All meetings will take place on Friday mornings from 10-12, in theGermanic Seminar Room, 334 Royce Hall.  Presenters will be scheduledsoon.  

Meeting 1: September 28 (initial planning)

Meeting 2: October 19: Todd Presner: "The Humanities in the 21st Century: Disciplinary constellations and the idea of the University"

* Todd Presner, "Cultural History in the Age of New Media, or Is there a Text in this Class?", Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

Note: Click "LAUNCH PROJECT" (on the right menu) to play the flash film.  You can pause, fast-forward, or go back. The film is about 15 minutes in duration.

* Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (it's all there as a wiki or pdf download). I'll draw your attention to the introduction, chapter 7, and chapter 11. I'm still working through much of this book ...

* Henry Jenkins, "From YouTube to Youniversity" 

* Ithaka Report on Scholarly Publishing (in Commentpress!) 

Extra stuff (completely optional, just for reference):

Some articles by John Seely Brown  

Henry Jenkins weblog

Institute for the Future of the Book website 

Meeting 3: November 9: Media Theory seminar led by Todd Presner and Chris Wild

Readings:

*  David Wellbery's Introduction to Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. vii-xxxiii      Click here for text: Wellbery Intro to Kittler

* Mark Poster, Chapters 4 and 5 from What's the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2001), pp. 60-100.    Click here for text: Mark Poster

* Please review the Ithaka Report on scholarly publishing (above) in relation to Poster's arguments about analog and digital authors.   

Meeting 4: December 7: Kate Hayles

Meeting 5: January 11: Rita Raley

Meeting 6: February 1: Bernhard Siegert: "Cacophony or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Theory" from Grey Room, 29 (Winter 2008): 26-47.

Meeting 7: March 7: cancelled

Meeting 8: April 18: Chris Wild & Zoe Borovsky

Meeting 9: May 9: junior fellows

Meeting 10: June 6: Maite Zubiaurre

“Genealogies of Media Theory and Digital Humanities Faculty-Student Seminar” (2007-08)

With the increasing proliferation of new forms of communications technology and the increasing acceleration of the sharing and preserving—but also losing—of knowledge, questions of the media and materiality (or the immateriality) of cultural production have returned with renewed urgency. Taking our digital present as the jumping off point, the seminar will examine the cultural, historical, social, and economic significance of media and media technologies—ranging from web-based forms of communication such as blogging and podcasting to film, television, radio, moveable type, and the rotary printer.  Through attention to the technical specificity and materiality of the media, we are interested in probing the genealogies of media theory from a variety of trans-disciplinary perspectives. 

The first quarter will be dedicated to the emergent field of “digital humanities”: We are not only interested in humanities scholarship that takes digital form, but also, more broadly, what it means to undertake humanistic inquiry and produce humanistic knowledge in our age of digital media.  In this sense, all humanists are already doing digital humanities.  Humanists have become, by necessity, more attuned to the significance of media—especially, the history of print culture—with the emergence of new media, something that allows us to assess the specificity of old and new media as well as the complex ways in which they interact with and sometimes even condition one another.  What are the implications of digital humanities for the constitution of disciplines, research methodologies, knowledge production, pedagogy, and, finally, the very idea of the university?

In the second quarter, we will begin to probe the nexus between media and modernity, giving particular attention to a significant strand of media theory emerging from the German tradition.  From the Reformation which articulated the theological and theoretical legitimation for the first technical medium of print to Lessing’s theory of aesthetic media and Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks, German thinkers have been on the vanguard of media theory.  In the twentieth century, cultural theorists like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were among the first to reflect on the role of the new regime of technical media such as radio and film in shaping modernity.  In a similar vein, diametrically opposed philosophers like Adorno and Heidegger provided a perspicacious, albeit blistering critique of the effect of the new media on Western culture.  Most recently, in the last two decades the theorization and historicization of the a priori of technical media by Friedrich Kittler and others have fundamentally remolded the landscape of the humanistic disciplines, with implications for the American academic and cultural scenes that are only beginning to be mapped.

During the third quarter, we will open up the trans-cultural and trans-historical dimensions of media studies for understanding our global world.  In what ways have nations and nation-based patterns of cultural production been displaced (as well as re-entrenched) by global media technologies?  In what ways are diverse communities (for example, cyber-feminism, the South Asian Web, Second Life) using information systems to create new social worlds, alliances, institutions, and cultural ontologies that renegotiate identity, cultural heritage, and community in a global setting?