Book (monograph)

Many people deploy photo media tools to document everyday events and rituals. For generations we have stored memories in albums, diaries, and shoeboxes to retrieve at a later moment in life. Autobiographical memory, its tools, and its objects are pressing concerns in most people’s everyday lives, and recent digital transformation cause many to reflect on the value and meaning of their own “mediated memories.” Digital photo cameras, camcorders, and multimedia computers are rapidly replacing analogue equipment, inevitably changing our everyday routines and conventional forms of recollection. How will digital photographs, lifelogs, photoblogs, webcams, or playlists change our personal remembrance of things past? And how will they affect our cultural memory? The main focus of this study is the ways in which (old and new) media technologies shape acts of memory and individual remembrances. This book spotlights familiar objects but addresses the larger issues of how technology penetrates our intimate routines and emotive processes, how it affects the relationship between private and public, memory and experience, self and others.

(Source: Stanford University Press catalog copy)

As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities.

In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fagerjord provide a compelling guide,exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique cantransform the digital humanities.

Digital Humanities will be an essential book for students and researchers in this newfield but also related areas, such as media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly.

(Source: Polity catalog copy)

An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations.

Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works—created on floppy disks, in Apple's defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms—not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinders project and its series of “Traversals”—video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works. 

In Traversals, Moulthrop and Grigar mine this material to examine four influential early works: Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger (1986), John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1993), Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly's We Descend (1997), offering “deep readings” that consider the works as both literary artifacts and computational constructs. For each work, Moulthrop and Grigar explore the interplay between the text's material circumstances and the patterns of meaning it engages and creates, paying attention both to specificities of media and purposes of expression.

(Source: The MIT Press catalog copy)