Feminist IT: Infrastructures

The Feminist IT conference devoted to "Feminist Infrastructures & Technocultures" featured a number of prominent feminist scholars of technology in the morning sessions, which were devoted to questions about infrastructures and legacies.  With over three decades of scholarship to draw upon and a strong concentration of work done in the University of California, this conference tried to facilitate more conversation between people doing interdisciplinary work, specifically those who might be positioned in either the Society for the Social Studies of Science or the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In my opening welcome I pointed to the work of fellow organizers and panel moderators who approach questions about mediation from the perspective of material culture, the study of the apparatus and embodiment, and engagement with particular communities of practice, such as Lisa Cartwright on 3D printers that can produce guns, Lisa Parks on drone vision, and Kelly Gates on the truth claims of facial recognition technologies and surveillance footage, which have been much in the news this week in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.  I also noted that the particular context of public institutions devoted to big science provides affordances as well as constraints for this work on "making science, designing culture, shaping the technological imagination, sorting things out, and determining 'the right tools for the job.'"

The UC FemTechNet group is a regional research offshoot of the larger and more distributed FemTechNet initiative currently archived at the FemBot Collective and slated to move to new space at a FemTechNet site at The New School.  Many of its members use the UCFemTechNet Facebook page as a site for cross-campus coordination and introductions, although there is also a mailing list for announcements.

The opening panel featured a dialogue between Anne Balsamo and Chandra Mukerji about infrastructure that focused on their shared scholarly interest in uncovering women's roles in the labor force of expert knowledge workers who played a key role in shaping the technocultures of the modern administrative state.  Balsamo famously wrote about how her mother was a "computer" or person who performed mathematical communications, a topic that I also wrote about in the last chapter of the Virtualpolitik book and that was memorialized in N. Katherine Hayles' classic text My Mother Was a Computer.  To commemorate the occasion, we included a non-human participant on the panel, "Nancy," the actual type of comptometer that Balsamo describes.  (The machine is literally labeled "Nancy," presumably with the name of its former operator.)

The first question posed by disability activist Louise Hickman asked "How can we slow down time to shape participation in discussions?"  Mukerji, who does research on how female engineers played a vital role in hydrology projects in Bourbon France, laughed about the fact that mostly she lived in the 17th century and was well aware of how time functioned as a technology as well, particularly when the cyclical time of women's labor differs so radically from linear time.  Balsamo talked about how members of the FemTechNet initiative struggled to coordinate with each other and talked about how to align schedules at professional scholarly conferences in order to gain critical mass.  Balsamo also recast Marx with feminist temporality, by pointing out that women make the present and the future, but not under conditions of their own making.  Temporality has also been a concern for the panel's third moderator, Lilly Irani, whose recent work on hackathons looks at the bias toward action in the compressed time of such events.

In addressing the main topic of infrastructure, which Mukerji defined as the "structure of impersonal rule," panelists discussed how even social infrastructures, such as laws and regulations, had connections to material culture, in that they were written down.  Balsamo acknowledged the work of Leigh Star and many other feminist scholars who published important work on infrastructure, as as way to think about the challenges and opportunities of feminist networking.  As Mukerji pointed out, the actions of largely female staff members in human resources charged with the Weberian task of the maintenance of files, played a more important role in implementing affirmative action than any piece of legislation or judicial decision.  Codes of politeness that allow flexibility in infrastructure that make continual function possible are also infrastructural, as I noted, where women's labor also mattered.  Such codes are also important to FemTechNet, as are the peer promotion practices of those who might be maintaining tenure and promotion files, but the object-oriented character of the panel was also emphasized with Mukerji's object, which was also passed around, a rock and leaf to demonstrate the laundry techniques that she argued were important for understanding the cultural innovations associated with daily life.  (She is famed for arguing that the Canal du Midi is much more than the sole achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur, because it was also the product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors.)

An Afternoon in Informatics

Yesterday I was honored to speak at the Friday seminar hosted by the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. I had been invited to give a presentation about the Virtualpolitik book by Bonnie Nardi, an expert in computer-mediated communication, who did some of the early ground-breaking work on blogging and the "zero comments" phenomenon.

I have given a number of overview talks about the book since its publication, but this was a unique opportunity to talk about methodology in a setting in which graduate students trying to figure out where they saw themselves fitting in disciplinarily asked many of the most difficult questions to answer.

I explained the basic thesis of the book, that institutions have an inherent conflict between content-creation and regulation when it comes to digital media, because files can travel to unintended audiences and be used for unanticipated purposes. As in the case of the photoshopped images that I write about, these files can also be altered to create new forms of political commentary. Too often these forms of digital alteration are misunderstood by government officials, and in the book I describe several stories of profound media illiteracy in which legislators saw potential terrorist intent in the work of creators of fan films or web generators or equally civil and nonviolent forms of expression.

In talking about the idea of "media archeology," which includes examining the role of the platforms that store, display, and edit digital files and carry digital signals, I made the case for reconstructive and interpretive disciplines, some of which might be closer to the humanities than the kinds of disciplines traditionally associated with informatics, at least as it is described in convent. I explained that my work has no methods section, since my method is to gather as many texts -- of all kinds -- as possible and then do the close reading, rhetorical analysis, historical guesswork, and explication that is by its very nature hard to quantify.

After all, how does one measure ideology, my main object of study in considering new forms of digital rhetoric? Of course, there are many who might look at games, simulations, and other kinds of messages composed with computational media and construct elaborate matrices about user types, message types, types of emotion and cognition, types of narrative and play, etc., and then carefully sort all their observations about computer-mediated communication into countable boxes. This kind of abstraction might serve others well who do other things disciplinarily. I can only speak about my own practices and the ways I see research questions. But this kind of archetypical thinking went out of fashion in literature many years ago for good reason as a method of reading.

Ironically, many from my established disciplinary home on the other side of campus from Informatics might see my readings of the government's digital rhetoric as less "pure" in the literary sense, because I interview participants like digital artists, electronic archivists, and software developers and actually go to sites of collaboration and creation and explore why one digital text was created and not another. And unlike "electronic literature" or "literary nonfiction," "digital nonfiction" is still regarded with s0me skepticism, when it comes to the genres that people in English departments study and teach.

Slides from the talk are here.

Thanks to John Unsworth for the video link.

An Open Letter to English Departments about What "New Media" Means

Dear English Department,

There have been many apocalyptic futures imagined for you, should you maintain your identity as a department devoted to texts published in print, in a time when paper is not only less likely to be the medium for disseminating new ideas but also for personal expression and collective statement of all kinds. As someone who holds four degrees in English literature (B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D.), I don't think the training in close reading and interpretive extrapolation that you provide is irrelevant for the modern world. Nor do I predict that we will rapidly arrive at a post-literate age, given the continuing value of the written word and the efficiency and durability of alphabetic formats. ("ASCII is forever," many might say.)

But I do have to protest your continuing resistance to including digital nonfiction genres in your courses of study. Literary nonfiction in print has become a recognized part of the canon: essays, memoirs, chronicles, and speeches are regularly taught. Supreme Court decisions and Congressional hearings are even considered legitimate objects of study. Writing about travel, scientific inquiry, household management, religious conversion, and forced captivity are stock subjects in English departments.

At the same time hypertext fiction, electronic poetry, and interactive online drama are embraced with great excitement. As long as the objects of study are both properly virtual and properly fictional, they belong in the department catalog.

But write about nonfictional forms of computational media and watch the puzzled expressions and polite dismissals begin.

This is not English, you say.

Only it is.

It is most of what constitutes English at the moment, not only in the United States or Great Britain or any of its former possessions, but all around the world. What bloggers in Baghdad create or text message-makers in Finland fashion may have useful lessons to share with English departments, their students, and the institutions in which they teach and learn.

Please include digital nonfiction in your department's course offerings next year.

Respectfully submitted,

An Author

Twenty-Four Frame Philosophy

In putting together this May 14th event, which celebrates the launch of the Richard Rorty Archive, I'm delighted to announce that philosophers Mark Wrathall and Iain Thomson will be speaking. You can see Wrathall and Thomson in the remarkable forthcoming movie about philosophy, Heideggerian currents in contemporary American intellectual life, and outreach from the humanities to the public in an attempt to speak to people's daily lives: Being in the World.

Obsolescence and Its Discontents

VP colleague Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been busy with her book-in-progress Planned Obsolescence.

There’s a delicious ambiguity in that sentence: is it too late for a book — the literal, physical object — to change the world, or is it too late for any textual form? This text isn’t yet a book, though it’s headed in that direction. And possible or not, it’s determined to change the world, or at least the small segment of it where our colleges and universities reside.

And it’s attempting to begin creating that change here, with this site. One of the points that this text argues hardest about is the need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open. And so here’s the text, practicing what it preaches, available online for open review.

I’ll be relying on these reviews in revising the manuscript before its final submission. If all goes according to plan, the book will be forthcoming from NYU Press, which is sending the manuscript out for blind review as well. I’m grateful to those anonymous readers, and will certainly take their comments very seriously. But the conversation that takes place here will be key to my revision process.

Please read and comment here, either all at once or at your leisure. Respond to the text, but also respond to the other readers. I’ll be joining in the discussion as well, of course, and I’ll also be posting more general thoughts about the project’s development to the site’s community blog.

Portions of chapter 3 were originally published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and on MediaCommons. Portions of chapter 1 were presented as part of an online conference held at Interdisciplines. Thanks are due to the editors and coordinators of those projects, and to the many scholars whose responses to the talks I’ve given about this book have helped to shape its development.

Finally, enormous thanks are due to Eric Zinner, Monica McCormick, Bob Stein, Christian Wach, Brian Hoffman, and everyone else who made this publication possible.

Make sure to weigh in with your own commentary soon!

Charting the Course

Yesterday's plenary session "Digital Media and Learning: The State of the Field" featured a number of researchers whose reports have offered findings that contradict depictions of new media practices by the mainstream media and indicate a more complicated story to tell about the so-called "digital generation." In their rapid-fire presentations, speakers were limited to ten minutes to summarize what was often years of work.

Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart discussed the recent report on "Social Media and Young Adults," which indicated that commenting on blogs by young people was down as well as blogging itself, and that remix activities were less of a focus of digital activity than a simple sharing of content. She also noted that game consoles, as well as cell phones, were important portals for Internet access.

Stanford's Brigid Barron of the Youth Lab project looked at a spectrum of interactions with technology from more common publication activities to less common membership in robotics clubs. Researchers created a "technobiography" that examined how social networks played a key role and that not all young people were in the "hothouse environments" that seemed most revolutionary. Barron advocated more attention to "process not outcomes" and critical thinking about "what do we care about assessing."

Eszter Hargittai began her remarks by noting a conversation that she had had with Harvard's John Palfrey in which he reminded her that the fact that "there is a field" was itself a significant finding. Hargittiai, known for her focus on the "question of skill and digital literacy," announced to the audience that there were "no numbers in this presentation." In thinking about "learning about the average user," Hargittai unpacked the notion of "skill" to connect it to its "uses" and "dimensions," which may include activities such as "evaluating credibility" and "managing material at the end." She also defended her seemingly instrumental interest in "what explains variations in skills and uses" by arguing that "skill can be intervened in more easily than other issues." For her references, she directed her listeners to the publications in the Web Use Project and encouraged them to continue to look at "risks and problems."

In his plenary session, Joseph Kahne described his study of 430 youths that looked at "interest-driven" and "politically-driven" forms of digital participation to note that there was "political but not civic participation" and that this political participation may still be at a lower level than cyber-utopians might hope. He depicted a more complicated spectrum of "skills" and "agency" among digital young people and summarized his findings as showing "no relationship to voting from politically-driven participation and interest-driven participation," but "some friend-driven participation" that correlated to voting. (I had already interviewed for this DML blog posting.)

Kevin Leander of Vanderbilt University explained how his own research was "not site-based" but oriented in "flows and networks" that might include "imagery" and "spatial analysis" to characterize "hotspots for learning" such as instant messaging or networks in a town. He showed a diagram of visual markers of the hybridized digital life of a young immigrant to the Netherlands with family back in Morocco, which included a headscarf nexus, one for Moroccan "male hotties," as Leander put it, fashion outlets like H and M, and "I love Holland" branding. I liked the fact that Leander argued that their goal in digital media and learning should not be "to recreate institutional sciences" and that he noted the presence of "scholars in the room trained in the humanities. At the same time, he said that although "bodies aren’t stable," "they aren’t moved by critical theory." In another case study he showed an image of someone decked out in Naruto costume accessories for whom "swordplay is not just about texts and tools." Although he cited Deleuze and Guattari and Massumi, he also cited the more prosaic work of CNN's infographics-map maestro John King as an example of "learning to see" in a new way that included "spatial analysis" and "new ways to understand" that expand learning and offer an alternative to "memorizing state capitals," which certainly wouldn't help contemporary students who "need GIS and spatial–navigational work." (He closed by noting that his Space, Learning, and Mobility Group were looking for a postdoc who could speak Dutch.)

Lynn Schofield Clark introduced herself as someone studying "parenting in the digital age" from the dual perspective of "Mom/social scientist" in project in which her own pre-teens were "collaborators" as well as subjects, as she explained her Guitar Hero mom persona.

In closing Mimi Ito described the Digital Media and Learning community as "at a place where the field is coalescing, diversity of sites both on the level of research and on the level of intervention" for which "multiple approaches" were needed. Of course, Lev Manovich, who was sitting next to me, couldn't help but point out how much he was reminded of the dawn of sexology as a similarly interdisciplinary scholarly enterprise.

Blast from the Past

The proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Digital Arts and Culture is now available through the eScholarship repository. Check out the plenaries for starters! These sessions were also videorecorded and will hopefully be available as well.

Driving Blind

Speaking of the work of academics, Brenda Brathwaite has a wonderfully scathing piece about game criticism in "Deep Critique Without Play" that applies equally to the scattershot amateur expert chiming in as part of the vox populi in online popularity contests and the supposedly serious academic too engrossed in deep concerns to actually play a game.

I’d like to offer you my opinion on a game I’ve never played. My opinions are based purely on the collective conscience and on my interpretation of the game’s play by viewing screenshots and photographs of it in development and in play. I heard its designer talk about it, and I suppose that should be enough. If not him (or her, in my case), certainly the many other people I’ve heard talk about it should suffice. I don’t know whether they played the game either.

Now, there are already a number of you wondering why I’d ever do such a thing. Perhaps you’re wondering why anyone would ever do such a thing. Yet, it happens all the time.

In her opening, Brathwaite uses a clever rhetorical strategy by adopting the voice of her object of criticism. She also recreates a number of conversations in which popular opinion is revealed to be utterly uninformed.

Me: Yeah, I am studying a bunch of games for my thesis, including Daikatana.

Critic: Oh my goodness. That game sucked.

Me: What did you think when you played it?

Critic: Oh, I didn’t play it.

Brathwaite then restages this conversation as being about something someone loved rather than something hated and being about a movie rather than about a videogame to reveal how conventions of received opinion operate.

So, this whole process of deep critique without play is fascinating to me. By deep, I don’t necessarily mean that the critic discussed it at length, though that could also be true. I also mean that the critic pushed the blade with conviction into a wound he was not personally sure was there. It is telling that we don’t often profess our opinions similarly for things we loved.

Do I Have a Dog in This Fight?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written some interesting things about current hand-wringing in the digital humanities blogosphere in "The Stakes of Disciplinarity."

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.

I need to start by saying something about my own position in all of this, as it’s that position that sets the terms for everything that follows. My doctorate is in English, from a pretty traditional literature-based program that espoused pretty traditional analog methodologies for the study of that literature. I went to that program, however, because it was the one institution that didn’t run screaming from my statement of purpose, in which I said that I wanted to work on the intersections of literature and contemporary media. With the exception of one course in cultural studies, though, all of the media-oriented work that I did in grad school was pretty much self-taught, because that institution — well, to say that its departments are siloed off from one another would be a significant understatement. There were at least two, and I think three, programs at the institution that my work could really have benefitted from, had I had any inkling that they were there.

Fitzpatrick concludes by bringing in two issues dear to my heart: 1) the way that academic labor -- sometimes in a very temporal, embodied, and even manual way -- comes back as a kind of return of the repressed and 2) the way that institutions actually serve sustainability that shouldn't be rejected too quickly. (An argument that Geert Lovink has also put forward.)

What such a reconstructed university would actually look like, I have no idea. Some folks have argued for fluid, shifting field groups, clusters of scholars working on similar, limited-duration projects or issues, and I can certainly see how such mobility would support the development of exciting new kinds of scholarship, but how you build a curriculum out of such flux, I have no idea.

Even more, how you build a staffing plan based on flux is impossible for me to imagine. It’s one thing if you’re starting with some number of tenured faculty members, and you give them the freedom to shift and move and reorganize themselves — but then what happens when one of them retires? How do you define the position that this faculty member occupied, and thus the position that you now need to fill? It seems almost unavoidable that shifting projects would demand equally shifting staffing resources, thus inevitably leading to an increasingly contingent labor market.

And it’s the realities of such labor issues, along with other, similar economic factors, that I’d argue underwrite our continued dependence on the disciplinary model that structures our institutions. It’s understandable, and it might well be impossible for us to escape.

As someone who advocates for the value of online scholarly work but produces a lot of old-school print criticism and who believes in interdisciplinarity despite my mainstream B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. in English, I'm sympathetic to those like Fitzpatrick who are trying to imagine the university of the future while working in the university of the present.

Of course, like any academic, I am part of a nomadic class and a person who periodically welcomes other nomads, so I do inevitably have a dog in this fight as well. The problem that Fitzpatrick describes -- the "we already have one of them" problem when it comes to media studies scholars in literature departments -- is one that takes place in conversations overheard on campuses across the country.

From my perspective, I think it is a matter of establishing how English functions as a methodology rather than just as a subject area. Questions about the relevance of English as a discipline and the future of the humanities are about much more than choosing subject matter that is either radically contemporary or canonically enduring.

After all, you can be an academic who makes material relevant no matter what the main period is that you study, if you have an interpretive procedure that brings something of value to public debates about culture, politics, civic spaces, community membership, persuasion, ideology, rules, daily routines, special occasions, or cataclysms that seem to signal new eras and attitudes.

Frankly, I've met many people who wrote dissertations about the eighteenth century who have far more useful things to say about online discourses and practices than others writing about World of Warcraft or cell phone novels. It's about the rigor of the analysis, the scope of intellectual curiosity, and how much communicating clearly and distinctively matters in a given person's scholarship. As they say, some of my best friends are bloggers . . . and Shakespearians.

Membership in an English department is about applying certain critical lenses of close reading to texts and interfaces defined broadly, about attention to how media mediate the sound and sight of particular objects of study, about thinking through experiences of literary or linguistic performance, about the idea that writers reshape genres as well as compose within received forms, and about how translation, adaptation, and rhetorical turns and tropes function in a global English that has a long history of both regional and transnational expression.

You only need one new media person if the category "new media" is merely a subject area to be checked off in a larger subject area called "English," but you need a whole department of people engaged in the cultural conversation taking place online if you think of English as a methodology.

The Ministry of Silly Walks

In an MLA session on "Links and Kinks in the Chain," the idea of the digital humanities as a kind of "Ministry of Silly Walks" was raised to illustrate the absurdity of attempting to group the idiosyncratic scholarly interests of a range of individuals into a single bureaucratic organization. In the discussion, Bethany Nowviskie also made a spirited defense of the importance of recognizing the labor of "hybrid scholars" who make important contributions to the digital humanities and embracing the spirit of "intellectual egalitarianism" in an honest conversation about status in the digital humanities. The line-up also included Laura C. Mandell, who is known for the range of her work from text-encoding initiatives to data visualizations, and Timothy B. Powell, whose work on Ojibwe culture I had seen earlier at the American Studies Association annual meeting. Much as Kim Christen has worked to keep cultural artifacts of her subjects in Aboriginal Australia off the public Internet, Powell has found himself questioning ideologies of openness promulgated by the digital humanities.

Last up was Jason C. Rhody of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, who discussed the challenges of overcoming the fiction of the solitary scholar and using both carrots and sticks to encourage people to collaborate on important initiatives like the Shakespeare folio project being undertaken by the Folger Library and a number of other institutional stakeholders. Rhody also discussed the importance of understanding that "infrastructure can be people" and not taking the contributions of librarians and computer scientists for granted. He cautioned that when it came to collaboration "2+2+2' might only add up to "3."

In the question and answer session Jason B. Jones discussed how his own campus had experimented with giving all students an iPod touch as a vehicle for course content, but the problems that arose when students were separated from institutional infrastructures in their non-wireless homes.

This was not the only session talking about the limitations and challenges of the digital humanities at the MLA. Earlier in the day in a session on "Making Research: Limits and Barriers in the Age of Digital Reproduction," other obstacles to utopian outcomes were also detailed. William Baker discussed "The History and Limitations of Digitalization" and grad student Elizabeth Vincelette pointed out how the hypertext party has been declared over by Alan Liu in a talk called "Moving Past the Hype of Hypertext: Limits of Scholarly Digital Ventures." Vincelette discussed how such projects might exploit the labor of graduate students, adjuncts, and OCR monitors and document scanners in developing nations. She singled out Google Book Search as a flawed privatized program that has been justifiably criticized by Geoffrey Nunberg and the issue of the theology surrounding Google that were first made explicit by Thomas Friedman. Graduate student and Tennyson scholar Jan Pridmore did not completely clarify the procedures in "A Proposed Model for Peer Review of Online Publications," but she did explain how her low budget, high quality site literaryhistory.com managed to produce so many pages and still avoid copyright battles with her large bibliographies of linked literary criticism. Pridmore singled out scholars like Marjorie Perloff for praise by putting so many of her scholarly essays online. On this morning panel only Kerry Kilner of AustLit played cheerleader.

As the Twitter archive of tweets from the MLA indicates, there was a lively backchannel. One of the "rockstars" of the twitterati was the man who was called "missing in action" by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Brian Croxall. Croxall's name appears prominently in the Twitter wordcloud above and his blog entry explaining his absence for reasons of poverty became a must-read.

Meanwhile, Twitter has also been a vehicle for the Twitter feed that complements the yearly MLAde send-up of Aaron Winter.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick's round-up of all the digital humanities playfulness and caution at the MLA is here.

Thanks to Mark Sample for the word cloud!

Update: More great data visualizations about the MLA for Mark Sample here. I'm only a small piece of the pie!

Job Fare

There are three interesting postdoctoral positions in new media studies that are getting attention on the conference circuit, but may not be disseminated online as much as they should.

I'm a big believer in postdoc positions, when they are structured intelligently for something other than cheap labor, in ways that help recent PhDs think about larger questions about interdisciplinary, the presentation of knowledge, and how to position themselves in current debates. All of these positions come with fair compensation and the opportunity to participate in a vibrant scholarly community.

1) With about a salary of about sixty-eight thousand dollars, the biggest purse goes to the 2 year post-doc position in Software Studies with the University of Bergen and the research group at UC San Diego. The ad, which is excerpted below, for the postdoctoral fellowship is here.

Multimedia technology and visual analysis is one of the strategic research areas for the department. Applicants must have achieved a Norwegian doctorate or equivalent PhD education abroad. The candidate must either have a Ph. D. in information science or a documented strong competence in information technology in combination with a Ph. D. in another field that is relevant for the position. The successful candidate will work in relation to the project "Visualizing Patterns in Databases of Cultural Images and Video", on which the department cooperates with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, at the University of California San Diego.

The successful candidate will have Bergen as his or her base and will be a member of one of the department’s research groups, but will also have to spend some of the time in San Diego.

The ideal candidate should have both technical knowledge of computers and digital media and solid understanding of contemporary research issues in one or more disciplines dealing with visual and media cultures (media and new media studies, journalism, game studies, film studies). The candidate will work on using information visualization and data analysis techniques to analyze cultural patterns in large sets of visual media (such as movies, TV programs, web pages, games or other media.) This work will be carried in collaboration with other members of Software Studies Initiative at Calit2/UCSD (softwarestudies.com) using the tools and methodologies developed in the lab.

2) For great roundtable discussions and an exciting Ivy League atmosphere, it is difficult to beat the Academic Fellowship at the Berkman Center, which offers a $48,000 stipend at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Berkman academic fellowship is designed to support an early-to-mid career academic conducting research expected to yield valuable data and/or new insights related to Internet and society.

The Berkman Center looks forward to facilitating and advancing significant works of scholarship achieved through both traditional and experimental methods. The academic fellowship provides a focused opportunity for the production of such works as articles, books, and other considerable contributions to our understanding of cyberspace.

Beyond executing the plan proposed by the fellow, interaction with, support from, and contributions to the fellows and Berkman Center communities play a vital part of the academic fellowship experience.

3) Last, but certainly not least, the Yale Information Society Project is developing a great track record for selecting interesting young scholars with an interest in public service through their Resident Fellows Program.

The Yale Information Society Project is now accepting applications for 2010-2011 ISP postdoctoral fellowships at Yale Law School.

The Yale ISP resident fellowship is designed for recent graduates of law or Ph.D. programs who are interested in careers in teaching and public service in any of the following areas: law and innovation, media studies, Internet and telecommunications law, intellectual property law, access to knowledge, first amendment law, social software, digital education, privacy, cybersecurity, standards and technology policy, biotechnology, and law, technology, and culture generally.

Fellows receive a salary of approximately 44,000 USD plus Yale benefits. Fellows are expected to work on an independent scholarly project as well as help with administrative and scholarly work for the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. A small number of special ISP visiting fellowships are also available for persons who provide their own sources of funding.

In Good Company

Today is the launch on the new DML Central website, which has "a physical office at UC Irvine and a new virtual destination," where "the Center will support emerging research on digital media and learning by hosting international conferences, facilitating workshops and working groups, and bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, industry leaders and others working on related projects." It is also home to "related research initiatives of the MacArthur Foundationʼs digital media and learning initiative. Harvardʼs Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the nonprofit research group FutureLab are partnering with UC Irvine on Hub activities." The news was announced today at a splashy Google event, "Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age," by U.C. Irvine's own Mimi Ito.

I am pleased to report that I am part of a top-notch team of bloggers for the site, which includes danah boyd, Howard Rheingold, Raquel Recuero, and Constance M. Yowell. I'll be posting about my favorite topics about authority, cultural institutions and traditions, and digital media: civic education, political participation, higher education, and digital parenting.

Let's Put on a Conference!

A reminder that registration for DAC 2009 at UC Irvine will soon be open. From December 12 to December 15, this international conference, which is organized this year by Simon Penny, will offer a presentations on the following themes: Embodiment and performativity, After mobile media, Software/ platform studies, Environment/ sustainability/ climate change, Interdisciplinary pedagogy, Cognition and creativity, Sex and sexuality, A Space-Time of Ubiquity and Embeddedness, and The Present and Future of Humanist Inquiry in the Digital Field. When I attended DAC in 2005 in Copenhagen, I met many of those who now are associated with emerging discipline of software studies. This year I will be part of the Interdisciplinary Pedagogy track. Stay tuned for my ten pedagogical trends in digital instruction and my argument about how Southern California serves as a site of regional advantace in hybridizing of learning and resisting the distance learning courseware-driven paradigm of atomization, efficiency, and modularity that stifles real learning.

The Public Turn

Although I include it among my professional associations, I haven't always felt welcome at the Association of Internet Researchers, given their predilection for the social sciences and for papers that deliver a methods section rather than accepting organizational strategies for arguments driven by interpretive reflection and a desire for rhetorical interventions.

But this year's program for their annual conference already seems to display what I would call a "public turn" in the organization and perhaps in Internet studies more generally. Check out this year's offerings in Milwaukee, which include substantive panels on governance, health policy, ICTs, and political organizing. In the past, the focus has been on ethnographic studies of individual communities of practice, but this year it looks like the policy wonks have been made more than welcome.

Of course, choosing VP pal Siva Vaidhyanathan may have signaled this public turn months ago, but it is nice to see this engagement with institutions and policies will also be represented in smaller sessions. This week at the NEH Institute on Broadening the Digital Humanities I talked about how the nature of the public has changed with social computing and object-oriented ideologies and pointed to books like Networked Publics and Making Things Public as proof.

Downloading Academia

Kudos to Virtualpolitik pal Matt Barton for being part of the 2009 Top 10 Research Findings wrap up at this year's Game Developers Conference. Barton is a regular on the Computers and Writing circuit, and we've been on panels together making connections between rhetorical discourse and computational media.

Alphabet Soup

There were a number of acronyms bandied about at "New Media and Writing Program Administration: Reconfiguring Administrative Discourses and Practices around New Media," where participants discussed how programs in rhetoric and composition with names like "PWR" (for Program in Writing and Rhetoric) and "WRD" (for Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse) face challenges when objectives for teaching new literacies face threats from back-to-basics backlashes or blunt trauma budget axes, as the following panel abstract explains:

Although many of our esteemed colleagues have discussed new media integration from the perspective of teachers and scholars (Ball 2004, 2006; Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Selfe and Sirc 2004; Sorapure 2003, 2006; Wysocki 2001, 2002), little scholarship exists on new media from the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) perspective. As writing programs become new media composition programs, such change inevitably leads WPAs to investigate new media from the administrative perspective, challenging our long-held assumptions about writing, teacher development, disciplinary boundaries, and even resource management (DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill 2005). In our panel, we four teachers and WPAs (representing geographically diverse and CM-classified institutions) will present and engage attendees in a discussion of issues encountered at our institutions with the move to new media. Our four presentations raise WPA concerns about what constitutes new media, new media and the integration of curricular reform, where new media reside institutionally, and the technological possibilities and constraints of integrating new media.

This session at the Conference on College Composition and Communication began with Melinda Turnley from DePaul University and a talk on "Who Owns 'Media'?: Institutional Positioning and New Media Initiatives." At her campus, a number of players were claiming rights to the subject of digital and interactive media, including art history, history of art and architecture, cinema, and computer science. Her policy to "educate when possible and argue when necessary." Her own Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse program actually broke off from an English department, leaving the Creative Writing program behind, which facilitated new connections with new media.

Many, such as Amy Kimme Hea of the University of Arizona praised the panel's chair, Anne Frances Wysocki, for her work with titles such as Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Hea's talk about "Integrating Technologies in New
Media Composition Courses: A Programmatic View" noted that Wysocki's repurposing of the work of Lev Manovich could be instructive for others in the field who might want to make claims for embodiment and rhetorical frames in composition. She also noted that hierarchical top-down laptop initiatives were also less effective than multimodal events that showcased student work. Her colleague Anne-Marie Hall's presentation about "Translating Research into "Mediated" Forms" complemented Hea's overview with a consideration of the balance between "criticism" and "engagement" that new media writing problematizes.

The last speaker, Stanford's Marvin Diogenes went beyond his planned spiel on "Old Wine in New Bottles? Translating Research into 'Mediated' Forms" to discuss the Realpolitik of university initiatives to explain what "may seem like a case of backing away" from teaching with new media actually involves more complicated dynamics involving institutional politics and what he called "issues of translation" at work in computational venues. Because of campus interest in providing training to undergraduate students for critical spoken presentations, Diogenes explained how the "course we have now is rooted in traditional academic approaches with students encouraged to support their oral presentations with appropriate media."

HuManifesto

The Digital Humanities Mellon Seminar at UCLA has been asking a number of interesting questions about the Digital Humanities, including "What is (n't) the Digital Humanities." Now the group has issued a "Digital Humanities Manifesto" that lays claim to some important rhetorical ground.

It's a fabulously polemical document that has already inspired over a hundred online comments on the text. For example, the text includes this free culture call to arms to faculty members to champion digital rights:

Copyright and IP standards must, accordingly, be freed from the stranglehold of Capital. Pirate and pervert Disney materials on such a massive scale that Disney will have to sue… your entire neighborhood, school, or country. Practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright and mashing up media.

To make this seemingly subversive argument for creative nonviolent protest, the document looks to etymology to rethink the academy's traditional respect for the aura of the original in the era of so-called "big data":

This is an abundance based economy, not one based upon scarcity. It values the COPY more highly than ORIGINALS and restores to the word COPY its original meaning of abundance: COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE.

The manifesto also attempts to do some basic definitional work, although the rhetoric tends to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

Nonetheless, like other famous manifestos, such as the classic text by Marx and Engels, it does attempt to energize its audience by imagining and demonizing potential opponents.

The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.

It also attempts to narrativize a history of the digital humanities, in which there are first-wave practices that are distinct from current practices in the field.

Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.

The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity.

Of course, as a specialist in what I call "Virtualpolitik" or the Realpolitik of digital institutions, I might wonder about how well this manifesto balances an engagement with the practical challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration at the material level (by advocating for "changes in language, practice, method, and output") with its self-confessed "utopian" idealism that embraces "the open, the unfixed, the contingent, the infinite, the expansive, the no place." But manifestos are never procedural manuals, even if an understanding of what Ian Bogost calls "procedural rhetoric" might be at the heart of the digital humanities.

Blogging from People and Practices

Faculty and graduate students at UC Irvine have been teaming up across disciplinary lines as part of the "People and Practices Research Initiative" funded by the Intel corporation. PAPR has not launched the PAPR@UCI Blog to publicize the range of projects that have been undertaken by UCI researchers who are looking at topics that include social practices around online console-based shooter games, the use of Facebook among Generation 1.5 Chinese immigrants, musical collaboration with teleconference tools, the information and technology ecologies of the homeless in Los Angeles, and the "craftivist" movement's use of Web 2.0. This posting explains my own assessment project funded by PAPR, which looks at how direct instruction in online composition in college coursework may impact Internet behavior longterm.

Table Talk

Today I attended a session with graduate students as part of UCSB's LCM Symposium: Careers in New Media and Digital Humanities, which was structured around some of the following questions and issues:

- challenges of working and seeking positions outside one's PhD granting department

-- what do humanities departments mean by "media"?

-- strategies for showcasing technical work in job applications (e.g. RA appts, wiki projects, blogs)

-- nomenclature and the shape of the field: new media, the digital humanities, electronic literacies, et al

-- the place of new media in rhet/comp departments (job opportunities, research questions)

-- what is the place of practical or applied research in the humanities?

-- the place of gaming in new media studies

As a rhetorician who is interested in praxis, I also put together a web page with three main types of sample public appeals that advertise expertise in the field of new media: sites created by graduate students and recent PhDs, sites I had created, and sites for different national and international professional associations, think tanks, philanthropic groups, and conferences in this rapidly changing interdisciplinary field. It was a lively discussion as we talked about how to balance virtuosity with collegiality and how to avoid gaffes such as providing too much personal information or creating websites that are difficult to display, navigate, print, or copy and paste. We also discussed some of the new genres being created by graduate students, such as the dissertation blog. Thanks to Rita Raley and Alan Liu for leading a productive discussion with me.

Update: One of the students present has already created his own site.

The Great Display Wall of China

In the "Event Webs" panel that followed, which was moderated by Bonnie Nardi, there was a terrific presentation by Ruth Mostern of U.C. Merced about the challenges of representing history with new digital tools. As a practitioner and partner in software development, she emphasized one of the major problems at issue: "How do we think about history, so that it works with a database?" She also showed Google maps to illustrate how spatial representations that use computer-mediated communication technologies tend to be much more sophisticated than temporal representations.

I particularly liked the fact that she was interested in ideology, politics, and state power in understanding how reconfigurations of historical events and geography take place. Her own research area has to do with space and place in China, where she showed how even seemingly discrete map markers could morph over time in relationship to other locales.

To demonstrate the kinds of "genre trouble" created by this work by digital historians, she showed examples of both "Digital Gazetteers" and "Historical Atlases" as preliminary models. She argued that ironically some of the best data representation of history is being done by law enforcement agencies that are creating crime mapping projects such as Instant Atlas and CopLink, which provides "geotemporal" visualization to locate perpetrators. However there are academic institutions also working on the problem of modeling discrete events, such as the Temporal Modeling Project at the University of Virginia or a number of initiatives at the Berkeley iSchool. I particularly liked the idea for a demo of SemTime, described at NewsBlip, for how various historical actors learned about Watergate that could encompass two different versions of time and the meaningfulness of events. Unfortunately, time limitations prevented Mostern from showing much of GapMinder or the SIMILE earthquake USGS mash-up.

Mostern claimed that the biggest constraint currently inhibiting this kind of scholarly work was the difficulty of having computers represent causality. As she pointed out with a diagram of the sequence for how to stop at a stoplight, the formal logic of Spatial Ontology Theory is far too cumbersome for more complex historical events and inadequate for the interpretive work of the historian with causality, narrative, agency, perspective, memory, emotional relationships, and themes. Although she did acknowledge that it might be possible, given our "socially authored world," for a computer to one day model a "Palestinian-authored world" and an "Israeli-authored world."

During the question-and-answer session, I was glad to see fellow panelist Lewis Lancaster of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative bring up the work of Judea Pearl of UCLA. In addition to maintaining the Causality Blog, Pearl is known for his sophisticated work with Bayesian statistics to model causal relationships. (To learn more about this subject, you can also use "belief nets" or "belief networks" as keywords.) To her credit, Mostern was certainly aware of the importance of network graphs and pointed to the work of Lothar Krempel and papers such as "Diffusion Dynamics in an Historical Network" as very influential on her thinking.