Book (monograph)

Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field.

Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity.

Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations--creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners--that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts.

(Source: MIT Press catalog copy)

There are not few questions and crucial problems that the theoretical and comparative reflection should face trying to keep certain relevance in the areas of humanities and social sciences in the globalization era: What type of social subject is conforming this new communicative context? What new forms of literary textualities are the digital media spaces conceiving?

This book introduces and defines the new field of digital literature, answering to the question of the introduction of hypertext if it has suposed a reconfiguration of the literary paradigm in all its areas: theoretical, creative and educational. The theory, ideology and politics of hypertext are examined from a view of a theory of the hypertextual links, which proposes an original typology that is used as a tool for the analysis of literary digital texts (Source: Aurea Library) (Translated by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua).

With the digital media in a culture changed by hypermedia, by immersion in virtual spaces and new social habits in reading, the fiction universe has been transmitted to us in a printed way and we can start to reflect on its past context to find a space in the future. This book searchs for answers of a key question when we talk about digitization of works of fiction previously printed. Is it possible to move and in which way the cultural memory of a printed book to the virtual memory characterised by hypertext, audiovisual immersion and participation in reading-writing?

(h)adas is not a conventional essay and it does not only try to be about women and technology; (h)adas tries to find one’s own times and ways of domestication and emancipation that are deduced from daily life technologies, about its invisible power in appropriation and time management and expectations. It is a singular book, in which stories, research and autobiography cohabit and it has worth Remedios Zafra V Malaga Essay Prize “it has been written to revindicate the political power that accompanies this periphery , to make everything shared, to reflect upon the conditions in which repetition power of the world perform, some ways to battle against it from the critical consciousness and creation” (Translated by Maya Zalbidea) (Source: remedioszafra.net)

Suppporting the critical reappropriation of a room of one’s own -Virginia Woolf, 1929-and contextualizing in the present Net Culture, this essay questions the redefinition of the private spaces transformed into nods of relation and inmaterial work in a Web-Society. With the hypothesis of that space conforms a new public public-private scenario for the reflection and self-management of the self, this book examines the new conditions and possibilities of emancipation and subjective construction of a connected home, the consequences of the production ways and online life from the intimate spaces and the redefinition of the new productive spheres.

A Connected Room of One’s Own is an insightful essay about intimacy, about the spaces of privacy and the Internet; a book which sets out to ponder the challenges new online habits and customs pose to creativity, politics, and the management of our personal identities. It brings a broad range of disciplines to the discussion –from anthropology and sociology to philosophy and politics– certain to be of interest to researchers working in the fields of online culture, feminism and identity/cultural studies.

Netianas are heirs of cyborg, of the nomadic subject and other political feminist fictions, they are also a myth, new factitious, desirable and productive creatures, ironic cyberfeminist figures that warn of the new risks of the Internet for an emancipator production of the contemporary subject “woman”. But netianas go further than the artistic ideal of a chimera, the invention produces the same territory of the discourse that tries to change (Translated by Maya Zalbidea) (Source: remedioszafra.net).