CFP: There and Back Again: Cultural Perspectives on Time and Space

Welcome to the international conference There and Back Again... Cultural Perspectives on Time and Space. The conference is organized by the doctoral student council, Department of Culture and Media Studies. More information will be available shortly on this website.

Call for Papers is now open - please submit your abstracts by February 15, 2013. Hope to see you in Umeå this spring!

The concepts of time and space are intrinsic parts of the factual and fictional experience. No matter where (or when) we look at the humanities temporality and spatiality form the basis of our research; implicitly or explicitly. However, questions regarding space and time are often overlooked as potential points of theoretical departure or a basis for methodological tools. The aim of this conference is to explore the possibilities of time and space within the diverse fields of the humanities.
We invite paper proposals from doctoral students from all disciplines of the humanities that address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:

• Identity and (inter)subjectivity.
• Narratives and narrativity.
• Representation/-s and creation of space and time.
• Theoretical perspectives on temporality and/or spatiality.
• The future and the fantastic.
• Transgressing bodies.
• Geography and migration.
• History and politics.
  Papers on all other topics pertinent to the conference’s scope of interest are also welcome.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California.
James Barrett, Umeå University.

INFORMATION: Send electronic submissions to the organizers, Tamara Andersson, Märit Simonsson and Josefine Wälivaara: taba@kultmed.umu.se.
Abstract, maximum 300 words should be submitted by February 15, 2013. Please state whether you would like to make an 8 or 20 minute presentation. Specify any technical requirements. Note that we only accept papers in English.

Jobs for Two Early Career Research Associates in Digital Humanities

We are recruiting two early career research associates - one in multi-media programming; the other in digital anthropology or sociology - to work part-time on "Digital Bridges: 'Have you lost your password?'", based at the University of Cambridge.

Directed by Professor Simon Goldhill (CRASSH) with Dr Jenna Ng (CRASSH) as the project leader, this project is co-funded and co-sponsored by the AHRC and the Palace Theatre at Watford, a leading regional theatre. The Palace Theatre, under the directorship of Brigid Larmour, has noticed that there is very little theatrical exploration of the new digital world and has consequently commissioned three writers to produce pieces, going into rehearsals in the summer of 2013, on the role of the digital in society. The three playwrights are Stacey Gregg, E.V. Crow and Gary Owen (three young but successful writers whose work has been performed at the Royal Court, The Bush and the National Theatre of Wales).
 
The goal is to establish a network of creative exchange between new digital research and its potential for drama through a discussion between theatre practitioners and active researchers in the digital world, leading to performances in the theatre and pre- and after-show discussions with theatre makes, academics and audiences. This exchange will also involve training for our early career academics first in the interface between research and the creative arts, specifically with regard to theatre, and,
second, in the issue of science and society - how the public can be intelligently and creatively informed about the consequences and implication of scientific development.

Applicants should be high-calibre early career researchers (within 8 years of the award of their PhD, or have submitted their thesis and be awaiting examination).

Please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/89/vacancies.htm for more information, including application procedure. 

Application deadline is 12 noon, 25 January 2013.

Professor in Media and Communication Studies Job

A position is available for a Professor in Media and Communication Studies with a focus on digital humanities at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University Faculty of Arts  in North Eastern Sweden. The Department has approximately 70 employees and offers a unique combination of subject areas and a creative environment for meetings and collaboration between culture, art, literature and communication. We carry out research and education within media and communication studies, journalism, drama, theater and film, ethnology, history of art, cultural analysis, literary and museum studies.

The Department provides seven renowned professional programs with many students. We educate strategic communicators; journalists with specializations in culture, scientific or sports journalism; culture analysts; culture entrepreneurs and scriptwriters, as well as for work within the museum and cultural heritage sector. Departmental research within the discipline of media and communication studies is focused upon the relationship of media and journalism to sociological and cultural issues such as gender and ethnicity, risk, sustainable development, the aging population, school, disabilities, surveillance and crime. Other research areas include digital media and citizen participation; communication of science, technology and environment (VTM); news management and photo journalism.

The appointment is a part of the Faculty of Arts’ long-term investment in the Humanities and Information Technology (digital humanities) as research areas.Therefore applicants whose research relates to issues within media and communication studies relating to digital media and expressions will be prioritised. We are looking for a person with the commitment and ability to drive the development of the research and education environment within the subject of Media and Communication Studies. As part of the appointment, there is an emphasis upon individual research and research group leadership. In addition to developing personal research, the applicant is expected to initiate and lead research projects and applications, and to supervise Ph.D. candidates. The applicant will also be expected to take chief responsibility for advanced seminars. A certain amount of teaching at both first-cycle and third-cycle education can occur.

The position will be in close cooperation with HUMlab (http://humlab.umu.se/en) HUMlab is the meeting place for Humanities, Culture and Information Technology at Umeå University. It offers an internationally strong environment and infrastructure for research and development within the area. The appointed will have his/her main basis in the Department, but also a secondary affiliation with the HUMlab.

A long-term strengthening of research is highly prioritised at the Faculty of Arts. Therefore academic skills, the ability for independence and analytical work, in addition to initiating research and work within research groups, are important factors for the appointment. Further requirements include documented pedagogical skills and solid experience of teaching and supervision at both first and third-cycle levels. Great emphasis is also placed upon cooperation and leadership skills, administration abilities and the ability to work with external partners within society and industry.

This includes the task of informing about research. Additionally, the ability to teach either in Swedish or English is a requirement for the appointment. If the person offered the position does not have a command of Swedish upon appointment, after a few years he/she must be prepared to take on board administrative and pedagogical tasks that require the ability to communicate in Swedish.

To be eligible for the position as professor the applicant must have proven academic and pedagogic capabilities and competence as reader within media and communication studies or an equivalent relevant subject (for further information see Higher Education Ordinance, Chapter 4 Section 3 in addition to the Umeå University Appointment Rules for teachers at Umeå University), see www.umu.se/digitalAssets/86/86755_anstllningsordning-fr-lrare-vid-ume-universitet-111213.pdf

Greatest importance will be attached to the evaluation criteria of academic capability and research initiation and leadership. Great emphasis is also placed upon pedagogic competence. In addition to this, other evaluation criteria are attached, such as cooperation and leadership skills, administrative competence and the ability to work with the surrounding community.

The appointment is located in Umeå and high attendance at the department is a requirement.

The application should be formed in accordance with the directions set out by the Faculty of Arts.
www.humfak.umu.se/digitalAssets/99/99436_98894_humanistiska-fakultetens-anstallningsanvisningar.pdf

The application may be submitted either electronically (.pdf or Word format) or in paper form (3 copies).

Additional information is available from the Head of Department, Kerstin Engström tel. +46 (0) 90 786 69 29, e-mail kerstin.engstrom@kultmed.umu.se. Contact person from HUMlab: Director Patrik Svensson, patrik.svensson@humlab.umu.se.

Union information is available from SACO, +46-(0)90-786 53 65, SEKO, +46-(0)90-786 52 96 and ST, +46-(0)90-786 54 31.

Your complete application, marked with reference number 311-1027-12, should be sent to jobb@umu.se (state the reference number as subject) or to the Registrar, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden to arrive 14 January 2013 at the latest.

We look forward to receiving your application!

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Opening of a lecture I gave at Amsterdam University:

'Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin'

Prezzi and the links to the videos shown during the presentation 

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.

“One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”

Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry. However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as the present situation in the education sector of most Western democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of culture.  There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works. Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual, sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism, iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of the digital works.  These works are

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)

Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)

Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)

Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q

CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)

The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)

Call for Partners for a Teaching Project in Second Life.

As our initial partner has had to pull out due to institutional reasons, we make a new late call for collaborative partners for a project in sociolinguistics and teacher training in Second Life.

As part of the Euroversity network (http://euroversity.ning.com/), the Department of Language studies at Umeå University are looking for a minimum of 12 committed collaborative partners (preferably people with previous experience of Second Life and language teaching) from various universities or other educational institutions around the world in order to participate in a collaborative online project conducted primarily in the virtual world of Second Life. The activities are part of the ASSIS project: https://assis.pbworks.com

The subject of the activities relates to the topic of gender and language in education and is included as an activity under our English teacher-training programme. Our ambition is to expose our students to external contacts with professional experience in order to explore aspects of gender and language in a classroom context (physical and virtual). Providing a culturally mixed forum for such discussions will, in our opinion, bring new insights into these issues and hopefully widen our students’ horizons. In this context it is worth mentioning that many of our students will be working in schools of heterogenic cultural demography in their future professional lives.

Specific activities will be carried out during the autumn 2011. We have planned three such specific activities under the project:

• A group discussion (in groups of four) of a ‘case’, which illustrates different aspects related to language and gender in a classroom situation.
  

• A group workshop (in the same groups of 4) involving the creation a case based on real life examples and anecdotes, which illustrate/s various issues related to language and gender in an educational context. In the creation of this case we will ask participants to draw on the collective experiences of the all the four group members present.

• An observational study of teacher behaviour related to gender and language, which will go on parallel to the two events above. For this part of the study the participants will be asked to observe the behaviour of our own lecturers/teachers who are assisting them in the collaborations. We have two teachers working in this capacity, one male and one female. The participants will be asked to fill in two online evaluations (one for each teacher) in order to produce a short observational report evaluating potential gendered behaviour of our teachers and in a debriefing meeting at the end of the project we will relate the findings to the theoretical frameworks studied in the course literature.

The collaboration will be conducted online, primarily in the virtual world of Second Life. We will also provide tools for asynchronous written collaborations in the form of a wiki, where each group will have access to their own space.

As experienced SL-users/teachers you will obviously hold a special role in the group discussions but the idea is that the collaboration should be one where all contribute. You do thus not have to feel that you have any special responsibility apart from being a collaborative discussion partner.

Suggested dates for meetings etc are as follows:

6^th -16^th of September:

Technical and social initiation (https://assis.pbworks.com/w/page/44744583/technical%20and%20social%20initiation): During this period we will provide all participants with the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the tools (Second Life and the wiki). We will have group meetings for this purpose on the 6^th of September (13.00-15.00 CET) and on Friday the 16^th of September (13.00-15.00 CET) in Second life and we will also contact all who feel they need private one-to-one guidance on an individual basis in the ‘window’ 7-15^th of September. We will also provide the participants with contact details of their partner groups and encourage them to meet up and get to know each other in Second Life or using any other tool they see fit (Skype, MSN, e-mail etc). Our ambition is thus that ALL participants should have entered the environment and tested the functionalities prior to the actual workshops. In addition, we hope that the participants also will have had a chance to at least get to know each other superficially prior to the planned events.

20 and 21^st of September

Discussions of case: The discussion of a case provided prior to the event via the wiki will probably take about 1-2hrs and will be conducted in groups of 4. Since we are anticipating a total of 12 groups we have booked two days for this event but note that participants will only be committed for one 1-2hour-session. Because of potential time differences etc we cannot at this time specify exact times for the event yet but afternoons CET is a safe bet.

4 and 5^th of October

Workshop – creation of case example: The creation of the case example will probably take about 1-2hrs and will be conducted in groups of 4. Since we are anticipating a total of 12 groups we have booked two days for this event but again note that participants will only be committed for one 1-2hour-session. Because of potential time differences etc we cannot at this time specify exact times for the event yet but afternoons CET is a safe bet.

Note that we will also ask our students to summarise their findings from each meeting in a wiki tool. As outside participants not being examined your participation in this activity is of course optional. The observational study on teacher behaviour will be reported using an online questionnaire tool and here we appreciate if all contribute to maximise the reliability of the data.

20th of October

Debriefing: During this meeting we will evaluate the activities together and also reveal the results of the evaluation of our own teachers and discuss these results. The meeting will take place in a face-to-face setting in a lecture hall at Umeå University with online access through U-stream or Adobe Connect.

Please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested in participating.

Thank you!

Mats Deutschmann mats.deutschmann [at] engelska.umu.se

(project leader)

Hanna Outakoski

(Euroversity coordinator, Umeå University)

Upload of 18 592 Scientific Documents to the Pirate Bay

A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

The torrent consists of documents from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the copyright to which has long since expired. However, the only way to access these documents until now has been via JSTOR, as Maxwell explains in a long and eloquent text on the Pirate Bay, with individual articles costing as much as $19. “Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he writes.

Maxwell goes on to explain that he gained access to the documents years ago in what he says was a legal manner, but he was afraid to publish them because of potential legal repercussions from the publishers of scientific journals. He says the indictment of Swartz, who allegedly tried to download thousands of files from JSTOR through the library at MIT, made him change his mind:


"This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents. These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society's prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction, scanning the documents created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge as their lofty mission statements suggest but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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My Welcome to Students for 2011

Welcome to Australian Studies at the Department of Language Studies Umeå University, Sweden

The Way to Work

Is It Next Week Already?

Last week was so jam packed with activity I have little time for documenting it here. So I thought I would post a couple of things here before setting out on another hectic week come the morn..
The above images are from a presentation I gave in HUMlab on Thursday as part of the ”Creative Space – Människan, Tinget, Rummet” workshop. I used the 3D web browser ExitReality to present part of my talk. I created a blog, Augmented Reality, and switched between a 2D and 3D representation of it during the talk. The title of my presentation was Remixidity: Hybrid Spaces for Exploration, in which I gave examples of mixed reality spaces and embodiment. As well we (HUMlab) staged a small gallery-like exhibition of works and projects dealing with the concept of mixed reality space (second image above). My departure point for the conception of space in the talk was Henri Lefebvre's classic text The Production of Space (I am holding a copy in the first image). More on Remixidity can be found on the HUMlab blog.

Last Wednesday I gave the final lecture for the Cultures of Commonwealth English course that I have written and have been teaching over the past five weeks. All the lectures are online as video podcasts so you can check out my teaching style (or ambiguous lack thereof) here. The exam for the course was on Friday and I expect a great lump of papers to be marked to land on my sorry desk in the next day or two.

On Thursday I heard that a chapter which I wrote in collaboration with HUMlab Research Coordinator Stefan Gelfgren on teaching and learning using the virtual world program Second Life has been accepted for publication. We have to make some corrections but it should be out in the not too distant future. My first academic publication!!

I have also be writing thesis. I received positive feedback on chapter four early in the week from my secondary supervisor, which was very heartening. I have now returned to the third chapter of the text, on design in digital literature and how it implies responses to the texts. The latest realisation, partly provoked by the positive but not uncritical feedback from B supervisor, is that narrativity needs to be a grounding concept in the text, rather than restricting it just to chapter four. A source of inspiration for this line of approach has been Theorizing NarrativityBy John Pier, José Angel García Landa. Which B supervisor suggested in feedback and I happened to have on my desk, borrowed weeks ago but unread. It has been my companion since Friday and has been very helpful.

The final piece of news from last week is my purchase of three vinyl gems:


13. V.A./ OCORA – MUSIQUE RITUELLE TIBETAINE: “S/T” (Ocora Records – OCR-49) (Record: Near Mint/ gatefold Sleeve: Near Mint/ Attached Booklet: Near Mint). First original Ocora pressing out of 1969 on the dark blue label. The recordings on this album are representative of the music and rites of the various sects of the original current o Buddhism and were made in North-east Nepal. Tow of the most important monasteries in this frontier region are represented here, the monastery of Thami of the Gelugpa sect and the monastery of Tengboche of the of the Nyingmapa sect. The music is varied and consists out of big two-headed drums, providing the rhythm, 2 pairs of hollow cymbals, 2 oboes producing a nasal and tense linear sound, handbells, chanting and other esoteric rumblings. The album is filled with tantric drone-like escapades that seem to capture and magnify images of roaring of torrents, the noise of rocks splintering and sliding down the mountain, violent guts of wind, sudden storms, the tinkling of bells worn around the necks of animals and the ankles of children, etc. Again massive….original 1st pressing.


"Traditional Music of Southern Laos," Unesco Collection Musical Sources, Art Music of Southeast Asia, IX-4, Philips 1973


Indianmusik från Colombia. Musiknätet Waxholm, Sweden. 1973.

The End of the Commonwealth of Englishes

In three weeks I have presented seven lectures on The Cultures of Commonwealth English. It has been a demanding time, but I have learnt a lot. I have been using a wiki to teach and administer the course. The wiki is the textbook, the lectures notes, the plan and the study materials for the exam. I am not sure how the students feel about the use of the wiki, but I suspect it may be positive. I will distribute a short series of questions to guage opionion during the last lecture tomorrow. I have been even teaching from the wiki in the classroom, using the embedded videos and images as learning objects in lessons. I have been spacing out the videos from between 10 an 20 minutes apart, as the students start to get bored listening to my voice after about that amount of time. I hope to be teaching the same course again next term and I will continue to develop the wiki as part of future teaching of the course. You can check the wiki out HERE.

Words and Silence

Silence here has been due to a marathon 4 day writing session of a thesis chapter which I finished at midnight last night. The chapter, Ritualized Texture: Design, Materiality and Response in Digital Literature will be discussed in a seminar next Tuesday at 15:15:

Design is relevant to how digital works of literature are encountered, interpreted and responded to. The visual arrangement of a work on the computer screen (use of color and light, points of view etc), its structural elements (programming codes, server speeds etc.) and its functional qualities (spatial arrangements, linking systems, and sonic features etc.) combine to become the overall design of the digital text. It is argued in this chapter that patterns of implied response are present in the design elements of a digital work of literature. A recent popular work on the design of digital media describes the authorship of interactive texts where “the ratio of accessible states to conceivable states is a good measure of the quality of the interaction. Verbs are what make states accessible to your user. If you put lots of effort into the verbs, you’ll be giving more and more state accessibility to your user”. (Crawford: 95) Such a mechanistic approach to interactive design speaks of a lack in the understanding of how representations from multiple cultures often intersect in the authoring of digital textuality. However, there is present in the statement a suggestion of the relevance of response in the design of digital media works. It is such dialogic exchanges between design, the material artifact and implied response embodied in the digital literary text which forms the subject of this chapter.

Should be interesting.....

In the meantime there is much to do. I was sent a link today to The Eighth Day, "an online graphic novel created as a 3rd year Final Major Production for (BA) in Interactive Media Production by Arni Lochner".
There's a blog for The Eighth Day as well. It represents for me a further development in Flash as a narrative production tool. The Eighth Day is an interactive web comic with audio. Really nice use of animation in both visual composition and kinetic structures. Shading and colors are great as well. I question the need to maintain the folio form but it works fine.

The Hermit of the Open Laptop

I have sort of gone into hiding this week. Well physically anyway (I am still blogging and the mobile is on). It is the first week for a long time where I don't have anything booked to do at university. At the same time my youngest son is going to be tested on Wednesday to see if he may be partially deaf (long story..he does not seem to hear so well and it involves a general aesthetic). As well my oldest son is at home for most of the week with a week's 'sport holiday'. Erika (partner, wife, mother to the two already mentioned) is also suffering from a back injury. So I am working at home. Not easy in one sense as there are always other things to do but at the same time I tend to find many distractions at university as well (coffee and biscuits - 'fika' in Swedish, the library, talking to colleagues, writing in my blog, reading RSS, cafes, bookshop, more talking to people and so on). Today I have actually managed to get quite a bit of work done (found some good sources on iteration in narrative, planned out the whole chapter and began revising the first draft of 13 pages). I am writing a thesis chapter on design and implied response in digital literature (Seminar 8th April). It is supposed to deal with the bits of a work of digital literature that contribute to the story but are not directly part of it as language. Like the way sound or the visual layout is used to address the respondent to the text. I am really enjoying it, in fact it is the first chapter so far (my third.......well fourth if you count the first misadventure) where I feel sort of like I know where it is going. How it is going to get there is another matter.

Umeå Live

The town I live and work in is called Umeå. The population is around 100 000 people and considering it is a town of that size it is really quite a dynamic and diverse environment in which to live. Recently a book was published called umealive.se which is about the IT scene in Umeå. It's 40 pages long, written in Swedish but it has lots of pictures and there is one which includes me (Page 14). It can be downloaded as a PDF.

Umeå Live is a collaborative project between Umeå University, Umeå County and Vinnova. It will be opening a website soon as well as announcing more exciting projects.

Tomorrow: Seminars and Exams

Tomorrow I will be presenting a chapter of my thesis in a seminar in the conference room in the Humanities Building at 15:15-17:00. Before this, from 13:15-15:00 in HUMlab I will be attending this (under the UB Library, all are welcome):

New Media and Architecture: The American Megachurch as a Case Study
Erica Robles, Stanford University

With the widespread propagation of networked communication technologies, the settings for social life, more often than not, involve complex compositions of media and space. Affecting every category of human experience, from work via telecommuting to leisure in cyber cafés to public discourse in virtual communities, new media re-shape the architectures of everyday life. As scholars, designers, researchers, and practitioners our primary focus has been the role of communication technologies in affecting these transformations. For example, Media Lab founder, Nicholas Negroponte, writes, “digital technologies should allow people to be anywhere, regardless of where they are” (from Being Digital, 1995). From this perspective, the qualities of physical space, geography, cultural context, and institutional setting become obstacles to transgress, overcome, or forego.

Arguing, instead, that contemporary social settings involve both cultural and technological changes, both media networks and material structures, this talk demonstrates their inter-relationships by focusing on how a traditional social practice, religious worship, employs new media and contemporary architectural design. Illustrated vividly by American megachurches, which combine commercial-style architectures in sprawling metropolitan areas with a reliance on technologies, media enterprises, and consumer logics, these sites evidence a strong interest in using new media to preserve rather than overcome traditional social structures.

Through case study of a pioneering and influential megachurch, The Crystal Cathedral, this presentation grounds a series of questions about the role of new media, culture, and the built environment. Recounting the fifty-year history of this institution first as a Southern California ‘drive-in church’, then a ‘walk-in/drive-in/television church’, and finally as a monumental glass architecture and global media enterprise, its architectural expressions magnify the processes of cultural response to technological and spatial change. The church evolves as it brokers new media – first television, then the Internet – to its community of believers. At every step the built environment, designed in collaboration with a series of notable architects – Richard Shelley, Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson, and Richard Meier – reproduces a vision of faith that relies upon technology to enact a new form of monumentality suited to a digital, networked world.

I met Erica Robles today in HUMlab and judging from the short chat we had, tomorrow should be very interesting. Tomorrow, before lunch from 09:00-12:00, I will be one of four teacher supervisors facilitating in a mock seminar for third term cultural studies students. We will be discussing paper presentations that range between The Shining, Vampires, Football Hooligans, Heart Of Darkness/Apocalypse Now and Harry Potter.

Quite a day ahead and still more reading to do before then........

Horses Oil and Links

This morning in Second Life..horses on the lawn of the Swedish embassy

Busy. The Oil21 workshop began today and I spent a few hours listening to Sebastian Lutgert (an audio file from 2004 here)and Jan Gerber faciltiate conversation and consideration at the Umeå art school. It was an interesting session and I look foward to Thursday when I can return to OIL 21.
In other news my delic.icio.us links are multiplying and have just passed 6000.

Beyond Intellectual Property: From File-Sharing to Distributed Archiving

For all of this coming week I want to spend as much time as I can at the Acadamy of Fine Arts here in Umeå. The are hosting an Oil 21 event this week, The Oil of the 21st Century, Beyond Intellectual Property: From File-Sharing to Distributed Archiving. The first three days (Monday-Wednesday) are open and Thursday and Friday require registration. It seems to be related to the even that took place in Berlin October 26 to October 28 (program and news). The Umeå event will include films, discussions and more:

Beyond Intellectual Property: From File-Sharing to Distributed Archiving" is a workshop and a symposion with Sebastian Lütgert, artist, writer, theorist, and Jan Gerber, programmer and video artist, both from Berlin. Special Guest on Friday, Nov.9: Rasmus Fleischer, Historian, writer, musician and conceputalist; cofounded the collective Piratbyrån in 2003.

Situated at the core of this workshop is an ongoing research project on images and information on the internet: who owns this information - allegedly the most valuable good in this century - and who has the right to produce and distribute it? These question arise from working with images, texts, music and film, and may demand for a set of entirely new artistic strategies. Archive and context – both key words in the arts during the last 15 years – are of particular interest and subject to new definitions.

Questions (in no particular order):
- What is the masterplan behind "Rights Management"?
- What does file-sharing mean for the relation between production, distribution and consumption?
- What do we do now that all files have been downloaded?
- What is "Pirate Cinema"?
- What can we expect from the "Creative Commons"?
- What modes of subjectivation exist beyond the "Small Author"?
- What is the answer of the artist / the filmmaker / the fotographer to these emerging questions?

The reading list is an interesting thing in itself and all the texts are online:

Beyond Intellectual Property – Reading List

1. Control and Rights Management
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
John Perry Barlow, Censorship 2000

2. Copyright and the Commons
Tim O'Reilly, Piracy Is Progressive Taxation
Joost Smiers, Abandoning Copyright
Rasmus Fleischer - "Content Flatrate" and the Social Democracy of the Digital Commons

3. Music and Piracy
Courtney Love, Music and Piracy
Steve Albini, The Problem with Music
Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Music

4. Détournement and Pirate Cinema
René Vienet,The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art
Situationist International, With and Against Cinema
Situationist International, Cinema and Revolution
Situationist International, The Role of Godard
Steven Daly, Pirates of the Multiplex

5. Small Authors and Material Reproduction
Franz Kafka, Intellectual Property
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
Michel Foucault, Author Function
Robert Luxemburg, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

OHHH what a week......

If you want to aquaint yourself with what the SI thought of Goddard, I put up a series of Situationist comics on my Flickr site quite a while ago...but they are still here.

Katherine Hayles at Umeå University

On Friday 19th October at 14:10 in Humanist Lecture Theater F, Professor Katherine Hayles will be giving the address for her honorary doctorate from Umeå University. It is open to the public so if you are in the area and want to witness a great mind in action come along. The topic is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
In case you are unfamiliar with the work of Katherine Hayles:

. Katherine Hayles (16 December 1943 - ) is a noted postmodern literary critic and theorist as well as the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998–1999. She is currently the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Other Books:
My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, 2005
Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.), 2004
Writing Machines, 2002
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, 1999
Chaos and Order (ed.), 1991
Chaos Bound, 1990
The Cosmic Web, 1984

Welcome to the Blogosphere Nicke

I would just like to welcome Nicklas Hållén to the blog world. Nicke is a new PhD candidate with the Department of Modern Languages/English Literature at Umeå Univeristy. He started a blog, Nicke's Tea Party on the weekend and I'm sure it will be an interesting read over the coming four years of PhD work..

Flight Was Achieved this Morning

Almost too busy to blog. This morning on the way to taking my 7 year old to school our bicycles collided at some speed. Silas was sent face first into the asphalt and I was airborne. We returned home with me carrying him. I think he is alright, some grazing to the side of his face. He is asleep now but I am watching for signs of concussion (sleeping being one of them). Apart from that drama it is university full power. I was up until 1am last night and have completed 14 pages of the first draft to my thesis introduction and will give it to my supervisor today as he is in town. It will be our first face to face meeting since June. I have a meeting with Kerstin Munck,associate professor in literature at Umeå University, today about a seminar we will be having on digital literature in HUMalb. Also involved is Jan Van Looy, who I met for the first time yesterday, the co-author of Close Reading New Media and now a postdoctoral fellow at HUMlab. Exciting times in HUMlab. On Thursday I leave for Stockholm and the M3 Interaction 2007 conference (aahh I have to print out and read the other papers yet!). I am hoping to be able to put together my slide presentation today and tomorrow. It is the first time I have presented a paper at a conference and the first time I have thought to use slides. I think I will use Slideshare or Zentation. Not sure which yet.
Finally tomorrow is Benyamin's birthday. Two years old and a joy to behold. Yiippee!

My Next Six Months

What am I doing?
I am working on:
1. A paper for the 3M conference in Stockholm in September. My abstract "Prefacing Interaction: Copyright and Remix in Online Digital Literature" was accepted and now I have to write it.
2. I have started writing an outline for a course I will be teaching in the Spring Term 2008. Under the brilliant guidance of Pat Shrimpton (now retiring!!) it was called British Realia; examining the culture and institutions of the British Isles. I have ambitions to develop a Commonwealth of English module, looking at how English and cultural institutions have spread beyond the British Isles and have developed lives of their own. I plan to concentrate on Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. However, it is only a small course so I should be careful about what I try to fit in. I think I will stick to a list of four or five institutions and follow some of their threads about the Commonwealth.
3. The HUMlab Island in Second Life. I have not yet ventured into SL since being back in Sweden but I need to soon. I was taking a critical eye to the architecture around me while I was travelling and I have a rough idea of what might suit the island in terms of structures. I need to make some drawings.
4. The HUMlab wiki. This is going to be a learning experience. HUMlab needs a wiki and I am going to build one.

Along with two chapters for my thesis this is is the plan for the next six months of my life. Busy times ahead.