture, Joshua Green
Studying a dynamic cultural system like YouTube requires an approach that balances the range of participants and co-created media space. Determinations about what counts as content are difficult to make from the data alone, and require an examination of the videos. At scale, this poses a challenge to the methods of cultural and media studies. The methods of media and cultural studies are particularly adept at the close, richly contextualised analysis of the local and the specific, bringing this close analysis into dialogue with context, guided by and speaking back to cultural theory. But scale at the level which YouTube represents tests the limits of the explanatory power of even the best grounded or particularist accounts—among the millions of videos hosted at YouTube, it is relatively simple to find sufficient examples of whatever phenomenon the researcher wishes to investigate; it is much more difficult to use this approach to account for how YouTube itself works as a cultural system. Attempting to address the missing middle between large-scale quantitative analysis and the sensitivity of qualitative methods, the study discussed combined the close reading of media and cultural studies with a survey of 4,320 of the videos calculated to be ‘most popular’ on the website at a particular moment -- gathered between August and November 2007. This paper discusses the research approach and attendant challenges, as well as opportunities for understanding dynamic co-created cultural systems.

Knowledge Everywhere: The Distributed Memory of Social Media, Alexander Halavais
We know almost nothing about the college years of our 43rd president. We know that George Bush attended Yale University, was a cheerleader, played rugby, and did not excel as a student. Compare that with what we will know about our 49th president. It is very likely she will have a Facebook profile. She may have had a blog. Chances are good that her emails to friends, colleagues, teachers, and lovers will all be preserved, not in a centralized archive, but in the distributed memory of the web. As knowledge creation more closely resembles a tapestry woven by a crowd than an organized warehouse, creating an archive—a distributed memory—necessarily requires new strategies. An examination of some of the theoretical concerns (fidelity, privacy, selection) provides a framework to understand existing technologies that enable archiving, and suggests practical, incremental steps toward exploiting these opportunities to provide for a democratic, layered, distributed archive of the social web.

Histories of Representation, Perception, and Archiving in New Media, Orit Halpern
Today we are surrounded by a new architecture of knowledge and perception. Seated behind our personal computer monitors, we stare at an interface of multiple screens, and no longer aspire to go out and explore the world. How would one, then, go about telling a history of this form of perception and the cultural forms of the interface and storage systems upon which it rests? I would like to begin at an early post-World War II moment when the aspiration for this mode of perception—this architecture of seeing, and in fact thinking—was first formally articulated and became a visible sign of discourse in the bastard science of cybernetics. This paper takes as its focus the discourses of archiving and interactivity in these sciences as a preliminary point from which to consider the re-organization of perception and knowledge that computer systems both resulted from and induced.

It’s as if You’ve Known Me Better Than I Ever Knew Myself, or Meta-Privacy and Our Personal Electronic Communications Under Judicial Scrutiny, Paul Ham
In the public sense, the jury is still out, but U.S. courts have not recognized a clear reasonable expectation of privacy over personal electronic communications, i.e., your personal e-mail is not private. How does this abstract meta-view by judges affect our daily lives? Do we really not think our electronic communications are private? How does this idea expose what we do and don’t think about ourselves, by what we do and don’t say in our electronic communications? Lastly, what is ours—and what is “us”—when our ethereal personalities are kept in our minds, on our hard drives, at our ISPs, in our e-mail providers’ accounts, in others’ e-mail accounts, others’ hard drives, bits and pieces on routers and cache servers here and there.

Media Criticism Moves Online, Christopher Harper
The paper will address how digital media have become significant analysts and critics of the media, providing an important historical oversight of the press.Simply put, the digital media are successfully challenging the mainstream media as the sole gatekeepers and agenda setters of news and information. As such, digital media have provided an important oversight role for the American media in particular. Perhaps most important, digital media have provided oversight of the press with respect to what I and others consider the outdated notions of objectivity, fairness, and balance. This role of the digital media—as critics and overseers of the press—has provided a significant historical breakthrough that should keep the media more accurate and the public more informed.

Iconic Literacy, Justin Hayes
As the university rapidly evolves into a site for the electronic archive, exchange, and production of knowledge, it seems to outpace our understanding of the effects this transition may be having on student literacy. McLuhan enables us to decode student error by interpreting the “fragments” as icons related through a non-linear, generative grammar. Given that such a grammar seems to be already at work in post-logocentric advancements in and across anthropology, physics, aesthetics and philosophy, the university should develop pedagogies that re-conceptualize student error as a positive and potentially transformative mode of inquiry.

The Durable, the Portable and the Processible, Till A. Heilmann
Today global computer networks provide us with information that can be accessed everywhere anytime, on a wide range of devices. In the study of digital media therefore one must turn to categories other than space or time. This paper argues that Innis’ distinction between the durable and the portable has to be supplemented with the processible—that which can be easily changed in form by machines.

Repatriation, Digital Cultural Heritage, and the (Re)Production of Meaning in a Canadian  Aboriginal Community, Kate Hennessy
Many Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal organizations are using digital media to revitalize their languages and assert control over the representation of their cultures. At the same time, museums and academic institutions are digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to originating communities. As the use of digital media becomes standard practice both in the production of ethnographic objects and the virtual repatriation of cultural heritage, new questions are being raised regarding copyright, intellectual property, ownership, and control of documentation in digital form.  Based on four years of collaborative ethnographic multimedia production work with the Doig River First Nation (Dane-zaa) in northeastern British Columbia, I explore how access to digitized and repatriated ethnographic documentation has shifted Dane-zaa perceptions of their intellectual property rights to cultural heritage.

Using Web Graph Analysis to Study Online Policy Advocacy, Bill D. Herman
Before internet communication can change policy outcomes, the content of online messages must be substantially different than the content of offline messages. Few scholars have explored such differences, leading to a dearth of systematic methods for comparing online and offline communication. This research presents one such method, combining content analysis with the web graphing techniques developed by Richard Rogers and made available via his Issue Crawler site (issuecrawler.net). Starting from a handful of representative sites from an interlinked group of related sites, the Issue Crawler identifies the remaining sites and ranks them according to the number of incoming links. This ranking is then used to identify the most authoritative sites, based on the collective verdict of the sites in the population. Sites that are consistently included among the top 100 sites are then coded for relevant articles. The method is illustrated via the example of online advocacy around the issue of US copyright law. Congressional testimony and newspaper coverage provide points of comparison.

The Other Digital Transition: Television’s Great Content Migration, Jennifer Holt
Television's advertiser-supported business model is fast-becoming an unsustainable relic and online distribution is being held out as the industry’s salvation…or at least the next destination. The path to an alternative model has yet to reveal a common approach. Instead, the past four years of experimentation has yielded a collage of attempts (ranging from the half-baked to the inspired) to put television programming within reach of an audience staring at the computer. This paper considers the current unique and varied digital strategies of the broadcast networks as they navigate the vagaries of doing business in a time of transition, uncertainty and even opportunity.

COSMA, Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge, Mary E. Hopper
This presentation will provide an overview of the design, construction and promotion of free and public knowledge utility. The system is centered on an innovative web-based interface designed to invite exploration of a unique, systematic top-down inventory of the worlds vast online resources organized around the elements of communication. In addition, it utilizes the virtual world named SecondLife to enable explicitly spatial knowledge navigation through a series of strategically located, relatively well known and popular virtual public spaces.  The project has been evolving over the last five years and is now at a stage where it is ready to be scaled up and prepared for full release.  The process of arriving at this juncture has been full of challenges and surprises. The presenter will provide a unique perspective on those as well as some others that are clearly looming on the immediate horizon.

Afro-Folksonomy: Visualization Journeys through Multiple Publics, Art, Public Space and Narrative Mapping, Del R. Hornbuckle
The traditional library catalogue is a tool of the Web 1.0 world, having developed as an organized index into the library's collection of physical items in the 19th century. In the Web 2.0 world, however, catalogue content and public access will be increasingly dynamic and engaging; this is evident in the seemingly ubiquitous social bookmark, video sharing and social networking sites and wikis which are based on the principle of folksonomy i.e. social tagging or indexing. What will the library catalogue of the future look like in urban spaces?  Hopefully, the visionary public libraries servicing multiple publics will leap forward and evolve into “fourth places”—media-rich, open access/ open source, art/performance space information commons. I will present my Afro-futurism catalog project: “Storing Art” (working title) which conceptually and visually re-imagines the public catalogue; public library; art and public space and access.

“Original” Copies and the Re-Reproduction of the Crimean War in France, Katie Hornstein
The Crimean War (1854-1856), the first major armed international conflict to erupt between European states since the Napoleonic Wars (1804-1815), occasioned a flood of visual representations in an astonishing variety of media: images of the war not only filled the exhibition spaces of the Salon, but were also to be seen in the shop windows of print and photography merchants, in the rotunda of Jean-Charles Langlois’ panorama, and on the pages of luxurious folio books and illustrated weekly newspapers.  This paper considers the proliferation of reproductive copies of one painting, Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la Malakoff, the largest and most ambitious Crimean War battle painting exhibited at the Salon of 1857, and explores the controversies and contradictions that occurred when new technologies of reproducibility came into social use during the mid-nineteenth century. 

On Knowledge Media, Mediality, and the Mediatization of Knowledge, Theo Hug
Unsurprisingly, terms like ‘knowledge media,’ ‘knowledge scape,’ or ‘knowledge space’ are used with different meanings and often in metaphorical ways which sometimes suggest questionable forms of reification of knowledge dynamics or ontologized media. Some of the corresponding problems can be clarified on a terminological level. But what do processes and results of the mediation of knowledge entail more explicitly? How can other concepts like mediality, mediatization, medialization, or remediation contribute to a better understanding of current knowledge dynamics? The paper seeks to elucidate the relationship between of knowledge, media, and space on a conceptual level. It refers to relevant debates on the spatial turn and the mediatic turn as they have been led in English and German speaking countries recently.

The Lithuanian Mediascape in the Post-Accession Era, Bjorn Ingvoldstad
Innis and Carey steadfastly and rightly focus on North America, but a conversation regarding communication and globalization requires similar attention paid to a host of other locales. This paper seeks to expand the discussion beyond the USA while still maintaining roots in national specificity. I will consider the transitions of time-based and space-based media in the case of Lithuania, which completed its accession to the European Union and NATO in 2004.

Do Mainstream Games Exist? - Reflections on Independent Game Culture, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann
The label “independent film“ has for decades been associated with a form and practice of a cinema that seeks to clearly distance itself from the practices and articulations of the cultural mainstream. And, no doubt, to a large degree, the success of many American independent films results from their making allowances for both popular logics (accessibility) and the need for distinction and anti-conventionality. In my presentation, I will show that, since the 1990s, designers and producers of digital games have taken note of American independent film’s popularity, presence, and cultural capital and that Amerian independent films in many respects serve as a cultural model and reflective agency for a still developing independent games movement. I will show the similarities of and differences between independent films and games and to what extent independent film is qualified as a role model for games, at all.

Digital Media Archives and the Case of Pad.ma, Tilottama Karlekar
In 2007, a group of documentary and experimental filmmakers based in Mumbai initiated a collaborative digital archive project named “Padma” (The Public Access Digital Media Archive). The project ultimately aimed to collect documentary images from filmmakers in India and overseas and make them available online, where they could be downloaded and re-edited into new “found footage” works. For the filmmakers who initiated the project, Pad.ma (does not work with Internet Explorer) was intended as a space for critical engagement with historical images, a counterweight to the passive consumption of a barrage of media imagery. It was a transnational initiative and aligned with the global “copyleft” movement, but also distinctly national because of the kinds of images and narratives the archive encompassed. My paper will trace the conception and development of the Padma project through 2007-08, focusing on the discourses and debates that unfolded around the archive leading up to its live launch in October 2008.

Hypertext and the Postmodern Frankenstein, Natalie King
Shelley Jackson’s electronic novel, Patchwork Girl (1995), illustrates the collaborative potential of the novel and the computer network, however adversarial they may outwardly appear. Structurally, the novel is composed of lexias, or blocks of text, connected by hyperlinks; the reader travels through the narrative by clicking on hyperlinks and reading the lexias. The lexias and links – the ‘skin and bones’ of the hypertext system – provide a unique structure for multidimensional reading experiences that cannot be replicated in a paper text. The non-linear, rhizomatic design of Patchwork Girl defies duplication of the reader’s chosen storypath which disappears with the click of the next link; some lexias offer links to multiple lexias, and some links remain hidden until they are discovered by the reader.

Documentary Is the New Black: Filmic Textbooks, Virginia Kuhn
Innovations in emergent technologies allow for the storage, dissemination and manipulation of information via film footage in ways that foster critical, visual and digital literacy. Iraqi Doctors: On the Front Lines of Medicine charts a 2003 exchange between doctors from Baghdad and those from USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Using this film as a starting point, students conducted research in an area relevant to their major field of study—from broadcast journalism to international relations to health care—and created web based documentaries of their own, accompanied by citations and statements of purpose.

The End of Journalism Education: The Great Good Place, Susan Jacobson
We seem to be facing the end of journalism as we know it. But is this “end” the demise of the journalistic endeavor? Or is it the purpose of journalism that is being called into question? And where does this leave the mission of journalism education? Taking a cue from Neil Postman’s (1996) The End of Education, this paper sees the end of journalism as the search for a new master narrative for the purpose of journalism, and proposes the model of Ray Oldenberg’s (1999) Great Good Place. Oldenberg theorized the existence of “third places” outside the realm of work and home, places of informal public life where people meet to relax and discuss common interests in coffee shops, parks and community centers.

The Politics of Organizing Information on the Web: Computing Centres and Natural Languages, Peter Jakobsson, Fredrik Stiernstedt
This paper is an exploration of the methodologies, economics and politics of organizing information on the web, through a historical-comparative analysis of
Google. The paper centres on two cases that reveal interesting tensions in contemporary attempts at organizing knowledge and information. The first case deals with natural and artificial languages as tools for knowledge, working with the historical case of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his interest in a universal language
as well as his pioneering contributions to etymology. The second case looks at the dialectics of centralization and decentralization as illustrated by the early 20th-century project of bibliographer Paul Otlet. Together they are used to evaluate Google’s utilization of techniques from computer science to extract knowledge from search queries and unstructured web-data, both of which are stored and indexed in Google’s computing centres. In the concluding parts of the paper this is considered from the perspective of “audience production." In the case of Google everything users do on the web is potentially of economic value for the company. E-mails, search queries and web-pages are raw materials that can be mined in order to reveal information of our
most private longings: the intentions, desires and interiors of human users.

Education@Play: Untangling Simulation and Imitation, Jennifer Jenson (lead author), Suzanne de Castell
Education faces unprecedented challenges to its knowledge-base and social structures, changes fueled in part by new media and computer-based technologies. Teachers, students and administrators have been variously delighted and affronted by postings on social networking sites, where inappropriate “insider” school knowledge has been made public, at times at great cost and dubious benefit to the lives of students and teachers. Youtube and Flickr have also brought classrooms under greater scrutiny as students film, without their knowledge or consent, other students and teachers and thus make public what has traditionally been “behind closed doors.” We want to argue here that one of the central questions for education in the 21st century is how best to prepare young people to act and live in a complex world that is constantly remediated and remediating through the use of technologies, and, significantly, through play-based forms.

Literal Aurality: Digital Poetry and Temporal Poetics, Juri Joensuu
Diverse types of digital poetry base their meaning production on temporal dynamics of digital media. This yields an important difference to historical concept of writing and its non-temporal materiality. It seems that time and temporality are the central signifying components in every type of digital poetry. Session is often used term to describe the one temporal unit of reception. Videopoetry, animated poetry or programmed poetry have all somewhat different ways to use time as part of their poetics. Benjamin’s own comments on writing were scarce and rather unproblematized. This is why it seems fruitful to examine the new types of literal and literary aurality that temporally dynamic poetic texts call forth.

Digital Archives in the Wild, Jeremy Leighton John
The scholarly value of personal archives of historical manuscripts, of personal papers, lies in the more candid and open nature of their contents. The letters, diaries and notebooks of individuals can be contrasted in their informal, impetuous, unfinished or idiosyncratic nature with the peer-reviewed publication, which is the product of a community (the author, editor, referees, and so on). Over the last three decades these types of personal material have been increasingly represented as digital objects (or eMANUSCRIPTS) residing on computer media in association with an individual’s own desktop or laptop. In recent years, however, these personal digital objects and personally created content have begun to move from the local environs of an individual’s computer to the remote servers of online service providers (OSPs). The British Library is leading the Digital Lives research project that is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. One of the aims of the project is to investigate the emerging role of OSPs (such as Flickr, Facebook, etc) and their possible collaboration with repositories in the long term future of personal digital objects and content. Some of the findings of this project will be outlined and discussed in my presentation, with particular attention given to the component of the research that is directed at understanding the potential role of OSPs and repositories in securing the future of online personal digital objects.

This paper builds upon and updates previous work on the social influence of television viewing to account for the novel forms of viewing provided by streaming television services like the ABC Full Episode Player and Hulu. Based on examples taken from those two interfaces, the paper details the relative affordances and constraints that streaming interfaces offer the television viewer, and points to the ways in which those factors might reshape the social impact of television. In particular, the paper highlights three potential impacts of streaming technologies: increasing television’s spatiotemporal ubiquity, shifting the social-spatial dynamics of the viewing area, and encouraging more selective – or perhaps biased – viewing behavior. These thematic findings emphasize the distinctiveness of the social phenomena surrounding streaming television relative to broadcast television and, as such, underline the need for further empirical work on the user-end impacts of streaming. 

Mobilized by Mobile Media:China’s Transitional Communication Order, Societal Changes and Citizenship, Liu Jun
Digital technology has expanded cell phone’s potential from a talking device to a dynamic participant, doing new things one had not even previously thought of. As the content is largely unknowable, unpredictable and unregulated, mobile media succeeds in breaching the information blockage, helping Chinese people receive the outside world information, maintain contact with each other and make political waves in an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information. The aims of this paper is to think critically about how their positioning and interests shape Chinese people’s understandings of mobile media and its information in contrast to the government-controlled mass media, and trying to answer the question how has mobile media changed Chinese people’s information dissemination, political participation and democratic expression in China.

Paint, Sketches, Tools and Notes: Analogies of Code in Digital Arts, Aleksandra Kaminska
Using the frame of digital art, this paper offers an exploration of code through analogies with materials and tools of analog artistic methods. It argues that analogies of code help us conceptualize the storage and transmission of digital processes in the material concreteness of language, and not only as phenomena that are immaterial, fleeting and ephemeral. Using Flusser’s ideas on the nature of code, this paper suggests a way of thinking about our comparisons between materials based on their differences in spatial structures, dimensions and temporality. It questions how our theories of digital convergence correspond or clash with our search for analogies with more traditional materials. This paper proposes that the transformation and translation between materials is a process of loss or gain of information during which capacities for storage and transmission can be imagined and defined through comparisons such as those produced through analogies.

Early Digital Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, Carolyn Lee Kane
Research conducted at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the post-war years was highly innovative and vibrant, giving way to the transistor, information theory, color television, the first satellite communications, and fiber optics, to name only a few. However few people, including the Labs themselves, acknowledge the equally brilliant and cutting-edge digital color systems and research in color aesthetics that was produced under the same roof. This absence is explained by the fact that, as composer Laurie Spiegel of Bell Labs puts it, “the art had to be hidden.” This article analyses the computer films of Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton made at the labs between 1968 and 1974 and demonstrates Bell Lab’s open and humane environment of collaboration and support.

Automation of Historical Research in Digitized Media Archives, Akrivi Katifori, Eirini Savaidou, Aristotle Tympas
This paper reports on the possibilities and the risks that the team of its authors has encountered while working on Papyrus, an interdisciplinary research project of the European Union that brings together historians of science and technology who specialize in media history, and, computers scientists who specialize in the computational technology involved in storing and assessing media archives. Using the history of science and technology as a paradigmatic case, we have been experimenting with ways to integrate the availability of these digital archives in the research (and teaching) of a historian’s work.

Virtuality, Immateriality, Homosexuality: Network Theory and the “Bad Copy,” Kevin Kearney
The wide accessibility of the Internet has rendered formerly hidden subcultures, such as that of homosexuality, greatly more apparent. Though many theorists claim that the Internet culture provides a new horizontality, leveling hierarchies and eliding differences through accessibility and visuality, reactionary calls against gay rights and even cyberspace impediments prove to be a recalcitrance for heteronormativity, the so-called natural, prelapsarian structure of relationships that contrasts any celebratory call for universalism. This paper investigates the conflation of the “virtuality” of the Internet with the supposed “immateriality” of homosexual relationships alongside discourses of authenticity.

The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age, a presentation of media criticism by Christian Keathley, Andrew Miller, Eric Faden, and Craig Cielikowski, with response by Jason Mittell
The format of this unusual session will start with a brief overview, presented by Christian Keathley and Andrew Miller, of various ways that the discipline of film studies has previously engaged with the tools of writing with sound and image.  We will map the range of possible approaches via the use of moving images as a critical language, from expository visual analysis to associative creative meditations.  We will then show a series of short videos produced by the participants, which exemplify the range of approaches and possibilities afforded by the video medium. Following the videos, Jason Mittell will discuss the ways that this mode of criticism might remap the field of film and media studies, focusing on the specific opportunities that this mode of scholarship poses for publishing and pedagogy, while considering the challenges of copyright and peer review.

Arizona State University, College Board and Google Offer Math Through APWorlds, Gary Keller
Arizona State University, the College Board, and Google is creating APWorlds, a mathematics instruction game based on virtual reality and using the platform Lively by Google. The initiative begins in the 9th grade and runs through first-year college calculus. Student performance is evaluated with the College Board’s examinations beginning with introductory algebra through calculus. APWorlds stands conventional pedagogy on its head, by constructing a virtual-world platform (image) that is supercharged and interactive with all the elements of mind and matter that can be included in knowledge, imagination, hypothesis, fantasy and science fiction. This heightened, interactive, and virtual pedagogy is diametrically opposed to conventional mathematical pedagogy which is recipe, rote and drill driven.

Aura of Multilocal Artworks, Raivo Kelomees
In my presentation I will discuss differences, which are connected with object and auratic art and also telecommunication art. The question is, can we speak about the phenomenon of aura in connection with multilocal and telecommunication art? Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura can be a productive starting point for discussion for multilocal art where physicality is not excluded and where we can meet the phenomenon of aura in connection with physical representations of virtual art. Relying on personal experience with telecommunication artworks on the net and in physical space, I suggest that analogues to the experience in classical “auratic” object-art  aura could be encountering physical representations of parts or objects which belong to the “body” of multilocal artwork.

Religions of the Book, Religions of the Screen, Flourish Klink
Religious groups have been among the first to take advantage of Second Life, the first widely-accessible virtual reality. This paper explores the contradictions of a "religion of the book" entering into a virtual space, drawing from a three-month ethnographic exploration of a Bible study at the Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center in Second Life and from an in-depth examination of Catholic theology regarding new media use. The paper will explore the Campivallensians' tactics for adapting religious practice to the limitations and affordances of virtual reality and explore their place in a greater context of historical media change.

Outside of Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain, Melanie E.S. Kohnen
Films have been credited with bringing audiences closer to social realities with which they might be unfamiliar. My paper analyzes how genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain that encapsulates the films' diegeses in a distant place and time. Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of American society.  I argue that the screening of queerness in Boys Don't Cry and in Brokeback Mountain plays out in the tension between offering a seemingly provoking representation of queer lives in a homophobic environment and containing this provocation in a remote time and place. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to significantly impact neither Hollywood film-making nor everyday life.

Time Vortex: Versioning and the Fluid Text, Derek Kompare
Reproduction has always been a controversial practice in culture. Revisiting my work on repetition from my book Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, this paper will look more closely at the textual possibilities and difficulties stemming from the last decade of digital-television rerun distribution, as repetition has increasingly given way to versioning. This paper will focus on the “versioning” of Doctor Who and Star Trek as key examples of this kind of fluid textuality. Using textual and industrial analysis of the Doctor Who DVDs (2001 - ), the remastered Star Trek (2007 - ), and various fan paratexts, and drawing from the work of Gray and others on contemporary textuality, I argue that the logic of repetition fostered over the twentieth century has largely given way to the logic of versioning, whereby the “original” functions more like a brand than a closed work.

This paper proposes that analyzing the documentation involved in the migration from print formats to digital formats provides a useful framework in which to place other discussions on the transitions of media, communications, and information technologies. The paper will analyze some definitions and concepts of documentation, illuminating a number of information science scholars’ unique, but complementary, perspectives, including those of Michael K. Buckland, David M. Levy, and Niels Lund. The paper will then concentrate on the four properties of documentation presented by noted documentation theorist Bernd Frohmann. Applying Frohmann’s four properties to an understanding of the transition from print to digital documents will help show the resulting changes in the materiality of formats, relationships, organizations, institutions, and interactions in this new “information society.”

The Unique in Reading Digital Literature, Raine Koskimaa
Historically, literature was the first of the arts to enter the phase of mechanical reproduction. Since the mature phase of print technology the uniqueness of a book has not been an issue (with the exception of certain collectors’ items). With digital literature we are facing a wholly new situation. Cybertextual literature possesses devices for creating a different textual whole for each reader and reading session. Even though the piece of computer code underlying the work remains the same, the surface level may be different on each and every run. In this situation the reader may truly face a unique text, something that nobody else may ever see. I will discuss the consequences of this new textual condition, especially from the perspective of personal reception and interpretation. I will also present some examples of this sort of work.

Judy Fiskin and The End of Photography, Alison Kozberg
By articulating a shifting artistic paradigm, contemporary photographer Judy Fiskin engages the emotional results of the displacement of analogue. Fiskin’s body of work primarily consists of localized, small-scale vernacular photography, particularly of Southern California. Her short video The End of Photography fuses her trademark subject matter with rumination on the photographic medium. By directly bidding farewell to photography, the video demonstrates the culmination of Fiskin’s career-long engagement with memory and personal narrative. By evoking our recollections, the video foregrounds the emotionally charged capabilities of conceptual art. Through the combination of multiple artistic media Fiskin creates a work torn between progress and reengagement of the past, effectively evoking our memories and feelings of nostalgia.

The Digital Archive and Alternative Media in Canada, Kirsten Kozolanka, Michael Lithgow
The rise of digital collaboration exemplified through wikinomics and Web 2.0 has ushered in an era of renewed interest in cultural collaboration and participation. This is true also in the realm of memory and the ways in which we collectively come to terms with the past. This paper will explore the potential of collaborative archiving in restoring dissident voices to the public realm. Specifically, the paper will outline a digital archive project currently under development in Canada. Using collaborative archiving, the project will uncover the participatory, activist and emancipatory ways in which alternative media and culture engaged with the public sphere in the past and continue to disrupt mainstream accounts of the present.

Surveillance and Self-Presentation: Foucault’s Arts of Existence in the Digital Archive, Anne Kustritz
Despite constant reminders of the always present potential for surveillance and discipline, people continue to blog, chat, interact, podcast, and otherwise inscribe themselves into the digital archive.  Their reasons for doing so far exceed the concept of an implanted desire to confess, and provide a bridge between Foucault’s early and late work, schools of thought often considered mutually contradictory by many theorists.  Increasingly, as awareness spreads of the permanent and public nature of digital information archives, practices develop not only to limit personal exposure and not only to confess indiscriminately, but to enter into a process of creating the self through digital archiving or archive management.  Often, the solution to unflattering links associated with one’s name in Google is to add more web content to “clean” one’s “Google trail,” the answer to a revealing Facebook picture is more Facebook pictures, and the answer to overly confessional blog posts or transcripts archived by “the Way-Back Machine” is to flood those media with more entries. These practices of deliberate digital self-fashioning can be understood as arts of existence or arts of the self, an aesthetic theory of identity and ethics developed in Foucault’s later works like The History of Sexuality: Volumes 2 and 3.

Active Fans versus Passive Readers: Remapping the Relationship between Authors, Readers and Texts among Chinese Fan Communities in the Cyber Age, Petra T.C. Kwong
To a large extent, female fandom and its related online media production are not unique to western culture. Asian females, especially teenage girls and young women, also participate in online fandom through the production of media artifacts such as fan sites, fan fiction, fan drawings and so on. Having been both an observer and a participant in Chinese ACG (animation-comic-game) fan communities for more than nine years, I intend to assert the value of “printed texts” among the members of ACG fandom by investigating the role of “virtuality” and “materiality” in the reception, creation, publication, circulation and collaboration of fan artifacts especially fan fictions and fan drawings in online ACG fan communities.

Documentary Journalism, Kurt Lancaster
In this talk, I will examine documentary works for The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as the author’s experience in training print reporters for The Christian Science Monitor in short-form documentary storytelling. I will explore the shift from strictly cinematic presentation of video on the web—being a form of small-screen cinema—and examine how some of these video projects become part of the website designand interactivity itself, as part of its storytelling process.

Virtual KinoEye: Mutability, Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life, Lori Landay
In Second Life, the conference theme of the tensions between durability and portability, storage and transmission finds expression for the machinima maker in a specific kind of virtual subjectivity created discursively through the literal and metaphorical point of view of the kinetic inworld camera. The paper/presentation will be comprised partly of text that is read and partly of machinima that is shown.  It briefly surveys machinima and inworld photography, forms which represent the impulse to archive, to hold fast Vertov’s dream of the kino-eye experience, so exhilarating but fleeting, gone in the blink of an eye, the click of the mouse. Then the paper/presentation turns to two original short pieces of machinima that use the techniques of the inworld camera to illustrate and explore the concepts of mutability, mobility, and virtual subjectivity. The paper concludes by raising questions about the Proteus effect—the relationship between experiences in the virtual and real worlds.

Digital Cartographical Interfaces as Transformative Material Practices, Sybille Lammes
This paper looks at how digital maps and the spatial relationships they endorse can be understood through focussing on a new conception of them as material interfaces. As the term already indicates, interfaces facilitate interaction between map and user. However, in line with the ideas of Latour, this paper does not view them as empty vessels that let this interaction ‘come to pass’ but as material signs that are inscribed with socio-spatial ‘programs of action’ (Latour 2005; 1999; 1993). Similar to for example a door-hinge, they prescribe and invite certain spatial actions (e.g. ‘turn left’, ‘touch me’) and invite transformative processes. This paper will focus on how mapping interfaces as technological artefacts act as such mediators, creating and prescribing links between users and spaces.

Showing and Sharing on a Saturday Night: Participatory Dynamics in Real Space Event Series, Al Larsen
In Buffalo, the group Sugar City puts on attic shows emphasizing participation and community. All Caps, a music event series in Toronto promotes CD mix-tape exchanges at their shows. Dorkbot is a worldwide series of presentations under the theme “people doing strange things with electricity.” The actual act of participating - uploading, commenting, browsing, revealing - becomes more important than the quality or significance of any particular statement. In much the same way, in all of these event series participants find themselves alternately in the role of audience and producer. Looking beyond the surface of these event series, contradictions become apparent. Slideluck Potshow seems to be bent on becoming a brand or franchise; All Caps makes sure to provide instructions on exactly how one ought to make a mix CD. The invitation to participate holds the promise of community but also comes with its own sets of expectations, pitfalls and penalties.

Can One-to-One Computing Interrupt the Textbook-Based Tradition of Rote Memorization?, Catalina Laserna
This panel explores how ethnographic knowledge can inform the design of culturally responsive learning environments.  As a 1:1 laptop computing is introduced into public education in Costa Rica, a group of undergraduate students carried out fieldwork in three educational settings in a fifth grade classroom in a public school is San Jose.  Each of the three fieldwork teams reports on their research findings.  In conclusion the panel reflects on how collective ethnographic inquiry and theorizing can provide critical insight into the conditions under which the introduction of laptops can promote constructivist learning thereby interrupting the tradition of rote memorization which pervades much of Latin America's public education.

Tracing Youth Mobilities Across Social Spaces, Kevin M. Leander
In this conceptual paper I discuss how mobility, as informed by human and cultural geography, might be understood within digital literacy practices. This paper moves toward an understanding of mobility as not an abstract social concept, but as enacted through the particulars of the lived experiences of youth, the possibilities of their online and offline social spaces, and the connections they produce among these spaces. The paper begins with the position that all literacies are neither autonomous nor fixed in situations (Brandt & Clinton, 2002). Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper describes three important dimensions of mobility evident within digital literacies. The ethnographic data analyzed are drawn from a study of youth literacy practices online and offline (Synchrony Study).

Political Bloggers’ Lack of Linking to Primary Source Materials, Mark Leccese
Hypertextuality is the prime difference that separates the online medium — and thus blogs — from existing mass media. A hypertext link on a blog serves a similar purpose as attribution in a mainstream media news story — the assigning of a fact or set of facts to a source using “so-and-so said” or “according to so-and-so.” The purpose of analyzing the frequency of links to primary sources by political bloggers is to discover to what extent political bloggers go about their work using the same technique as reporters for the mainstream media: discovering and reading primary sources rather than secondary sources (such as a newspaper article, TV news broadcast segment, or some other extent piece of writing or video).

Rite of Death as a Popular Commodity:  New Media and New Korean Funeral Culture, Joonseong Lee
In the winter 2005 I was in Seoul, Korea, doing fieldwork for my dissertation. I was looking curiously at a new trend of Korean funeral culture, cyber memorial zones.  In the cyber memorial zones, people memorialize their late loved ones by writing memorial letters and posting photos or movies on the web. Those who are familiar with web technologies can also set up cyber altars for remembering the deceased, making visits available anywhere and anytime. During the last decade, the cremation rate in Korea has sharply increased along with the number of the large-sized columbaria. A government-driven funeral policy sought to promote cremation to resolve the shortage of burial grounds. I found that cyber memorial zones were developed in order to appease the mourner’s empty heart with cremating their loved ones.  In other words, cremating a body leaves only a handful of ashes to the bereaved while a grave becomes the tangible connection between the bereaved and the deceased. For this reason, the bereaved could have a greater sense of loss in cremation than in ground burial. In this sense, memorial letters or media files of the deceased in cyber memorial zones could be a good way to ease this sense of loss. Thus, cyber memorial zones are not only byproducts of the IT industry and the new funeral culture but also of government funeral policy. While exploring the contexts of the new Korean funeral culture- commercialized funeral parlors run by hospitals, drastic hike of cremation rate, and cyber memorial zones, in this paper I will look into how traditional rite of death has changed as a popular commodity in the neo-liberal turn in Korea.

From Content to Context: How Book Collectors Demonstrate the Contemporary Significance of Books, Elizabeth Lenaghan
In past decades, book historians have paid increasing attention to the physical properties of books in an attempt to explore their cultural significance. However, this increased attention has also exposed the tendency of the discipline to foreground the physical aspects of books at the expense of ignoring the social world surrounding them. Thus, the importance of studying the habits and practices of book collectors in order to better understand the significance of the material object of the book not only works to fill in gaps left by book history’s efforts to understand books as material objects, but also contributes to our broader understanding of the social practices surrounding technologies. In sum, focusing on the practices and habits of book collectors highlights the crucial role people play in determining the relevance of technologies.

Postcolonializing the Internet: Digital Media, Migration and Glocalized Youth Cultures, Koen Leurs
Mass migration and electronic mediation are two chief flows in processes of globalization. The migrant condition embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that also pertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. Our research project, Wired Up, aims to show how Dutch-Moroccan youth aged 12-18 digitally mediate what it means for them to be a living in a hyphen between the Netherlands and Morocco. Building on postcolonial studies, I will argue how digital media offer migrant youth an alternative interactive space between the culture(s) of origin and that of immigration and how issues of identity, gender and ethnicity are articulated between online and offline settings.

Archiving Women, Minorities, and Indigenous Peoples in the Digital Era, Amalia Levi
Digitizing can mean greater visibility and usability for material hitherto relegated to obscure stacks or to the knowledge, good will and not-always-so-impartial judgment of referral librarians and archivists. It would seem that digitization has brought about the emancipation of the record from the spatial, temporal, and human elements. But are digital humanities today truly liberated from the tyranny of cultural politics? This paper will examine the ways we archivists involve minority, ethnic, and native peoples in literacy, especially digital literacy. What is the meaning of the digital divide for minorities and their representation in archives? What do “hot topics” such as copyright law, digital curation, social networks, e-scholarship have to do with people whose permission was neither asked when their heritage was pillaged or taken away through unethical ways, nor consulted when they were “exhibited” in museums and archives?

TheWall, Paula Levine
Locative media, wireless and networked systems actively reshape cartographic imagination through a system of portable, space-based exchange of information and experiences. Coupled with new cartographic technologies and the web, TheWall engages with these emerging new spatial vernaculars to convey the impact of a segment of the security/barrier wall, currently being built in Israel and Palestine, upon selected U.S. and Canadian cities. Like trade routes that residually altered the cultures and communities through which they passed, locative and mobile projects such as TheWall changes both the experiences within and memories of familiar and local spaces by shadowing the impact of the structure's trajectory upon local communities and lives, translating distant events in local terms/on local ground.

Dis/locating Audience: The Online Circulation of East Asian Television Drama, Xiaochang Li
In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, established models of transnational media audiences prove insufficient. While more traditional channels of distribution targeting diasporic audiences are floundering, the popularity of these dramas through unauthorized fan networks has grown exponentially. What happens when individuals are radically participating in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of the very texts and images that shape and articulate the social imaginaries they inhabit, making them not only collective, but collaborative? How does the increased visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audience practices around them complicate the models of diaspora and globalism? What new (hybrid) models emerge when we take into consideration the interplay between diasporic conditions and fan practices and how do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of global media audienceship?

The Chicago Underground Library: Ranganathan's Library Rules Applied to the Digital Age, Raizell Liebler, Nell Taylor
In the 1930s, Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan created five rules for organizing libraries: books are for use, every reader has a book, every book has a reader, libraries should save the time of the reader, and the library is a growing organism. The Chicago Underground Library (CUL), an archive of independent and small press media from the Chicago area, expands on the notions of accessibility and democracy that underpin these rules to reimagine special collections and their place in the community. By tracing the evolution of networks and interdependencies within Chicago’s historically stratified communities and movements, the CUL proposes a social interconnectivity not just among its intended users, but also among the materials in its collection. We will present about how this library has progressed since its inception, implementing Ranganathan's rules, and how the CUL will continue to grow -- hopefully bringing this model to other cities in the future.

Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists, Rory Litwin
Workers in professions as diverse as librarianship, law, journalism, and academic scholarship are motivated by a set of values that relate to dialectical reason and the use of texts as a medium for the storage of truth through time. These values compose a major part of what we understand as the Western worldview. Walter Ong was a scholar who traced the historical origins of these values to the development of the technology of alphabetic writing in the second millennium BCE and the influence of literacy on Western culture over ensuing centuries. This presentation will summarize Ong's ideas about how alphabetic writing led to particular ways of seeing and to particular values, and will then engage in questions raised or suggested by media scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Ong, McLuhan, Postman, and Aldous Huxley will be taken as a group in finding implications in shifting media for cultural values such as individualism, rationality, and democracy.

The Innis-McLuhan Communications Revolution, Robert Logan
The pioneering work of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan provide cogent insights into the cognitive and social impacts of communications media and other information-processing technologies on work and education. The general theoretical framework of this book, including the notion that computers and the Internet are both  media of communication and information-processing technologies, grew out of the organic way in which Innis and McLuhan treated communications and their relationship to technology. I collaborated and published with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, where I am based.

Kindling Great Expectations, Anastasia Logotheti
Over a year ago the launching of Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle, promised to change the way Americans read books and newspapers for business or for pleasure. Although the Kindle may not change the way people read in a short time, it will change publishing in fundamental ways. What changes might this bring to the academy and to higher education? What potential for improvement might the Kindle bring to the college classroom? The Kindle may become an indispensable tool for an educator at a time when convincing students to read required texts proves increasingly challenging. Academic publishers will soon realize that the Kindle may prove to be the most appropriate format for specialized titles that enjoy only a limited run as well as for classics such as Dickens’s Great Expectations, typically required reading for English majors anywhere.

Ngen Celebrity Vlogs: The Virtual and Virginal Performances of the Disney Triumvirate on YouTube, Cortney Lohnes, Kimberley McLeod
The vlog has developed into one of the most popular modes of production on YouTube. These videos account for almost 5% of all content on YouTube with over 10 000 new vlogs added to the site each day (Digital Ethnography Project). Although this format is commonly recognized as one that propels users into instant celebrities, TV and film personalities also use this format to extend their performed subjectivities. Three of Disney’s most bankable stars, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez, regularly vlog for their fans. The Ngeners watching these vlogs are actively participating in the creation and dissemination of these celebrities’ intersubjectivities. This participation includes both text comments and video responses, which frequently feature mimics of the three stars. As part of our ongoing belief in performance as research, we will construct a series of performed mimics as an extension of our ongoing performance project IdeaAssassins.

Video Games and Transmedia Storytelling, Geoffrey Long
Although multi-media franchises have long been common in the entertainment industry, the past two years have seen a renaissance of transmedia storytelling as authors such as Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams have learned the advantages of linking storylines across television, feature films, video games and comic books.  Recent video game chapters of transmedia franchises have included Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Lost: Via Domus and, of course, Enter the Matrix - but compared to comic books and webisodes, video games still remain a largely underutilized component in this emerging art form.  This paper will use case studies from the transmedia franchises of Star Wars, Lost, The Matrix, Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and others to examine some of the reasons why this might be the case (including cost, market size, time to market, and the impacts of interactivity and duration) and provide some suggestions as to how game makers and storytellers alike might use new trends and technologies to close this gap.

Using Social Networks and Mobile Technologies to Enlarge the Classroom Space, Bernadette Longo
This paper will address a collaboration between an information design class at the University of Minnesota and First Step Initiative (FSI), a non-profit, microfinance organization working with woman entrepreneurs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). From this ongoing collaboration, partners are making situated knowledge and finding the limits of traditional storage and transmission media. Partners now plan to explore opportunities for knowledge making, storage, and transmission across cultures afforded by social networking tools and mobile technologies.

A Toxic Archive of Digital ‘Sunshine’: Wikileaks and the Archiving of Secrets, Lisa Lynch
This paper considers how digital encryption has facilitated a wholly new kind of archival practice; namely, archives of “leaked” classified documents submitted anonymously over the internet to a secure server.  Since 2007, the Wikileaks site has collected and published such anonymously sourced information on a regular basis, including material concerning Osama Bin Laden, Guantanamo, Bank Julius Baer, and the radio-frequency jammers the U.S. military currently uses in its Iraq operations. The site has been the subject of multiple legal challenges -- in fact, a US version of the site was briefly taken down following a California judicial ruling -- but thus far, Wikileaks has managed to skirt extinction.

Ewriting Prospective: Rescripting Authors’ Rights in the Electronic Domain, Artur Matuck
Ewriting (electronic writing) is a developing field of inquiry generating theories and computer applications that will gradually change our perspective on writing. Since computing today cannot be isolated from networking, it is actually their conjunction that will provide for ewriting technology. Because ewriting requires, indeed develops through a series of successive interactions, it re-defines traditional authorship. The writer’s activity is segmented in newly-conceived roles performed at each successive authorial phase. The first ewriting phase, metawriting, indicates a level of concept and planning. The second phase proposes interwriting as a collaborative human process, compwriting as a human-machine activity, or their inter-connection. The third phase, defined as post-writing, indicates the process of editing, selecting and eventually mutating the final electroscript. Ewriting processes will then be naturally challenging the present theoretical basis of intellectual property and authors’ rights since they will make full use of proprietary material through information-reprocessing systems.

Tactical Media for Artists and Activists, Nancy Mauro-Flude
In a recent article in Artforum, “Domesticity at War: Beatriz Colomina and Homi K Bhabha in Conversation” (Summer 2007, pp. 442-447), Colomina and Bhabha discuss and explore how the mediations of public and private in the context of war are domesticated and inform developments in media design, fashion, and architecture. I will discuss some projects that interface on this very level, including 'Baglady 2.0'  a performance with a customised electronic performance tool,an item for collecting, but also for broadcasting gathered information in realtime. Originally conceived as a modular tool for performances, the bag can serve many different uses. It can serve as personal recording device to capture one's daily life, to record conversations, log geographical data, and take images. It can serve as a tool for grassroot journalists operating under the conditions of repression. It can record images and audio files, and send them immediately to a remote server, while deleting the compromising data from the bag's memory. Once the server received files from the bag, the files on the bag are deleted automatically. I will also discuss other projects that have inspired such a tool, for instance EngageMedia and dyne:bolic mulitmedia operating system, groups of people inspired by the the GNU/Linux movement who design software and ideas for the arts, sharing a grassroot access to technology, education and freedom.

Our New Aural Ecologies: Podcasting, Publicy, and Secondary Orality, Robert MacDougall
This paper begins by looking at the growing popularity of podcasting as another manifestation of Walter Ong’s “secondary orality” and interrogates the significance this holds for the work of Innis, McLuhan and other medium theorists. Podcasting certainly seems to blur notions of “public” and “private” in unprecedented ways, and a recent concept dubbed “publicy” (privacy that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications) exemplifies this.  While the Podcast may be the latest and perhaps purest form of publicy, is publicy itself really anything new, or is it just a new form of orality (ie. secondary orality) that recasts us all as witness/participants to the chants and decrees of the iconoclast, village elder, and cultural mystic?  I argue that podcast consumption, itself the product of complex cognitive and cultural processes, facilitates consequential reconfigurations of our everyday soundscapes and the personal experiences bound up in them.

2008 Election Coverage by 40 College Reporters in Missouri Using Fresh Eyes and New Media Tools, Kyle Magee, Marilyn Yaquinto
This paper analyzes the media products and practices of 40 college reporters who covered the 2008 presidential election in and around the bellwether state of Missouri, from the Iowa Caucus through Election Day, participating as reporters, eyewitnesses and citizens in an election that reshaped how both political campaigns and media companies function. Their work exposes how much this election served as a turning point for both politics and media in America, especially concerning how information is gathered, disseminated, and digested by campaigns, media, and voters alike. The changes wrought by the recent election coverage are still reverberating in newsrooms (and journalism classrooms) across the country and continue to contribute to a dynamic process facing compounded challenges, given the troubled economy.

Arab News Reporting: From Print to Broadcast, Ramez Maluf
In the last 15 years the broadcast media have become the main source of news in the Arab World, a region that until the mid 1990s relied mostly on newspapers for information on current events. This shift in medium has also meant that Arab populations now rely on information sources that are free to cross national borders, that prioritize pan-Arab issues, that are strongly competitive, and that are controlled by deep-pocket investors, or political groups willing to run large deficits. This paper examines and critiques the recent literature on Arab broadcasting with special attention to the development of news reporting, comparing scholarship relevant to broadcast with that relevant to print.  It concludes by suggesting a new typology for understanding Arab broadcast media.

The Digital Record and the Future of Libraries , Marlene Manoff
We are in the odd position of having tremendous access to historical artifacts and digital surrogates while also facing technical impediments to securing the past. The vulnerability of the digital record poses significant challenges to the ability of libraries, archives and museums to insure the integrity, sustainability and accessibility of that record. These institutions are contending with digital objects that defy standard forms of bibliographic description.  The networked environment represents a shift toward the creation of information objects that are deeply embedded within their systems of hyperlinks and subject to recombination, reformatting and disappearance. This essay theorizes the current moment in terms of the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in a digital environment that recovers and reframes the past while also imperiling the historical record.

Living Space: The New Media City of Expo 67, Janine Marchessault
American media theorist and historian Gerald O’Grady recently argued that Expo 67 represents the most important media experiment of the 20th century, one which can be read as a pivotal precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-first century digital architectures. My paper will focus on how Expo 67 dubbed “McLuhan’s fair,” can be seen as a utopian media city. The paper deals with the overall design and architectural conception of Expo 67 in terms of a new humanist approach to architecture and urban planning that was both influenced by and influencing new forms of media production.

Online Video and Feminist Content, Stella Marrs
GirlCity.TV is an online platform for contemporary video portraits of and by women. The aim of the project is to create a specifically female space in which a genuine contemporary feminist content can emerge. The site collects video clips of women narrating their memories of the Barbie doll. The stories, remembered and told to the camera, reveal alternative histories of girls and their Barbies. By aggregating the stories together, I create a typology that reveals young feminist strategies and spontaneous resistances to this over-sexualized model of a female archetype that is imposed onto girls.The stories cast into relief second- and third- wave feminist responses and the web-typological structure creates an inventory of who women are after negotiating Barbie for 50 years. GirlCity.TV explores the democratic potential of online video as a new form of the consciousness-raising sessions of the 1970s Women’s Movement.

Unix Culture and the Coach House, John W. Maxwell
In the early 1970s, the Coach House Press, a tiny literary publisher and fine-art printing house in Toronto drove headlong into the digital era, anticipating by three or four decades the moves that their peers in the book industry are beginning to make only now. How did this small press manage this, given marginal capitalization, immature technologies, and the apparent divide between the arts and sciences? The answers to this question offers numerous insights into a cultural history of computing in the 1970s—which, by way of Internet culture, still underpins much of our media ecology today.

Weekend Pictures: Privacy and User-Generated Content, Steven James May
Creators of user-generated content exhibit an alarming disconnect between the online sharing of their “weekend pictures” and the related issues of privacy. The website weekendpictures.ca aims to increase literacy amongst such creators of the impact of sharing personal information within a networked online environment.  A sample list of featured interview subjects includes: danah boyd, Greg Elmer, Michael Geist, Lee Humphreys, Henry Jenkins, David Lyon, Steve Mann, Toby Miller, Hal Niedzviecki, Jan A.G.M. van Dijk, David Weinberger, Kenneth Werbin and Jonathan Zittrain.

Prognosis of the Unpredictable: Walter Benjamin’s Persistent Political Relevance for Media Studies, James McFarland
Walter Benjamin has long been recognized as a pioneering thinker of media and their social effects. Contrasting two roughly simultaneous essays of Benjamin’s, “Unpacking My Library” and “The Destructive Character,” both from 1931, allows the paradoxical dimensions of this mediating space to appear. By recalling the necessary destructiveness of genuine transmission, these texts can renew a politically relevant suspicion of the susceptibility of the discourse of media studies to gestures of prediction. Prediction, or the projection into the future of currently recognized public tendencies – what Benjamin describes as the perspective of “the victorious class in history” – contrasts with what we might call prognosis, or the momentary discernment of unexpected potentials in an unsurveyable collective present. It is, so this paper argues, this prognosticating potential in media studies that is Benjamin’s true legacy to the discipline.

“Life” After Expo ‘67: Bio-Archival Reinscriptions of the City, Scott Toguri McFarlane
The city of Montreal’s key defining topographic feature is Mont Royal. The park of Mont Royal was officially opened with much ado on May 24, 1876—to coincide with Queen Victoria’s birthday. Today, near the top of Mont Royal, just below the oft-visited lookout and to the south-east, you will find McGill University’s concrete and glass Montreal Genomics and Proteomics Centre. Directly south of the lookout are the towers housing the offices of venture capital firms that provide seed money, management and credibility to the increasing number of biotech companies whose names are reinscribing the architecture and archives of the city. But even as one walks amidst the signs of biotechnology, Montreal’s architecture seems hardly to belong to the cinematic futuristic city of Gattaca (1997). This paper describes the emergence of this disjunction between cities squared on the governance of humans and the metabolic, informatic “megacentres” of biotechnology. How then, are biotechnological archives re-inscribing city life? Are there any signs of such anachronistic reinscriptions within the cinematic incorporations of the body that characterized Expo `67?

New Media in Fiction: Why the Novel's Protagonist Never Plays With His iPhone, Joanne McNeil
Can fiction accurately depict the way that individuals interact online? Or is new media, like the act of reading a book itself, nearly impossible to describe in a literary novel? For this paper I will look at how email, cell phones, and social media are addressed in contemporary novels.  I will draw on my interviews with contemporary novelists, editors, and book critics. The paper will detail the very particular frustrations of a novelist in describing a heartbreaking Facebook "status change" in a compelling fashion. I will also demonstrate what kind of shortcuts writers use to avoid social media altogether, while still setting novels in the present. You will find in my research that the novel is largely resilient to digital transformation. We might now consider every contemporary novel as a science fiction thought experiment imagining a world without communicative media.  

The Resilience of Paper, Joanne McNeish
Predictions of the paperless society began in 1975 but ittle theoretical or empirical work with consumers has been conducted as to why they resist giving up paper. This paper proposes and tests a research framework to explore consumers’ resistance to discontinuing an existing technology, the paper bill. It conceptualizes the paper bill as an artifact thereby broadening the dimensions of its evaluation to include utilitarian, functional and symbolic dimensions. The research contributes empirically by providing the first in-depth research of resistance to discontinuing paper bills. The sample of 200 respondents is random and representative of ‘real’ consumers (who use the internet and pay at least one bill online in a year). 

A Cultural Analysis of Musical Theatre Recordings and Professional Wrestling, Fiona A.E. McQuarrie, Leighann C. Neilson
Our study of the evolution of soundtrack recordings from Broadway musicals demonstrates the applicability of Griswold’s framework to business operations as changes to the business model are traced from the early 20th century into the 21st century. This analysis also builds on Griswold’s model by suggesting several refinements. Tracing the history of professional wrestling in North America over substantially the same time frame allows us to identify how changes in industry structure, broadcast technologies, and media channels influenced the form of the cultural object. Our analysis contributes to the discussion of how shifts in distribution and changes in media affect the stories we tell and the art forms we produce.

Mapping the Information Flow in Chinese Discussion Forums, Wu Mei
Based on a quantitative analysis of the interactive content of 14 major Chinese net forums in China and overseas over a one-year period (which stands for over 450,000 postings), and one of the first large-scale projects of its kind, this study explores Chinese Internet discussion boards from the perspective of information flow analysis. It argues that the Chinese net forums have become an alternative channel of information dissemination parallel to the state-controlled news media system. The inquiry of information redistribution in cyber space focuses on: a) the volume and content of information circulating over Chinese net forums; b) the pattern of crossposting in BBS communities in relation to the mainstream media in China; c) the intertwined trajectory of information flow networks among net forums in the global Chinese Internet; and d) the potential of the Internet forums as a quasi-news medium in regard to the domination of the state media system.

How to Grow a Community from the Ground, Karl J Mendonca
From Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nationalism and “imagined communities” to Howard Rheingold’s treatise on virtual communities and democracy, the media have become intrinsic to our understanding of community. In an attempt to synthesize theory and practice, students from Eugene Lang explore both the theoretical and practical implications of maintaining a community media website at thenewcampus.org, while proposing a hyperlocal community comprising students at The New School. This paper will discuss the use and importance of both digital and print based media as part of community building efforts in relation McLuhan’s definition of “hot” and “cold” media. Further, given the activist inclination of the initiative, we will also examine the implications of the choice of media on participation and collective action.

Archiving Television: Two Case Studies, Maire Messenger-Davies
This presentation discusses some issues raised in the preservation and analysis of television material including: ephemerality versus permanence; the status and nature of television archives; access to archives; the competing rights of producers and ‘consumers’ of TV material – including the needs of researchers; the value of specific kinds of TV products, which can determine what survives and what does not, as well as what will be made available for public access; the problems of changing formats. These issues will be discussed primarily through reference to two case studies (First Edition, Clayhanger), in which the author had experience of, and access to, some rare and inaccessible TV archive material. Some of this material may find its way onto the Web via You Tube and other ‘scrapbook’-type outlets. But much may not, and it is argued that scholars need to be vigilant about possible untapped sources of evidence when discussing and analysing audio-visual media and their histories.

Computational Papyrology, David Mimno, Hanna Wallach
The arid conditions of Egypt preserved a remarkable number of Ptolemaic and Roman papyrus documents. While these documents provide an unparalleled window into the culture of Egypt following the conquest of Alexander the Great, they can be difficult to work with. The quality of preservation varies: some documents are nearly complete while others are highly fragmentary. Furthermore, the language and cultural context of the papyri are unfamiliar even to scholars with a strong background in Greco-Roman antiquity. It is therefore these oldest documents that can benefit the most from cutting-edge text processing technologies. In this paper, we use advanced algorithms to enhance the reconstruction, searchability and analysis of an existing online corpus of papyri.

Rethinking the Love and Labor of Reading, Jun Mizukawa
Between December 2006 and August 2008, I conducted anthropological research in Tokyo in order to examine a moment of crisis in Japan. Inconsistent with Japan’s national imperatives to institutionalize a successful socio-technological transformation into a “digital information society,’ in 2005 the state unanimously passed legislation to preserve and promote traditional print text culture. By way of Wahon, a pre-modern Japanese-style publication, this paper explores the culturally specific articulations of digital media technological intervention and other ramifications of reading/writing practices in contemporary Japan.

Using a Digital Archive to Save Lives in a Rural Area in the age of HIV and AIDS, Thoko Mnisi
HIV and AIDS, once a death sentence, cab be managed and survived, if the information on anti-retrovirals (ARV) reaches a community and becomes accessible. In this paper, I argue that a digital archive can make a difference even though such archives may have their own limitations. The challenge lies in extending access to information and communications technologies (ICT), in this case to educators and learners in a rural community. Digital archives provide electronic libraries for collecting, managing, dissemination and using relevant data in addressing the pandemic. This paper outlines the use of a digital archive, a data set of staged photos around the HIV/AIDS stigma, and records the experiences of educators in two rural schools, exploring their views on using it in their teaching to address HIV/AIDS stigma.

Beyond the Remix: Clarifying Mastery in Virtual Environments, Mary Leigh Morbey, Carolyn Steele
This paper focuses on the impact and potential of virtual 3D internet environments on higher education as part of the learning metaverse (Casino et al., 2007) that fosters advanced knowledge production and the implications these dynamics have for our current understandings of what it means to teach and learn in these environments. Using the virtual environments of Second Life and The Croquet Project as case studies for the engagement of the changing media environment in higher education contexts, we examine the potential and actual promise for tertiary education of 3D immersive technology to develop metamodal mastery – the ability to create, analyze, and synthesize data, artifacts, epistemologies, and vocabularies across contextual boundaries such as academic disciplines. The problems and possibilities of metamodal mastery as a viable contribution also will be discussed.

Spaces of Participation: Interfaces, Conventions, Routines, Eggo Muller
Against the background of current debates about participatory media blurring the boundaries between the spheres of production and consumption, this paper discusses how different forms of participatory television and websites – America’s Most Wanted, Big Brother , YouTube – create and institutionalize ‘spaces of participation’. The concept of ‘institutionalization’ as ‘socially constructed templates for actions, generated and maintained through ongoing interactions’, is developed as a framework for the microanalysis of the relation between the interface as constructed by a television program or a online video sharing site, and the specific forms of user interaction as they develop in participatory practices. The paper argues that though spaces of participation of online video sharing sites seem less restricted than those of participatory television shows at the first site, users’ activities are structured by the architecture of the interface, by cultural conventions of video making and by routinized practices on online video sharing sites.

Are Machines Trustworthy to Preserve National Heritage?, Claude Mussou
Basically, storage strategies are based on computer scripts, and hence machines are preserving the national heritage online. In my presentation I would like to adress a number of problems facing web archiving. On a global web of information, for instance, are national borders still prevalent as principles for harvesting? And in what ways are public policies fit to counterbalance private enterprises like Google, not the least in the new cloud computing era? Not only are heritage insitutions dealing with a new kind of dematerialised knowledge – an immense flow of bits – the basic assumptions and principles regulating what to store have become quite obsolete in the binary domain. Since most information is no longer static, but rather dynamic and persistently changing its structure, web harvesting has, thus, to be performed according to constantly updated sets of parameters.

Transitioning from Access to the Media to Access to Audiences, Philip Napoli
This paper considers the policy implications of the fundamental de-institutionalization taking place in the production and distribution of media content.  The migration of production and (more recently and more importantly) distribution capacity to individual media users, combined with the demonstrated willingness of audiences to consume such user-generated and user-distributed content, call into question fundamental assumptions underlying many aspects of media policy about the relationship between media institutions and their audiences.  Specifically, traditional media policymaking has been premised largely on the assumption that access to the media was highly limited and exclusive.  Reflecting this notion, media policy advocacy has historically been heavily focused on increasing access to the media for those individuals and institutions outside the bounds of traditional media organizations.

The Newseum and its Digital Modes of News Storage, Exhibition and Transmission, Mark Nimkoff
The Newseum, “the world’s only interactive museum of news,” constitutes a novel intervention into public space.  We can read the Newseum as an unprecedented form of representation for the news media, providing spatial, narrative, experiential, and performative means by which the discourse of journalism pursues a museum poetics of technologically enhanced cultural re-legitimation. I critique the Newseum’s technologically sophisticated memorial spaces, including a Journalists Memorial honoring journalism’s “fallen heroes” who have sacrificed their lives to bring us the news, and also the Newseum’s multimedia  9/11 Gallery, which is anchored by the figure of a mangled World Trade Center antenna fragment that memorializes the once-infinite reach of the news industry.

Narratives of Literature in Print and Cyberspace, Annika Olsson
This paper will focus on the reading of literature and how the experience of reading, and more specifically the reading of books in translation, is narrated in print and in cyberspace (You Tube). Inspired by Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature (2008) I will try and use her four modes of textual engagement (recognition, enchantment, knowledge and shock) to analyse and discuss how personal and professional readings of translated literature interacts and how it affects us in our daily work as researchers, as well as how it influences the way we perceive of literature. This paper is part of an ongoing project of mine: Books in Translation and Classification, where the Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck plays a central role.

Are Wooden Pixels More Pagan Than Plastic Pixels? The Slavic Idol of Swiatowid in Old Materials and New Media, Anna Olszewska, Scott Simpson
Polish Neo-Pagans represent a small minority on the Polish religious landscape and frequently rely on new media, especially the Internet, to maintain contact. The image of Światowid (based on one or more of three “originals”: the textual description by Saxo Grammaticus, a 9th century stone figure found in the Zbruch river, and a small wooden figure discovered in Wolin) has appeared in numerous modern contexts, including artistic representations and public monuments. Digital representations of Światowid, when created or disseminated for religious reasons, are conservative in attempting to maintain a close iconic relationship of material to meaning, preferring ‘wooden’ pixels (color, texture, attributes) to pixels that call to mind modern, artificial, industrial, or manufactured materials.

Mashing-Up as Video Essay Writing: A Distinct Form of Literacy, Jamie O’Neil
McLuhan described “the medium is the massage” as a “collide-oscope of interfaced situations” i.e. a series of preexisting concepts that were juxtaposed and combined in interesting ways. His famous puns, aphorisms and neologisms served to open up new possibilities for his concepts because he realized that “precision is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion.” This paper reflects on a recent project (http://www.McLuhanRemix.com) that “the death of the author” has only further enabled. Remixing (and by extension, mashing-up) are an important form of literacy for digital natives, whose YouTube mash-ups point to a day when Godard’s idea of the video essay (exemplified in Histoire(s) du cinema) will supplant the .doc. The Medium Is the Mix is a video essay that was created with this in mind, ironically, it was made for a class of students who were turned-off by reading McLuhan’s words only on paper… this is ironic because it was for this reason that McLuhan (with the help of Fiore and Agel) remixed his own message in a pictorial, graphic, non-linear, “cool” paperback in the first place.

Interfacing the Haptic: Cybernetics and the Design of Cutaneous Communication Systems, 1892-1960, David Parisi
In this paper, I detail a series of developments in the history of tactility that served to set the stage for the invention of haptic interfaces. I examine the specific moment when the doctrine of facts constituting the science of touch was dubbed the haptic at the end of the nineteenth century. I then chronicle a series of technologies developed in the middle decades of twentieth that attempted to translate Morse code into tactile sensations by distributing a network of computer-controlled vibrators across the skin. I connect these technologies to the contemporaneous work on Information Theory by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, showing how the engineers of cutaneous communication systems drew on the Shannon-Weaver model for inspiration. My intent in recalling this history is to demonstrate the operation of a technoscientific haptics far in advance of its usage in contemporary interface design. 

Mobile Communication as a Bridge Between Virtual and Actual Spaces: Brazilian Context, Eduardo Campos Pellanda
Mobile communications in countries like Brazil had a strong impact in many different ways. This paper covers many aspects of this interaction and try to indentify the transformations caused by mobile media. Brazil is a unique country in its extreme differences, with part of the population living under a marginal condition, and at the same time being one of the world’s greatest markets for technology products, largely adopting digital culture.

Why the Soviet Internet Failed, Benjamin Peters
Why wasn’t there a Soviet ARPANET equivalent? Building on fresh archival evidence, this paper examines several surprising leads: one, that the first person to conceive of a national computer network for civilian use was the Soviet cyberneticist and engineer, Colonel Anatolii Kitov; two, that Soviet economic cybernetics tried repeatedly but could not build such a network; three, that their failure can be traced to at least two causes: first, that bureaucratic infighting over resources owes much to the hierarchically decentralized, cybernetic-inspired designs shared by both Soviet networks and bureaucracies in the 1960s. The Soviet case study, in particular, provides at least two useful corrections for further scholarship: it corrects (at least the vocabulary of) the conventional critique of the Soviet Union as a centralized (rather than decentralized) entity and it cautions against present-day enthusiasm for the politically and technologically decentralized (rather than distributed) informational flows and organization.

Calendar, Clock, Tower, John Durham Peters
In this paper, I explore three “old” media that deal with fundamentals of time and space. Whatever time is, clocks and calendars measure, control, and constitute it. Calendrical systems are abstract devices of cognitive, political, and religious organization. Clocks, likewise, are data-processors that sit at the heart of modern life. Towers are related media – time-heralds that claim dominion over space via sight and sound. These media – so fundamental that they are sometimes fail to be seen as media at all – negotiate heaven and earth, nature and culture, cosmic and social organization. As such, they are among the most profound media of political and religious power and control. Their analysis points to larger implications: 1) the relevance of old (ancient) media for understanding so-called new media and 2) the neglected importance of the logistical or organizational role of media.

After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life, Dominic Pettman
This paper explores the different ways in which the capacity to “respond” has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Beginning with a rather harrowing telephone message, sampled by Glaswegian band Aerogramme, in which an anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the “human element” captured in recordings of the voice. Using Eric Santner’s notion of “creaturely life” as a conceptual lens, I argue that the melancholy poetics which often accompanies the sub-field of media hauntology are still too anthropocentric, given the continued investment in human exceptionalism (albeit of an abject kind). Rather, the cybernetic interdependence of humans, animals, and machines should be fully acknowledged and appreciated, in order to avoid the conflation of pathos with the human; thereby perpetuating Descartes’ (other) error: the assumption that animals and/or machines can react, but not respond.

A Contemporary History of TV Guide, Karen Petruska
In this paper, I examine TV Guide’s dramatic fall from its position as the television guidance publication, found on top of 25% of American coffee tables at its peak in the 1970s. A complete contemporary history of TV Guide is impossible to write because its history continues to unfold.  However, a certain chapter of the magazine’s life seems to have ended with the Macrovision sale.  My study begins during the late 1990s with the introduction of the Internet into American homes.  Examining the repeated sale of TV Guide through the year 2000, I investigate the changing status of the magazine with each change of corporate ownership.  The continued existence of TV Guide results less from its relevance as a television guidance publication than its name-recognition.  Examining the power of branding, I will investigate why the magazine’s brand identity continues to benefit its corporate owners even while the product that developed the brand loses its hold on the market.

Containment and Articulation: Media Technology and the Perception of the Material World, Tom Pettitt
To the extent the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” which opened with the dominance of printed mediation is currently being closed by the emergence of electronic, digital and internet alternatives, it may be predicted that associated changes in cultural production and cognition which emerged in the early-modern period will soon be, or are now being, reversed. They include the matter of the independence, autonomy, and stability of the individual cultural product explored at MiT5, and this presentation will focus on modulations in perception of the material world, as reflected for example in verbal and visual representations of the human body and the spatial environment. The opening of the Gutenberg Parenthesis saw an increasing tendency towards perception in terms of containment (the body as a multilayered envelope; the environment as superimposed enclosures). This supplanted an alternative system of perception, recently identified by medievalist Guillemette Bolens, in terms of articulation: a sequence of linked units (the body as limbs and joints; the environment as avenues and junctions), whose return we may accordingly look for. It may not be a coincidence that the Gutenberg parenthesis can itself be expressed in terms of a modulation (now being reversed) from articulated to contained media. These changes may in turn be symptomatic of more basic trends: a “parenthetical” need to treat the world as comprising self-contained categories, in contrast to an “extra-parenthetical” worldview based on overlapping units in an articulated sequence, with all that this implies for (in)tolerance of hybridity and categorical transgression.

A Path through the Virtual Museum: On Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Joana Pimenta
One of the most important filmmakers dealing with the questions of new media in relation to film, Chris Marker has been concerned with the ways in which new media are entering and reconfiguring not only film language but also forms of spectatorship. Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition, created as part of the work he has been developing on the online platform Second Life and first released on his channel on YouTube, seems to put in place a number of interesting questions. To begin with, it presents a reconfiguration of a number of canonical images that are present in our collective memory, questioning in that sense the ways in which we relate to the digital archive and how our collective memory is being reshaped.

Next to the Book: Towards a Theory of Translational Humanism, Andrew Piper
Since Augustine, the book has consistently been understood through a notion of proximity, its being “next to” or “at hand.”  When Augustine in his Confessions hears a voice urging him to “take it and read, take it and read [tolle lege, tolle lege]” just prior to his moment of conversion, we can see how this foundational work of the humanist canon was arguing for a theory of the book that depended upon its graspability, in both a material and intellectual sense. Today, nothing seems more uncertain than the book’s continued proximity and, by extension, the continued efficacy of the humanities for which Augustine’s work had come to stand as an essential cornerstone.  This paper attempts to rethink this increasingly unsettled relationship between the future of the book and the future of the humanities by looking at alternative ways of how the book has been understood throughout the past.

Web 2.0, Social Networking Technologies and Human Rights Organizations, Hector Postigo
This paper will present preliminary findings from a National Science Foundation funded study on social networking/web 2.0 architectures and their use by social movement/human rights advocacy organizations. The article presents the case of the Digital Universe Foundation, a non-for-profit organization that is building social network architectures to bring together human rights organizations under a common portal system. The portal system (called the Human Rights Portal) brings together activist networks, professional advocacy organizations and experts to form user communities that coordinate activism at all levels of a movement, connecting local grass roots initiatives with global advocacy. This initiative has the potential to change the dynamics that have historically existed between the media and social movements in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it places the power of issue framing squarely in the hands of movement actors.

I'm Not Here Right Now: Virtual Tourism in Fictional Worlds, Ksenia Prasolova, Irina V.Yegorova
Fictional representation of real or imaginary spaces is probably the last thing that comes to mind when one thinks of digital tourism. Yet world-building and subsequent touring of the newly-built world has long been one of the central issues for the writers: how does one go about creating such an environment that is realistic enough for the story to unfold, and alluring enough for the readers to want to visit and revisit it? The question is even more pressing for the young Russian writers of both fan and original fiction who tend to prefer setting their stories in foreign (as in ‘not here’) locations. In this paper, we take a closer look at the types of spaces created by young Russian writers, the reasons for choosing specific locations, the map of the virtual world created as a result, and the principle distinction between fictional tourists and fictional travelers.

The Perishable Paratext: Emerging Forms of Ephemera in Transmedia Networks, Bob Rehak
Recent trends in media evolution are resulting in a proliferation of texts that contrasts sharply with the restricted publication and distribution systems associated with traditional media industries, and thus requires new languages of classification and evaluation. This paper explores emergent forms of ephemera in transmedia networks, considering how, amid the explosion of content, user access, and participatory engagements offered by new media, new types of “forgetting” and “absence” are being produced. Setting contemporary ephemera against a historical backdrop of other moments of “collective forgetting,” I consider the relationship of current evaluation methods to storage and tagging practices on both a professional level and in the domain of fans, personalized libraries, and collecting cultures – and the impact of our current activities on what future generations will be able to know and understand of this era’s transmedia networks.

Playing With the Text: An Interactive Digital Archive of Early Moveable Books for Children, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
This paper concerns an idea for developing an interactive digital archive of early moveable books for children from the 17th-19th centuries that include flap books, paper doll books and toy theatres. All these texts consist of words, images, and moveable parts. These items are texts of play in a double sense. The reader/viewer has to engage physically with part of the text in order to make meaning but many artifacts are based on popular performance so are cross-over texts from the stage to “page.” Considering these texts as media on paper platforms the child becomes an “interactor” with various degrees of activity or narrative agency, as discussed by Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) Thereby, the texts are forerunners of interactive narrative media today on digital platforms. By applying historical comparative media concepts and by showing how “play” was part of the design and use of some of the earliest children’s texts, this project could change how the history of children’s literature and culture are understood to progress in a linear, developmental fashion from “instruction to delight.” 

User-Generated Content of an Online Newspaper: A Contested Form of Civic Engagement, Ryan M. Rish
Framed within New Literacy Studies, this study uses a critical discourse analytic lens to examine the literacy practices of user-generated content in an online newspaper as a contested form of civic engagement. The analysis focuses on news articles, video webcasts, blog posts, and related comments of the online version of a print newspaper situated in a Midwestern city. The study seeks to understand how the social practices of users, journalists, and public officials represented in the discourse of the online newspaper constitute forms of civic engagement, as well as how these various stakeholders take up online community literacy practices in relation to other forms of civic engagement. The study also considers what changes to the social order or practices would be necessary for user-generated content to be regarded as a legitimate form of civic engagement, as is hoped for by theorists and journalists invested in civic and participatory journalism.

Storing and Transmitting Identity: The Emergence of the Modern US Passport, Craig Robertson
This paper argues the modern documentation of individual identity is a problem centered on the need to transmit information about identity in a reliable and accurate form. This argument is introduced and developed through an analysis of the emergence of the modern passport in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. The early development of the modern passport is used to argue that as a modern problem official identification was rethought as the collection, classification and circulation of information – that is it became an archival problem. This occurred through bureaucratic logics of objectivity. I argue that this new understanding of identity allowed the federal government to be able to more easily retrieve information about citizens; it enabled the state to “remember” individuals through the production of an official identity.

New Media Literacies By Design: The Game School, Alice Robison
Gaming literacies are collections of activities, ways of thinking and participating, designing and playing, all of which contribute to a set of interrelated and interdependent complex systems for thinking about games and gaming. This chapter discusses a media practice sometimes referred to as "games-based thinking" or "gaming literacies" as they are conceived of by the creators of the Game School, set to open in New York City in 2009. The school is designed to highlight these gaming literacies and use them as a framework for developing an entire sixth-grade curriculum. The school is in its early stages of development but tools and ideas around gaming literacies are underway.  This chapter discusses these tools and ideas in-progress.

Video Education for the Netcasting Era: Towards a Critical Practice Pedagogy, Vincent F. Rocchio
This paper examines the shifting terrain of video production and reception in the transition from its broadcasting—or more accurately—cablecasting phase, to its emerging netcasting era.  Historically, the transition from broadcasting to cablecasting expanded the distribution of video, but changed little else in terms of program format or styles. The transitional period between cablecasting and netcasting, however, demonstrates that there will profound changes in terms of access to production and distribution, as technological advancements allow the web to function as a distribution network. Using netcasting examples such as Lonelygirl 15, Machinima.com, and Jib-Jab,  this paper demonstrates that the netcasting era of video will create the kind of paradigm shift in style and format that the change from broadcast to cable-cast did not produce.

An Uneasy Ocean of Air: Sound Waves as Media and Metaphors of Storage and Transmission, Tara Rodgers
This paper examines metaphors of waves and allegories of maritime voyage in foundational acoustics textbooks from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These texts established concepts and techniques for the analysis, control and creation of sound waves, and thus set conditions of possibility for audio technologies that would emerge in subsequent decades. In the texts, technical descriptions of sound waves are expressions of a mythic subjectivity: sound waves are movements between states of disturbance and rest, and a universal (white, male) voyager is tossed in their midst, pressed into the adventure of navigating and taming the waves. Through critical analysis of these texts, I will discuss sound waves as media of storage and transmission, and propose a feminist epistemology of sound waves based on concepts of movement, friction, and touch.

The British Postcode at Large, Rebecca Ross
In this paper, I briefly detail the history, formal structure, and a variety of official and unofficial applications, of the UK postcode system to life in the UK. The UK postcode is unique because it combines extreme precision with a substantial degree of human legibility. In London, if asked where one lives, it is common to respond with the first two or three digits of one's postcode. You can eat at the N1 Cafe or go dancing at W5. At the same time, a full postcode, such as NW1 9HZ, constitutes a precise reference to a single specific building, useful as a sat nav or online mapping shortcut, for example. I consider the possibility of the postcode or zip code in general as an example of a non-digital, perhaps even a pre-digital, infrastructure that facilitates interactions between mobile and durable media. The UK postcode system in particular renders this infrastructure transparent and therefore, I argue, promotes a sophisticated reading of relationships between mobile and durable media. I conclude with a variety of examples of attempts to leverage this nuance for creative and critical purposes.

Metaphorical Game Design – a Chance for Independent Game Developers to Create Unique Experiences, Doris C. Rusch
This presentation tackles the question how we can systematically expand the experiential scope of games and make games that allow for profoundly moving and insightful experiences. It is specifically targeted at people who are interested in small, unconventional but powerful games – be it as designers, players or researchers. It will be explained how metaphors can be a great way to make abstract concepts tangible, thus facilitating games that are based on complex abstract ideas such as love, honor, dignity or grief instead of physical concepts most commercial productions are based on. Drawing on the experiences of designing Akrasia – a game based on the concept of addiction and made during the eight-week summer program at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab – and the newest game project that deals with “letting go,“ the potentials and pitfalls of metaphorical game design shall be discussed.

Interfacelift: Modding the Doors of Perception to the William Blake Archive, Jon Saklofske
Disappointed by the failure of the web-based William Blake Archive (and digital archives more generally) to augment the provocative innovations of its source material, I have been working to create an alternative interface, a modified way of accessing and participating in this archive’s digital versions of Blake’s composite art.  Gaining the ability to refashion the object of critical interest and attention from within, readers are invited to occupy and populate the spaces between Blake’s pages with multiple critical points of view.  This modding activity signifies a possible path for the future of literary criticism and archival use, a “Web 2.0” attitude of lucid co-creation and critical self-awareness within archival spaces, an aggregation of interface communities whose centripetal discourse fields necessarily acknowledge but are not bound by book-based practices.  Unofficial portals and unauthorized applications developed in relation to existing databases of literary and artistic material offer unique opportunities to creatively extend the meaningful functions of traditional media forms within digital environments.

Encyclopedic Endeavor and the Internet, Erinc Salor
By studying Wikipedia through a historically comprehensive background, I hope to address important questions regarding the new media and society with a heightened sense of cohesion and increased overall validity. What does Wikipedia, with its content and form, represent for encyclopedic writing in the future? In which issues does the encyclopedic heritage provide helpful guidance? And what aspects of established encyclopedias are merely dismissible conjectures? Also, assessing the relevancy and explanatory power of media studies literature on this issue will be a very important addition to the findings of my study. With this study, I propose to locate Wikipedia into this broader historical and theoretical framework in order to provide a better understanding of its revolutionary aspects concerning our approach to knowledge and its organization.

Legal Distinctions of Communications, Sarah Salter
The paper examines the distinction between “stored communications” and electronic communications in the process of transmission under U.S. federal law protecting and limiting privacy in communications.  A possible third category has also been suggested, that of communications held in transient electronic storage in the process of transmission through the internet. The distinction is made in order to control the process by which law enforcement investigators can lawfully examine messages thus transmitted and stored, and also serves to define private claims to damages that can be made where individuals are charged with invading privacy in violation of statutory standards. In general, there are more stringent protections for information in the process of transmission than there are for stored communications.

The Encyclopedia and the Gutenberg Parenthesis, Lars Ole Sauerberg
Now, at the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the material existence of the encyclopedia as printed book is yielding to the hyper-text search facilities of the internet, and new, open-ended and open-contribution encyclopedias like Wikipedia. It will further be suggested that the change from a finite, static set of volumes (the numerous encyclopedias of the 19th and 20th centuries) relying on collective production, use, and support (authors and users sharing basic ontological and epistemological notions) to an infinite, dynamic repository relying on personal production, use, and support (authors and users cultivating widely differing agendas ) entails a cognitive change regarding knowledge just as revolutionary as the change at the opening of the Parenthesis from the encyclopedia as something idiosyncratically designed and with limited access possibilities (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance) to something standardized and open to readers through printed volumes in private and public libraries (Enlightenment, 19th, and 20th centuries).

Contact Audio – Evolved Modes of Listening in Dynamic Media, Julius Schaffer
Analog reproduction limited digital expression, as the technological necessities of 1970s system architecture put crushing restraints on audio storage and integration. Gradually, as hardware progressed, digital artists were presented a wider range within which to pursue their craft. Dual-tone transcription systems (the Atari 2600, for example) gave way to 8-bit music and audio samples.  And as digital synthesizers were developed in the music world, MIDI sequencing became available to more advanced systems. The resultant sounds in many ways mirrored the evolving digital music of the 1980s, though often more minimalist in nature. With these tools in hand, media creators were quick to move beyond simple call-and-response applications of interactive audio. These methods of manipulation enable the theoretical reappropriation of sound; though still largely subsidiary to the visual, the role of music, effects, and even ambient noise expands into the realms of digital instrumentation and sonic navigation.

In Words We Trust: The Changing Medium of ‘Truth,’ Claudia Schwarz
Each technology surpasses its predecessor in the capacity to represent, create, and recreate worlds. There are still words—messages—in all media (telegraph, radio, television, internet), words in which people trust. In the attempt to argue for an inherent connection between the development of the media, the perception of truth, and narrative style, this paper outlines the history of media technology in the U.S. from the first printing presses to current computer and online tools.  From a trans-national perspective, one of the points I will argue is that the passion for ‘truth’ to be conveyed through the media is fairly specific to American culture and rooted in its very beginnings. Based on the reasoning from before, it should therefore not come as a surprise that much of the technological development in the media was actually invented and put to practice in the U.S. How is the history of media technology connected to the American (and global) mind? And in which form of transmission can and should we trust?

Game Studies, Literary Anthropology, and Strategies of Distinction; or, Why It Pays to Take Another Look at the Work of Wolfgang Iser, Philipp Schweighauser
This paper argues that game studies can profit from reflections on issues other than narrative by a literary theorist whose work has been unduly reduced to those concerns. In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), Aarseth refers to the work of Wolfgang Iser as one influential model of literary communication that does not help explain the specific forms and functions of nonlinear, multicursal computer games. More specifically, Aarseth argues that Iser's notion of Leerstellen (blanks) cannot account for the kinds of openings cybertexts offer their users. Yet the later work of Iser is a much more promising avenue of exploration for ludologists. Iser's The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993) develops what is arguably the most sustained theory of fictionality available today. While honed in the study of literary texts, Iser's theory can tell us much about the cultural work of fiction in a variety of media without leveling the distinctions between different cultural practices. As such, Iser's later work does not provide yet another framework for reading games as stories but challenges games studies scholars to rethink some of their central concepts, in particular "play," "simulation," and "immersion."

Paperless Classrooms and Kitchens, Andrea Sciacca
The act of teaching writing, and celebrating its production through various forms of creative instruction will enhance not only the skill-set of the culinary student, but also the aesthetic experience of their clients to be - namely, those of us who wish to eat.  In order for the chef-as-artist and the chef-as-scientist to flourish concurrently, the conversation must continue, and the act of writing must be employed.  Without recipe, there can be no preservation [nor mutation] – and without writing, there can be no dialogue. As an instructor of writing, I maintain and employ a strictly paperless classroom.  Our required journals are kept on blogs, papers are transmitted, edited, and saved on GoogleDocs, collaborative presentations are produced using an assortment of digital media, and photojournalism assignments are used to track the process of perfecting the historiographic methods when exploring regional cuisine and family heritage as preserved through recipe.  Over the last two years, I’ve begun to work more closely with a handful of the chef instructors, and we are reshaping our curriculum into something that blends classical technique with cutting edge technology.  The paper I wish to present focuses on some of the most memorable moments of merging the two, in a manner that seeks to preserve, rather than destroy both disciplines.

Physical Practice: The Artifacts of Noise Art, Nick Seaver
“Noise” usually refers to interference, unintentional sound that impedes communication or causes discomfort. Starting early in the twentieth century, however, artists began exploring the possibilities using noise in their works, raising the question: Can noise be made and distributed intentionally? The development of recording technology has influenced this distribution, enabling the dissemination of novel sounds and introducing new kinds of noises. Noise artists operate in a peculiar and illuminating relationship with mediating technologies, using them to communicate what is thought to be uncommunicative. In this paper, I examine the physical dissemination of works by the artists Yasunao Tone, Christian Marclay, and the group The Loud Objects, reading these artifacts for the shifting definitions and associations of “noise” in contemporary noise art practice.

The Confusion Behind the Internet Bans in Turkey, Digdem Sezen, Tonguc Sezen
It has been almost a year since the YouTube ban in Turkey started. The problem has its roots in Turkey’s freedom of speech records and legal confusion of Turkish courts; but also reflects the confusion of the state on dealing with the new media.The Turkish state, like many, was used to having legal control over the analog distribution of information and ideas. Printed material; newspapers, magazines and handouts were collected by the offices of the public prosecutors and the police; broadcasts of TV channels were recorded by the Radio TV Supreme Council and people had to get permission for meetings and events, which could be recorded by police cameras. For the state, however, the Internet created a medium which could not be observed or recorded easily. The banning of whole “distribution channels” like YouTube or Blogger instead of specific web pages shows the confusion and lack of knowledge on the issue, and the tradition of controlling illegal content through controlling the whole medium.

Margins of Digital Databases, Yongsuk Shim
A new mode of organizing information has emerged and become dominant in the era of new media: a digital form of database. The relational database that has recently taken a predominant position among other types of databases, for instance, offers a way to query it with the set-theoretic operations, produces automatically organized tables of data elements according to the attributes, and thus results in its self-describing structure in which formal logics will determine the arrangement of contents. Moreover, considering that database and narrative represent two distinct and major modes of organizing information there would be strong temptation, as Lev Manovich presented, to regard them as natural enemies. Narrative, however, still remains the necessary ‘Other’ to the ontology of (relational) database, functioning as an effective counter means to the tendency of ‘monopoly of knowledge’ by database as a monopoly of knowledge always invites competition from inside as well as outside.

The International Circulation and Afterlife of Doctor Who, Shawn Shimpach
This paper is about the durable and the portable in television programming amidst the transforming global economics governing the television industry under neo-liberalism. It considers a specific case study to analyze both the spatial (transnational) and temporal (transmedia) assumptions that increasingly constitute the prerequisites for television production and circulation, even for public service broadcasters. It does so by treating the commodity sign of television programming as both cultural object and meaningful narrative, simultaneously. Specifically, this paper interrogates the new iteration of the BBC program Doctor Who to consider developing institutional strategies organized around the "afterlife" of television programming.

Investigating the Migrating Dimensions of Bollywood Dance, Sangita Shresthova
Today, Bollywood dance, a colloquial term used to describe choreography inspired by song-and-dance sequences in Hindi films, is fast becoming a global phenomenon in urban centers from Sidney, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Kathmandu, to London. Through an investigation of the increasingly dominant presence of fan-produced Bollywood dance videos on youtube.com this paper explores the ways in which this cinema permeates mediated identities and creates virtual communities that challenge geographical constraints even as they remain firmly rooted in the physical embodied experience of Bollywood dance as film reception. I argue that Bollywood dance on youtube.com represents a rather novel site of cultural reception in which performance, audience and commercial film cross reference, challenge and influence and remediate each other in ways that challenge conventional understandings of production and consumption, embodiment and migration.

Mobile Phone Movies: A New Format or Old Hat?, Jan Simons
Since the video camera became a standard component of the mobile phone, a new type of cinema has emerged. It goes under names such as mobile phone movies, cell phone movies, shorts, or micro movies but it is best known as ‘Pocket Cinema.’  There is already a dedicated mobile phone movie festival circuit and many independent film festivals like have their mobile phone film sections, often with open contests. The name ‘pocket cinema’ suggests an analogy with the pocket book: it evokes portability and mobility, easy digestibility, entertainment and divertissement and highly forgettable disposability. The most succinct definition of pocket films is ‘films made with and/or for the mobile phone.’ Within these developments, the discourse around pocket cinema looks like a rear-garde movement trying to preserve cinema’s ‘specificity’ in the face of an increasingly pragmatic and hybrid audiovisual culture. A new vocabulary is needed to come to terms with mobile moving images. Here’s a preview.

Tin-Can Telecommunication: Performances and Interventions, sam smiley
AstroDime Transit Authority is a research and media collective organized around ideas of transportation and communication. Its first appearance was on Bumpkin Island in Boston and our charge was to connect several groups of people through utilizing tin can telephones. With respect to this conference, we are interested in the re-embodiment of telecommunications systems in order to examine marketing systems and procedures. We use interventionist practices to make these systems transparent. Our methodologies include video interviews and documentation, surveys, performances, and research into the history of low-tech telecommunication systems. In our practice, we use the metaphors created through the marketing of “hi tech” communication systems such as cell phones, and overlay those metaphors onto a “low tech” communication system such as tin can telephones. In doing that, we hope to raise questions about the uses and misuses of communication systems in contemporary society.

On Archival Clouds, Pelle Snickars
National archives and libraries are today faced with an information paradox. As a pioneer in web archiving the National Library of Sweden, for instance, started collecting web pages in 1997. Now, more than a decade later the web istelf seems to be turning into an archive of its own. Since the current cloud computing trend uses the web as an archival platform, the irony is that cultural heritage institutions are trying hard to download information being uploaded in the first place to be stored in the new archival cloud at, say Flickr or YouTube. Computing  clouds  are complex but can roughly be divided into three layers: infrastructure, applications and a periphery where they interact with the real world. The latter is often linked to the next generation of mobile Internet devices (MIDs) with “online” as a default value. Why save an image locally on your camera, when it will automatically be stored through an applicaton in the cloud? The numerous “mash-up” applications of Google Maps of course serves as a case in point. A mixture of subroutines and reused programes are interacting and can easily be integrated with one another inside the cloud. So, even if the ALM-sector (archives, libraries & museums) still remains skeptical and doubtful towards the Internet in general – and the web in particular – the current information transfer towards online storage raises a number of archival questions. Confidence, trust and reliability are for instance keywords if the ALM-sector really whishes to move online and harvest the benefits of new binary media. Whether one likes it or not, computer science will affect archival practices.

Media Art, Culture, and Digital Storytelling, Young Imm K. Song
This project explores how digital storytelling can serve as a useful tool in cultural studies. As an after-school program with first-generation immigrant children at the Community Youth Center, it engages the children in digital storytelling activities as a way to encourage the children to express their understanding of American culture and the way in which their native heritage stays embedded within. This serves to help the children develop a sense of pride and respect for their ancestors’ cultures while finding a way to integrate this with an American culture. This also provides an opportunity for them to think about their social identities and cultural curiosities while building self-esteem and self-confidence. Furthermore, it provides a way for educators to incorporate digital media art and technology in the classroom or community center. Such teaching methods can be adapted to other multicultural and cross-cultural topics.

Considering Diaspora and Social Networks: ICT Design Possibilities, Ramesh Srinivasan
The submitted paper explores the interaction between emergent information technologies, social networks and “community.” This is investigated via the framework of cultural and diasporic studies. The potential of cultural ontologies to create locally relevant information and communications technologies (ICTs) is explored. A set of testable hypotheses that researchers can consider is presented to examine these impacts. This is presented via an ongoing effort, the case study of the South Asian Web, a diasporic social network system designed for a community of South Asian immigrants in the Los Angeles (California, USA) region.

Transmedia Noir: Genre Continuity and Transformation Across Media, Louisa Stein
This talk investigates the continuities and transformations of generic discourse across media formats and over time. Contemporary genre theorists such as Rick Altman and Jason Mittell consider genres as complex circuits of meaning that bridge media formats and history/time. I focus here on film noir, a generic concept that seems especially bound up with questions of technology and with notions of temporality and nostalgia. Specifically, I look at new manifestations of film noir in television, new media extensions, and independent digital arenas. I consider the way in which these texts combine contemporary investments in nostalgia and pastness with questions of the moral (or immoral) import of technology. Many scholars of film noir have located film noir’s particular cultural tropes and social critiques within time-bound historical and aesthetic movements. Moreover, the generic label of film noir is embedded with the assumption that these meanings and representational continuities are linked to the specific medium of film. However, we can recognize noir as a discourse that has thrived and shifted over the decades and across media, with its meanings transformed and transposed to specific cultural moments and media contexts. This talk considers these shifts and their ramifications, as I explore the manifestations of noir that surface in contemporary television and new media.

The Media-Enhanced Museum Experience – Debating the Use of Media Technology in Cultural Exhibitions, Maggie Stogner
Today’s new media, with its myriad combinations of creation and distribution, captures and shares our world from nanosecond to nanosecond. And it provides an unprecedented opportunity to share history and culture with people of all ages around the globe. Increasingly, exhibitions include high-def video, 3-D movies, animation, music, sound effects, sets and lighting effects, holographic imagery, some now triggered by GPS. Museums are also embracing new media to extend the museum experience beyond walls, from the Newseum’s Second Life site to the participatory internet model of “Exhibit Commons,” to engage more and younger visitors in exciting new ways.  But critics caution that such use entertains at the expense of accuracy and education. Now is the time to debate best practices for how we use new media technology to enrich, not undermine, our understanding of history and cultures. How can museums ensure use of media technology to enhance and educate rather than misinform or dumb-down? Immersive, multi-sensory experiences appeal to a wide audience, but how can museums avoid reducing the cultural experience to a Disney or Las Vegas-like caricature?

Figuring Out Fakery, Lana Swartz 
Counterfeit luxury goods—those fake bags sold in street markets, on the internet, and at suburban “purse parties” all over the world—are produced in violation of intellectual property norms, sold illegally, fake. But what does it mean for an object to be fake? How is it even possible for something that has physical properties to be fake? Yet clearly, we must mean something when we use terminology. What is the history of fakeness? Is there something in our current cultural moment, with its emphasis on figuring out how “virtuality” figures into our lives, that makes “fakeness” particularly relevant? In this paper, I attempt to address these questions by conducting a close reading of two competing and complementary histories – one popular, Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster and one academic, Mark C. Taylor’s Confidence Games – that address something that could be called an intellectual genealogy of fakeness. Both attempt to narrativize the shift from real to fake, from materiality to immateriality, though in very different ways.

Digital Germanic Philology? Questions, Challenges and Obstacles for Scholars of German, Michael Szurawitzki
Is the digital future a blessing for philologists, especially those working the vast area of Germanic Languages & Literatures? Or does it come with problems that jeopardize philology, in the Germanic and the broader scope? This paper sets out to explore the status quo of digital source material in Germanic philology, ranging from medieval manuscripts to 21st Century e-books and their at-times highly restricted availability to the scientific community. Do we really face a quantum leap in terms of open access, or is this leap rather confined to those only who pay the exorbitant fees specialist libraries charge for the use of their rare manuscript and book collections? This paper critically assesses the process and progress of the digitization of mankind’s written records.

The Hawaii Nisei Story: Creating a Living Digital Memory, Shari Y. Tamashiro
The Hawaii Nisei Story, a web-based exploration of the experiences of local Americans of Japanese Ancestry leading up to, during and following the Second World War, comprises the life stories of Hawaii-born Nisei veterans. Some well-known, some less so, these stories are deepened, complemented and complicated by the seldom heard stories of the veterans' wives and families. The project bridged the print and digital worlds. Thomas H. Hamilton Library established the Japanese American Veterans Collection to collect, store and catalog official papers, letters, photographs and other materials relating to the veterans’ WWII experiences. To document and place these wartime experiences in socio-historical context, the University of Hawaii’s Center for Oral History recorded and processed thirty life history interviews. Kapiolani Community College utilized oral histories, a myriad of primary source materials and the technology tools available to go outside the realm of traditional linear narrative and create a digital collection that serves a living digital memory.

Map, Hourglass, Ship – Saving, Pausing and Playing with the Nintendo DS, Samuel Tobin
In this paper I will examine the Nintendo DS handheld game system, focusing on one game cartridge The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and explore the use of this game and game system in particular settings, specifically involving travel.  While issues of storage and retrieval of game data are common to most modern videogames, when the Nintendo DS is played while traveling on the bus, train or airplane, issues of mobility, transmission and space afford new opportunities for complex ludic situations and perspectives, opportunities in which the age-old tension between storage and transmission is played out in new ways. My hope is that this sort of analysis might also be fruitful for examinations of other media assemblages and situations including texting, mobile email and personal computing as well as possible historical expressions of travel-based play and games, such as cards, dice or crosswords and portable board games.

On the Status of Science Fiction and Realism in the Age of Dissolved Technological Aura, Jaak Tomberg
My intended presentation will take as its starting point the concept of aura which Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), basically defines as a certain distance due to the existence of which the work of art once acquired its identity and uniqueness. In my presentation, I will apply the concept of aura to technology itself and observe its own specific dissolution in the age of digital. Against the background of the dissolution of this novelty, I will assess the current status of science fiction and realism in the age of advanced technological and digital integration, taking into account Fredric Jameson’s argument about the “suspension of borders” between realist fiction and science fiction which led to the possibility that science fiction is dangerously close to becoming – or already has become – “the realism of today”. I will exemplify my point by analyzing some poetic aspects of two latest novels by William Gibson – Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007).

Integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at Adang Island School, Southwest Thailand, Aumnat Tongkaw, Trevor Wood-Harper
In recent years there has been an increased emphasis on the use of technology to address developmental concerns throughout the world. The education sector has attracted a large part of this attention, which is centered on the use of information and communication technologies to address teaching, learning and administrative needs. Thailand has inappropriate ratio between schools and citizen and some part of Thailand also has a huge limitation about education resources. Especially, island schools are located very far away from the mainland.The Urak Lawai are indigenous people on the Adang Archipelago, India sea, South west Thailand.They are grouped together with the Moken and Moklen, sea gypsies or sea nomads. These people have distinctively different origins, cultures and languages. This paper explore multi perspective integrations of Information Communication Technology in island schools in developing countries. Data was collected by interviewing director of The Office of Satun Educational Service Area, master teacher, teachers, parents and students in island schools. The finding of study put in the context of the indigence for ICT in island schools as a utensil to reform as a entire. Outcomes of study are in the form of recommendations to assist processing implementations ICT of island schools environment in developing country.

Bury the Archive: A Look into Analog and Digital Time Capsules, Sarah Toton
This paper briefly examine two buried time capsules— the 1939 and 1965 Westinghouse Capsule I and Capsule II— and expands this notion of the buried capsule to include Space Race-inspired capsules like the golden records aboard the 1977 Voyager space probe. As more cultural content moves into the digital realm, I also argue that the notion of the time capsule has not disappeared in recent years but shifted to reflect new needs for preservation developed in the Silicon Age.  “Digital time capsules” exist today online though ambitious digital preservation practices like the Internet Archive's Way-Back Machine, as well as commercial projects like the Yahoo! Time Capsule and Time Netsule.

Poetry Machines in Early Modern Books, Whitney Trettien
Interactive user interfaces, computational writing, databases that order, analyze and manipulate the flow of information – we see these as the markers of the digital age, unique to, as Lev Manovich argues, “information-rich” societies. Yet systems for organizing information are also present in printed books in the form of nesting volvelles and cut-up flaps used to permute and combine quantities of knowledge too large to be handwritten or printed. This paper explores an especially neglected segment of the history of interactive, “database”-like book design: automatic poetry generators of the seventeenth century. These include Georg Philip Harsdörffer’s Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, which produced both new words and rhymes; Quirinus Kuhlmann’s sonnet XIV. Libes-kuss: Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen, a little-studied proteic poem; and Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz’s labyrinths, or nesting wheels used to produce strophes and aphorisms.

Pregnancy in New Media Environments, Laura Tropp
Using the theoretical works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman, this paper explores how the experience of pregnancy has been transformed as a result of changes in media technology.  The paper traces the origin of photo technology in pregnancy from the x-ray to the ultrasound and how shifts in the ability to peer into the pregnant body has changed our notions of private and public in regards to the pregnant experience.  The paper explores the uses of newer technology, such as blogs and websites, to document pregnancy and changes in social expectations of pregnancy as a result of this technology.

The New Mediated Environment of American Indians, Nancy van Leuven
This is one of the nation’s hottest and most profitable debates: Are Indian casinos worth the gamble?  Within the context of the “Media in Transition” conference, this project offers one more lens for how media is used to represent a traditionally oral civilization within the parameters of 21st Century cyberspace. Tribes suddenly flush with casino profits are now armed with technology that allows them to tell their stories of lived experience from pre-colonial eras to the present – without the interference of Anglo-European revisionist history. Critical dates range from 1794 (the U.S. acknowledgement of Indian independence) through today, when the State of Massachusetts (and national media) frame American Indians within political, environmental, and religious arenas. In this paper, I analyze the media strategies of over 50 tribes seeking to publicize their casinos and honor their histories while simultaneously flexing political clout throughout the new American landscape.

Searching for Better Measurements of Press Freedom in Conflict States Like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Diane Varner
Many have touted the role of media in developing and stabilizing conflict states. The problem is that the standards for measuring press freedom impose certain values and assumptions about the role of media. The purpose of this critical discourse analysis is to better understand these values and assumptions by examining the surveys of Freedom House, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and their assessment of Congolese media.

Education Remixed: Digital Geographies of Youth, Lalitha Vasudevan
The current digital moment is replete with spaces of representation, communication, and information dissemination.  Temporality and synchronicity of identity performances have given way to multi-spatial and cross-temporal instantiations of the self.  In this paper, the focus is on instances of youth educating themselves beyond the boundaries of school through the engagement with and production of digital geographies.  Drawing on recent conceptualizations of spatiality and geography, and theories of multimodality in communication and representation, artifacts from youth-produced and youth-inhabited digital geographies are examined as examples of a remixed approach to education.  All of the examples in this paper come from a longitudinal study of court-involved youth attending an alternative to incarceration program.  Specifically, an analysis of their communication practices and expressive artifacts – such as digital stories, online profiles, avatars, handheld technology use – will be used to explicate a discussion of new digital geographies.

Screens, Maps, and Fingertips: Of Handheld Timespace in Screenspace, Nanna Verhoeff
This paper will propose a set of questions that focus on the conceptualization of some of the basic principles of cartography: a spatiotemporal matrix that locates and fixates relative positions, relationships, and meanings. Digital cartography allows for a mapping of movement, of diversity, a multi-layeredness, and movement and change. A notion of cartography in 4D – a cartography of place, time, directionality, and relations – is helpful for analyzing timespatial movements in screenspace: the virtual screen space that is not separated from, but intricately bound-up with physical space. In this paper, I will analyze the cartography in 4D that hand-held navigation devices and some examples of locative uses for these devises allow for. In this analysis I will focus on the haptic engagement with the spaces users of these devises construct.

Why Divided Attention in Pervasive Gaming Can Be a Good Thing, Astrid Vicas
Pervasive games use mobile and location-sensitive technology to link players and bridge the divide between game and non-game space. Because they are designed to straddle game and non-game space in the perceptual and cognitive dimensions both spaces offer, they set participants up to face the problem of divided attention. If the consensus of recent research in psychology into divided attention is right, the development of pervasive gaming can only be a passing fad with no future. Yet quite a few developers and game players find the prospect of pervasive gaming promising and even exciting. This presentation will suggest that there is an older body of observations and experimental work that can be drawn on to gain some understanding into why people may be attracted to pervasive gaming and find its prospects exciting.

In Search of the Lost Aura, Piret Viires
Digital literature, e.g. the internet fan fiction and blogs lack aura as Benjamin understands it – these works, after all, are infinitely reproduced and accessible to all. At the same time there are cases where virtual literature is transformed back into print culture. In my paper, I present as a case study of two such instances: fan fiction written about the Russian girl band t.A.T.u., which the author reworked and published in book form as an ordinary novel, and the blogs of two Estonian bloggers – Epp Petrone and Dagmar Reintam – published as books. This raises the question of why the authors are not satisfied with presenting their work only in cyberspace, why do they need to publish it in print? As an answer I suggest that a printed book constitutes a bigger symbolic capital for the authors, and it is more elitist than internet literature.

The Uses of Catastrophe: Nineveh, Layard, and the Future of Knowledge, Peter Walsh
In 1851, while wrapping up excavations at Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital, the English adventurer Austen Henry Layard unexpectedly discovered the remains of possibly the largest library of antiquity. Now known as the “Library of Nineveh,” the clay tablets, Layard correctly deduced, represented a vast storehouse of human knowledge. What was less appreciated at the time was the entirely accidental nature of the library’s survival and rediscovery. The clay tablets of Nineveh represented the “old media” of the day. The “new media” (relatively speaking) -- wax-covered wooden boards and papyrus scrolls, which probably represented most of the library’s material -- all perished when invading armies burned the city in 612 B.C.E. This paper will use the Library of Nineveh as the exemplar of how human knowledge has been saved and transmitted over time. This paper argues that no human institution, no matter how carefully planned, can reliably predict the needs and hazards of the future.

The Shape of Space in the Second Industrial Revolution:  Constant’s New Babylon, McKenzie Wark
The Dutch artist Constant worked on his New Babylon project right through the sixties. Concerned about overpopulation, he decided to build an extension to our “house of being” to house the newcomers – by giving the whole planet a second deck. Extending across borders, this raised megastructure would allow a free circulation of people engaged in a world of pure play. Meanwhile automated factories would labor away underground, and vehicular traffic would move freely on the surface level. Needless to say, New Babylon has failed to arrive, but Constant’s more fundamental intuition was sound: Weiner’s second industrial revolution meant that the shape of global space would change. Where Innis thought in terms of the envelope of spatial and temporal possibilities of a given mix of communication practices, Constant extended this to built form. This presentation retrieves Constant’s vision from art history and shows its relevance for critical media theory in our times.

E - Media Evolution in Pakistan: Emergence of Visual Democracy – Building Concepts, Discourses & Frameworks, Muhammad Shahid Waseem
The mass growth of electronic media in the last seven years changed the landscape of media in Pakistan. This growth is just not bound to attract largest audience, but also shaped the market dynamics of mass media by creating opportunities to journalists in specific and people in general. The necessity of this core topic is felt in the current situation, where Pakistani media is transforming in many aspects that includes technological, economical, social and political and also on the moral grounds. Its access to the large audience is increasing day by day with the inclusion of private media. The concept of community radio is also getting its place in the media-environment. The booming culture of FM Radio and internet-localization factor also demanded the capacity of media history research. This study will be pioneer work in this dimension in the local settings and will give some thresholds for building discourse on visual democracy in Pakistan through the transformation of e-media.

Using Battle and War in The Lord of the Rings to Understand Modern Adaptation, Geoff Way
Adaptation is a practice that has been common in literature for years. With the popularity of films and video games, adaptations across mediums are everywhere. While there are many angles from which to approach adaptation in modern society, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings offers an excellent example of adaptation throughout a variety of mediums. The popularity of Tolkien’s trilogy cannot be questioned, but was it the popularity of the original trilogy alone that led to the success of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, or was it something more? What about the ensuing Electronic Arts video games, based off of Jackson’s trilogy? Is it the original work alone that creates a successful adaptation? That can hardly be the case, especially considering the shift in mediums. A novel will not always become a great film, and many video games based off films are lackluster at best. What then led to the success of both the films and games?  It is these questions that this paper will answer.

Material Cultures and Artists’ Codices: Museum Education through Artists’ Books, Courtney Weida
This paper examines a variety of artistic book forms in terms of their unique historical contexts, while considering critical analysis and studio practice in the book arts. I will contextualize artists’ books historically as objects dating back to illuminated manuscripts as well as works of William Blake. I will chiefly discuss contemporary bookworks that challenge traditional notions of the book, structurally and conceptually. I will examine such artists’ books as Denise Hawrysio’s unconventional fur-lined bookworks object “The Killing,” as a work of wordless protest against cruelty towards animals, and Barbara Hashimoto’s ceramic codex piece, “Tabula Rasa,” which metaphorically explores experience, identity, and pre-cognition within the blank slate.

Surveillance and Democracy in the Digital Enclosure, Jennifer R. Whitson
Once hailed as a place where users could escape hierarchical control and the tyrannies of government, the internet is now subject to an enclosure movement, wherein public “land” is being privatized, and citizen’s creative labour is appropriated to profit the corporations that administer these places. The extent of surveillance in these spaces may surpass any in the terrestrial world, yet the facade of democracy –communities labouring together as equals to create idealized spaces—is used to attract more citizens.  The gap left by elected governments, especially nation-state governments, allows corporations to conquer online spaces. The history of Second Life (SL), an online virtual world with over 14 million ‘residents’, provides a paradigmatic example of the digital enclosure movement. It is used throughout this paper to highlight the interplay between privatization, user-created content, the promise of online democratic spaces, and surveillance.

What Canada Can Learn from a Communications Revolution Taking Place in the Developing World, Gilbert Wilkes
In the research and other literatures the concept of development is always linked to the development of a state or states. But design solutions to the digital divide have emerged that make no assumptions about whether, or in what condition, a nation state exists. On a practical level, these solutions open up new possibilities for pursuing development goals in Canada and abroad. On a theoretical level, however, these solutions challenge the premises from which the development community draws its conclusions about the historical tasks of telecommunication networks and Information Technology (ICT).  In this paper I argue for a development policy informed by design, a policy grounded in both the practical and the probable as it specifies itself in design solutions. As an example of this sort of analysis, I compare the two design solutions developed to address the digital divide, with respect to their policy implications at this precise historical moment. 

Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab, Mark Willis
A blind reader who constructs an accessible text of Harold Innis’ “The Bias of Communication” will find in it some powerful ideas that suggest why such an accessible text is possible, if not inevitable. Innis’ essay is not available now in an accessible format produced by commercial or nonprofit publishers, but today’s blind reader has more tools than ever before to make it so. One goal of this presentation is documenting the implications and consequences of establishing such an accessible text within the rationale of fair use in copyright law. Today’s rapidly changing digital technologies are capable of producing ever more creative hybrid oral/literate forms. However, along with the promise of greater accessibility, new media bring new biases of communication. A goal of this presentation is exploring how accessibility is threatened by digital rights management, erosion of the fair use doctrine and contraction of the public domain. Links to accessible texts supporting this project will be posted at blindflaneur.com/?page_id=1208.

Translation and Copyright: the Transmission of the Law, Eva Hemmungs Wirten
Copyright is one of the basic parameters of book history. So is translation. What happens if we pull these two together? What sort of questions might we be able to ask? In my MIT paper I will especially focus on what use we might have of translation studies as a tool for understanding translation as a mode of transmission – from old to new media.  My paper will cover the following areas: (a) Translation in copyright. When, how, and why does translation become copyrightable? What impact does the work of the translator have on the copyrightable subject matter and the notion of authorship? What forms of translation are germane to intellectual property, both practically and theoretically speaking?; (b) Copyright in translation. How does the translation of the law itself affect the production of texts and the construction of authorship? The consequences of translating global conventions, agreements, and legal code are a neglected area of IP scholarship; and (c) Translating copyright theory. The question of the translation of intellectual property scholarship provides an important meta-level in this study.

The Digital and teh Cute, D.E. Wittkower
In discussions of online culture, nobody has yet given sufficient consideration to the importance of cute animal pictures. While there are perhaps obvious reasons for this aspect of online culture being and remaining understudied, from an objective stance we should consider it both surprising and noteworthy that, once given the means of mass communications and internationally accessible publication, a primary activity that people are interested in and committed to is the sharing of cute and funny pictures, especially of cats. This presumably unforeseeable outcome is made stranger yet by the relative lack of commercial motivation for a communications category that approaches the ubiquity of spam and pornography. This speculative presentation will investigate some possible explanations of aspects of these phenomena. 

Maps for the 4th Wave: Revealing the Future of Mobile Financial Services in Bangladesh from Ground Up, Andrew Wong
This paper examines the mobile communications waves from voice to SMS/MMS to info-entertainment to the 4th and current wave – mobile financial services. In the late spring 2008, I was in the midst of conducting an ethnographic study on financial services for the poor and unbanked in Bangladesh, and in one of the context interviews involving a family, I was asked by Abdul, the head of the household, about what sort of future will look like and constraints of using mobile phone will hold for his four children especially in managing their daily financial matters. The challenge although not the original part of the research project turned into a synthesis of an extensive research exercise – to create future maps. The crux of this paper is this: How do we know that what has been drawn out from interviewing the poor about their financial lives can be fed into future services as part of the new media scenarios? And, that these scenarios will have chances of occurring that matches with the real world situation?

Risk and Digital Preservation, Richard D. Wright
As storage costs drop, storage is becoming the lowest cost in preservation – and the biggest risk!  Audiovisual archives are particularly aware of the problem, mainly because of their sheer size.  While most digital libraries are storing a few terabytes, most major audiovisual archives have holdings in the tens of petabytes. Yet the basic problem really affects everyone; when a floppy disc held 200k of storage, a failed floppy meant a few documents might be lost. Now anyone can easily buy a terabyte of storage, and one failure could destroy years of work – and a decade of audio, video and photos. Distributed preservation on the web is attractive, but what are the standards and controls – and what are the risks? In addition, for audiovisual archives the whole issue of web content needs to be treated with extreme caution. The material on the web is almost always a highly compressed proxy of the master material from the archive. When web content – only – is preserved, who then preserves the real masters? Does anyone even understand the problem? In my paper I try to address the issues above, as well as review current practices – and present a roadmap for recommend best practice in audiovisual digital preservation.

Storyfox: A Design Proposal for Self-Reflective Storytelling, Jason Zalinger
This paper describes a design proposal called Storyfox, which is a Firefox extension that exports email archives into the format of a stage or screen play with the intention of supporting self-reflective storytelling. There are many wesites and programs that work to support “digital” storytelling.  What they all seem to have in common is that the user generally begins from scratch and tells a new story. Instead, Storyfox is an attempt to harness the richness stored in your digital history to see the past in a new way. My specific research questions are: (1) will “visualizing” email as a stage/screen play support self-reflection and/or storytelling? (2) will Storyfox provide users with unique insights into their history? (3) will users modify the “script” of their lives? and (4) will users learn anything new about themselves? As our personal digital archives expand daily, we need to begin to ask serious question about what to do with all this digital “stuff.” My hope is that Storyfox will begin to help us answer some of these questions about how we make sense of our digital history.

Carnival in Cyberspace: Egao as a Chinese Internet Subculture, Lin Zhang
Egao, literally meaning "evil work" in Chinese, is an online subculture characterized by the satire of mainstream cultural products through grassroots spontaneity. Produced by netizens and disseminated through the internet and mobile phone, egao can take the form of text, audio, image or video and has enjoyed immense popularity among Chinese people, especially young people. However, the unusual popularity of egao has not only attracted the attention of the mainstream media and cultural market  but has also triggered uneasy responses from the party-state since the subversive nature of egao stands as an iconoclastic challenge to its absolute authority and ideological control. This thesis situates egao in the post-authoritarian Chinese society to answer questions like how does “egao” become such a popular cultural phenomenon in China and why? What are the meanings and implications of egao to post-authoritarian culture and society? What will be the fate of egao in face of relentless commercial and political incorporation?

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