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 world's 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.