academia

Guest lecturer by Greg Niemeyer at the University of Bergen, May 02, 2018. As the University of Bergen develops a new strategy to become a leader in innovative approaches to digital media and culture, the Berkeley Center for New Media provides a compelling model of cross-campus engagement.

The University of Bergen program in Digital Culture, the departments of Media, Art, Design, and Media City Bergen are pleased to welcome Greg Niemeyer, the co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media, to UiB. Professor Niemeyer will give a presentation on BCNM's innovative interdisciplinary approach to critical and artistic engagement with new media.

The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) is a focal point for research and teaching about new media. It is led by a highly trans-disciplinary community of 120 affiliated faculty, advisors, and scholars, from 35 UC Berkeley departments, including Architecture, Philosophy, Film & Media, History of Art, Performance Studies, and Music; the Schools of Engineering, Information, Journalism, and Law; and the Berkeley Art Museum. BCNM is located at a global center for design and information technology and based in a public research university known for alternative thinking.

The mission of BCNM is to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest.

Laura Sullivan and her students explore webwritingand content provision as activist tools.

(Source: EBR)

Investigating the question of whether academics should be concerned that Academia.edu is not an educational institution, Johannah Rodgers finds that the answers depend on your definition of “education” and which parties you ask.

(Source: EBR)

Electronic literature (e-lit) is an emerging kind of literature in the Arab world and just few Arabic universities have embedded it in their curricula. This article is premised on the assumption that university curricula are the authentic gate for any discipline to be academically guaranteed. Consequently, studying the status quo of teaching e-lit in the Arabic universities and challenges that hinder its progress are essential steps toward securing a recognized place for e-lit in the global literary scene.

This paper is intended to help identify and build a new generation of Arab e-lit critics and writers by diagnosing the circumstances of the Arabic classroom situation. My method in this ongoing research project is to conduct interviews with Arab professors of e-lit and surveys for the students. Additionally, my firsthand experience, as an assistant lecturer, in teaching in an Egyptian university (Minia University) will be of great help in understanding the capabilities of the Arabic classroom settings.

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

In this interview Dene Grigar tells about her approach to electronic literature in the early 1990s and about her work as curator for the exhibit "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" in 2015. She goes on describing some distinguishing features of electronic literature and explaining her 'conceptual shift' on regard to the way of working with computers. Finally she suggests some methods of analysis for the understanding of electronic literature for both academic scholars and mainstream audience.