CFP: The Crisis of the Book: Worlds of Opportunity, Worlds of Change (Reed College, Due 6/1)

The Crisis of the Book: 

Worlds of Opportunity, Worlds of Change

October 18–20, 2012

Portland, Oregon

Hosted by the Reed College 

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program

call for papers/presentations

2012 annual conference

In the current electronic age, a few keystrokes will deliver vast amounts of information instantly and allow us to communicate with a wide audience indiscriminately. In this changing landscape, what is the role of the printed book as transmitter of knowledge and as material object? Revolutions in technology throughout history have changed the way we receive and process information, even the way we think about ideas. From scroll to codex, printing press to computer screen, just as familiar modes of communication disappear, new possibilities and opportunities take their place. This interdisciplinary conference will place the transformation in print culture in a historical framework, and will reflect upon the changing nature of text delivery and the experience of reading. 

How is knowledge produced? What role does the text play as cultural, material, and sacred object? How do we “read” historically, culturally, popularly, and what is the future of the practice of reading? What is the place of the modern library in the electronic age? How does the new field of media studies reflect evolving social contexts?  How do we “see” graphic novels or navigate through hypertext fiction? What questions concerning copyright and intellectual property does the digital age raise? 

The 2012 AGLSP Annual Conference invites papers addressing how knowledge and ideas are produced and disseminated. In this context, we welcome a broader definition of “text” to include electronic, film, pictorial, etc. Special consideration will be given to submissions which address the integration of this theme into Liberal Studies curricula and classes.

Paper presentation should be 20 minutes long with an additional 5 to 10 minutes for questions. Please submit a one to two page abstract electronically to Barbara Amen (bamen@reed.edu), MALS director at Reed College, by June 1. (Be sure to write “AGLSP Submission” in the subject line.) Also, please include multi-media requirements, although we encourage presenters to give judicious consideration to the effective use of PowerPoint. Additional conference information at aglsp.org

Scholarly Communications and the Digital Humanities: Panel Discussion (4/7)

This panel discussion is being moderated by Draper's Master Teacher in Art Worlds, Anna McCarthy.

Scholarly Communications and the Digital Humanities:

A Panel Discussion with Alexander Provan and Dan Cohen, moderated by Anna McCarthy

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

6 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary. Photo ID required.

The panel will discuss issues of readership, collaboration and format in the digital environment as they relate to the work of humanists from a broad range of disciplines and perspectives.

Alexander Provan, Editor of Triple Canopy, an online journal and workspace, Contributing Editor of Bidoun, an online magazine of art and culture from the Middle East.

Dan Cohen, Associate Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University, and author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.

Anna McCarthy, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, NYU Tisch, co-editor of the journal Social Text, and author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, and The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America.

This event is co-sponsored by The Digital Humanities Working Research Group, a project of the Humanities Initiative led by Diana Taylor (Professor of Performance Studies, Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Hemispheric Institute) and Michael Stoller (Director of Collections & Research Services, New York University Libraries) that brings together a broad range of humanists and technologists from across NYU to discuss the role and implication of digital technologies in the Humanities.

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (3/22)

Lydia H. Liu (author) in Conversation with McKenzie Wark
Tuesday, March 22, 7pm at BookCulture, 536 West 112th Street

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, by Lydia Liu, is the first in-depth study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. The book shows how the convergences of literary modernism, mathematics, and psychoanalysis in the 20th century transformed alphabetical writing system into the post-phonetic, ideographic, and universal system of today's digital media. Altering the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes, the remarkable event has compelled a new understanding of language, human-machine interplay, and the Freudian unconscious.

Lydia H. Liu, W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University

McKenzie Wark, Associate Dean of Eugene Lang College at the New School

Thank you,
Sarah

Sarah Monks, Administrative Assistant
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
sm3373@columbia.edu
t.(212)854-4541; f.(212)854-3099