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CFP: JCMC Special Issue on Search Engines

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication invites submissions to a special issue on the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of search engines. Guest editor Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University’s Web Use Project seeks to bring together a wide range of disciplinary views to consider what is known about the present and future of the use, design, and meanings of search engines. Some possible topics:

–Who uses search engines and for what purposes?
–What are the effects of search engine use on mass- and interpersonal communication?
–How do search engines shape online identity management and representation?
–Are there any potential alternatives to commercial search engines?

Abstracts are due on June 1, 2005, with full papers of 7,000-10,000 words due October 1, 2005. Read the full call here. Send inquiries to Eszter Hargittai.

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CFP: M/C Special Issue: “Scan”

The journal M/C Media/Culture invites submissions on the topic of “scanning“–the activities of watching, surveiling, reporting, and recording. Guest editors Joshua Green and Adam Swift encourage creative interpretations of the act of scanning, and contributions from a wide variety of fields, “to explore its practices, limitations, and potentials.” Read the full call here. Send inquiries to scan@journal.media-culture.org.au Deadline for articles is July 1, 2005, for an August 24, 2005 issue release date.

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Transliteracies Project at UCSB: Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading

ELO board member Alan Liu is organizing a gathering – and launching a larger project – that will bring together theorists and practitioners from the humanities, arts, social sciences, computer science, and industry to talk about the fate of reading in the new media age. The “UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference will serve to launch the Transliteracies Project. It all takes place June 17-18, 2005, in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s McCune Room (6020 HSSB). Read more Transliteracies Project at UCSB: Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading

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8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival, October 7-9, 2005

Plans are underway for the 8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival, to be held for the first time in its home town, San Francisco, California. The festival is an annual event where the digital storytelling community gathers to examine compelling projects, share new and useful information and ideas, and inspire, invigorate and create a thoughtful dialogue about current issues in digital narrative.

Two Digital Storytelling Bootcamp Workshops are planned, one before the festival, October 5-7, and one after the festival, October 10-12. These three-day courses are project-based introductions to creating and publishing a digital narrative.

To learn about the festival schedule and register for the festival and workshops, visit the Digital Storytelling Festival website.

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Turbulence Comp_05 Winners

The five winners of Comp_05 (the juried international net art competition of New Radio and Performing Arts | Turbulence) are quite interesting from the perspective of electronic literature.

Gothamberg (by Marek Walczak, et al.) “is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings” that will enable “travel using various strategies to different parts of the structure, the stories unfolding between public, private and personal spaces.” Meanwhile Peripheral n°2 KEYBOARD (by Marika Dermineur, Khalil Bennis, et al.) “will explore writing and language by reflecting anew on the keyboard” and SWM05 (by Troy Innocent, Ollie Olson, et al) will create a “distributed embodiment” of a fictional(?) group “as musical-visual forms performed on mobile phones and other wireless communication devices.”

Finally, meme.garden (by Mary Flanagan and Daniel C. Howe) will use textual analysis to “introduce the concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a computer-based search tool” while mimoSa (by Ricardo Ruiz, Alexandre Freire, Etienne Delacroix, et al.) will “record public stories (audio and film) using mobile phones and microphones and store them in a database, broadcast them in FM, and record them to CD; print telephone numbers and instructions on the streets and walls so that people passing by will be able to access the stories via their mobile phones; and make a web portal … to access both audio and video.”

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New ELO Website

The ELO’s new site, designed and engineered by Nick Montfort, is now in place. Thanks go to Scott Rettberg for his help, which included migrating much of the content from the old site, and to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who prepared many items that will appear in coming weeks in the new showcase.

The showcase is designed to feature exemplary electronic literature. The five most recent items are visible at the top of the main page, and everything featured to date is accessible via the “Showcased E-Lit” link just below the search field. An RSS feed of the showcase is available so that readers can automatically keep bookmarks to the current entry or syndicate the showcase on their own pages.

News entries and other pages on the site are now easily searchable. The news is also accessible by category and by date. We have tried to redirect as many previous URLs as possible to current resources, to avoid leaving anyone with page not found errors. The new site is also designed to be easier to maintain and manage into the future, allowing the ELO to communicate with members and the reading public more effectively.

The new ELO website is powered by WordPress and uses a theme based on Joni Mueller’s Zen Minimalist.

We hope you enjoy the new site. Please let us know what you think of it, and if you encounter any problems. The email you should use to contact the ELO can be found, along with our phone number and postal address, on the “contact” page.

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CFP: Cybercultures: Exploring Critical Issues

The 3rd global conference of the “Critical Issues” project, “Cybercultures: Exploring Critical Issues,” invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, workshops, and reports on a wide range of topics, including

–Cyberspace and Cyberculture
–Cybermedias: New Media and Technology
–The Virtual and Virtuality
–Cyberpunk: Writing and Film
–Digital and Interactive Arts
–Computers and Games
–Identities, Bodies, Cyborgs and the Human
–Cybercultures and Politics
–Cybercultures, Cybersubcultures and Communities

The conference will be held in Prague August 11-13, 2005.

300-word abstracts are due by Friday, June 3, 2005. All presented papers will be published in an ISBN eBook; selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard-copy volume. For the full call, including instructions on how to submit, visit the Critical Issues website.

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60 Second Story

Got a minute?

The 60 second story competition invites submissions of works of fiction, recorded by their authors as digital videos, which are less than one minute and one second in duration. Files size should be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

There will one grand-prize winner, who will recieve a one-minute supply of exotic chocolate, a one inch by one inch book of the winning work published by Spineless Books, and other one-minute pleasures. The winner and fourteen runners-up will be published in the “Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” a permanent web shrine to the 60 second story form. The judges of the competition include internet writers William Gillespie, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Jill Walker and Rob Wittig.

See 60secondstory.contagiousmedia.org for the details, to watch some 60 second stories, and to submit your own.

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Dichtung Digital “Netzliteratur” Issue

In November 2004 the University of Siegen hosted an all-star gathering of electronic literature critics and authors. Now the presentations from “Netzliteratur – Umbrüche in der literarischen Kommunikation” are online as a special issue of Dichtung Digital. Contributors include ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin and literary advisory board member Loss Pequeno Glazier, as well as Marie-Laure Ryan, Markku Eskelinen, Frank Furtwängler, Mela Kocher, Roberto Simanowski, Philippe Bootz, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Laura Borras Castanyer, Susanne Berkenheger, and conference organizers Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer.

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Itinerant

ItinerantItinerant is a site-specific sound installation in Boston, Massachusetts. It invites people to take a walk through Boston Common and surrounding neighborhoods to experience an interactive sound work delivered via handheld computer and driven by GPS satellite information. During a walk which may last for more than two hours, visitors hear a personal narrative of family and displacement, interspersed with passages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — the classic tale of a technoscientific monster and the family love he witnesses voyeuristically, but cannot share.