NextMEDIA2006–The Future of Digital Content will feature Yahoo!’s Stuart Butterfield, founder of Flickr, as keynote speaker on social networking tools and virtual communities. The two-day conference will include panels, one-on-one “interactive exchange sessions” with industry leaders, and much more.
Open Workshop on Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, Leicester
On Friday, June 23rd, De Montfort University will host a free “Open Workshop on Creative Writing and New Media”, featuring presentations by Randy Adams, editor and visual consultant for “trAces: A Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce”; and Sue Thomas, De Montfort University professor of New Media, on the future of digital writing in a changing media environment.
Workshops throughout the day will include:
–Jess Laccetti, DMU researcher in new media texts: “Encounters with Web Fiction”
–Helen Whitehead, Kids on the Net: “The Digital Playground: Writing with and for Children”
–Keith Jebb, University of Luton lecturer in Creative Writing: “Wikis and the Workshop”
–Kate Pullinger, print and new media author, and DMU research fellow: “Writing New Media Fiction”
To register, visit DMU’s Narrative Lab and enter your email address in the right-hand column. Attendance is free but space is limited.
A Morning of Discussion on Electronic Literature at Maryland
Please join MITH for a morning of discussion on electronic literature. In preparation for the Electronic Literature Organization’s impending move to MITH (www.eliterature.org), two of the ELO’s directors, ALAN LIU (Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara) and JOE TABBI (Professor of English, University of Illinois Chicago) will visit to present talks on the preservation and collecting of electronic literature, as well as a new curriculum (at Santa Barbara) to support its teaching.
The talks will take place from 9:30-12:00 on Friday, April 28 in the McKeldin Library Special Events room (#6137), University of Maryland, College Park. The schedule will be as follows:
* ALAN LIU, “Preserving Electronic Literature” (9:30-10:00)
* JOSEPH TABBI, “The Directory of Electronic Literature” (10:00-10:30)
* Discussion with Liu and Tabbi (10:30-11:00)
* Break (11:00-11:15)
* ALAN LIU, “The University of California Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading” (11:15-12:00)
ALAN LIU, Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, is one of the most accomplished theorists in the digital humanities today. He is the initiator of numerous digital projects, including the Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp), the earliest and still the largest humanities portal on the Web. His most recent book is _The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information_ (University of Chicago Press, 2004). JOE TABBI, Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago, is the author most recently of _Cognitive Fictions_ (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and is the founding editor of _ebr_ or the _electronic book review_ (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/), which has evolved into an essential hub for writing and scholarship on new media and electronic literature.
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Acting Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301-405-5896).
Stuart Moulthrop at Penn
The MACHINE series is pleased to host Stuart Moulthrop, author of Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and Pax. Moulthrop will discuss his more than 15 years of work in digital writing and will show and read from new work.
The event is free and open to the public.
Kelly Writers House
University of Pennsylvania
3805 Locust Walk
Wednesday – April 19, 2006 – 5:30pm
The MACHINE series at the Kelly Writers House is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.
Shelley Jackson at University of Maryland, College Park
The John and Bebe Petrou Foundation, the Department of English, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) are very pleased to announce the 2006 Bebe Koch Petrou Lectures on NEW MEDIA STORYTELLING at the University of Maryland, College Park. There will be two speakers associated with this event, coming to campus on separate days. All events are free and open to the public.
The first will be SHELLEY JACKSON on Monday, April 17th. She will present “Shelley Jackson’s Interstitial Library” at 3:30 in Susquehanna Hall 1120. There will also be a more casual colloquium discussion at MITH (McKeldin Library, B0131) earlier in the day at 11:00, which all are welcome to attend. Jackson is an internationally recognized writer, electronic artist, and theorist and practitioner of new performance media. Her work includes Patchwork Girl (published in 1995 by Eastgate Systems, it is a hypertext refashioning of Frankenstein, told–in part–from the vantage point of the female monster). “Perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era,” writes Robert Coover, “Shelley Jackson’s elegantly designed, beautifully composed Patchwork Girl offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into one’s own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling.” More recently, Jackson has gained notoriety for “Skin,” a short story “published” as individual words tattooed onto the skin of hundreds of willing participants. She has written experimental Web-based texts, including “My Body–a Wunderkammer” (available at http://www.altx.com/thebody/) and “Stitch Bitch” (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/jackson.html). She is also an illustrator of children’s books. Jackson teaches at the New School.
SCOTT McCLOUD will visit on Tuesday, May 2. Watch for further details.
E-FEST 2006 at Brown, March 22-24
E-FEST 2006: A Celebration of New Literary Hypermedia is taking place at Brown University March 22-24. The events include several presentations of new work and panels on “Memory and Real Time,” “Noulipo: Recombinant Poetics,” and “The Game of Fiction.” Participants will include:
- Aya Karpinska
- Braxton Soderman
- Brian Kim Stefans
- Daniel Howe
- Edrex Fontanilla
- Gale Nelson
- George Landow
- Ilya Kreymer
- Jim Carpenter
- Judd Morrissey
- Lutz Hamel
- Michael Stewart
- Mike Magee
- Nick Montfort
- Nick Musurca
- Noah Wardrip-Fruin
- Polly Hall
- Robert Coover
- Robert Kendall
- Scott Rettberg
- Stuart Moulthrop
- Wendy Chun
E-FEST 2006 is sponsored by the Brown Program in Literary Arts, the Creative Arts Council, the Watson Institute for International Studies, and the Salomon Fund.
See The official blog for information about the schedule and for the E-FEST 2006 poster.
MACHINE Reading Series at Kelly Writers House: Stuart Moulthrop, April 19
On Wednesday, April 19, acclaimed veteran hypertext writer Stuart Moulthrop will read from early and recent works at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. Moulthrop’s appearance, part of the MACHINE reading series co-sponsnored by the ELO, will take place at Kelly Writers House at 5:30 p.m. Map and directions can be found on the Kelly Writers House website.
MITH Digital Dialogue, March 7: Scott Rettberg
On Tuesday March 7, Richard Stockton College Assistant Professor of New Media Studies Scott Rettberg will speak at the University of Maryland’s MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) on the theme, “Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing”. Rettberg will show a variety of works submitted to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection as he discusses the ways that literary expression in digital environments has been changing since its early Storyspace days.
The talk will take place at 12:30 p.m. in the MITH conference room. For more information on this and other upcoming talks at MITH, visit MITH.
“Visual Narrative of the Desktop” at CAA
If you are going to CAA06 in Boston February 22-26, consider attending this New Media Caucus panel: “The Visual Narrative of the Desktop”. Chaired by Alec McLeod of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the panel will include presentations on a varieties of approaches to the desktop interface:
–Juliet Davis, “Fractured Cybertales: Interface Mythologies of Feminine Choice and Control”
–Craig L. Warner, “What We May Want May Not Be What We Need–An Interface Should Face the Inner Need”
–Craig Saper, “Interface as/on Art”
–Sylvia Grace Borda, “The Social Implications of New Media: An Overview of Trends”
–Mary Agnes Krell & Petra Gemeinboeck, “Investigating Imaginary Evidence”
The panel will take place Saturday, February 25, from 9L30 a.m. to noon, in Room 311 of the Hynes Convention Center. For information on all the New Media Caucus’ events at CAA, visit NMC’s website.
MITH Announces Spring Speakers Schedule
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park—ELO’s host institution as of July 1, 2006—is pleased to release its Spring Speakers Schedule. Between our weekly seminar series Digital Dialogues and a variety of special guests we are bringing to campus in partnership with other campus units, we are able to offer speakers and events in the digital humanities and electronic literature every week of the spring semester.
Alongside of showcasing a diverse array of current research by MITH’s Fellows and College Park faculty, MITH will host or co-host talks by such distinguished visitors as Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker (University of Virginia), Alan Liu (UCSB), Joseph Tabbi (UIC), Scott Rettberg (Richard Stockton College, and co-Founder of the Electronic Literature Organization), Shelley Jackson (author of Patchwork Girl and Skin), and Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics).
MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library. Unless otherwise noted, all talks are Tuesdays at 12:30 in the MITH Conference Room and are free and open to the public.