1st Annual Conference
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
27-28 March 2012
Call For Abstracts
The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy. Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka and Dr
Astrid Ensslin, whose biographies are included below. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to
code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are
sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:
Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism
It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives,
screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the „stuff‟ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the „analogue‟ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.
Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play
Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement
have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and
serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches
related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.
Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools
Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to
determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.
See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for details of CoDE projects and affiliated staff.
Email: code@anglia.ac.uk
Keynote Speakers
Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory (University of Turku, Finland) and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University. His writings have addressed accidents and the dark sides of network culture (Digital Contagions, 2007 and the co-edited volume The Spam Book, 2009), biopolitics of media culture (Insect Media, 2010, the co-edited special issue of Fibreculture “Unnatural Ecologies”, 2011 and the edited online book Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, 2011) and media archaeology (the co-edited volume Media Archaeology, 2011 and the forthcoming book What is Media Archaeology?, 2012). He is currently finishing editing a
collection of the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst’s writings, to be published in 2012.
Website and blog: http://jussiparikka.net
Astrid Ensslin lectures in Digital Humanities at the University of Bangor. Her research interests are in the fields of digital discourse, semiotics, narrative and communication. Most of her current research revolves around digital fiction, videogames and virtual worlds, language ideologies in the (new) media and specialised language corpora. She has a BA/MA (Distinction) from Tuebingen University (2002), a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from Leeds University and a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University (2006). She convenes Bangor University’s Digital Economies Cluster, is the founding editor of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and Co-Investigator of the DFG/AHRC learner corpus project, ‘What’s Hard in German?’ (2009-12), and of the Leverhulme Digital Fiction International Network (DFIN) (2009). She was Programme Leader of the AHRC collaborative postgraduate training scheme, CEDAR (2008-10). Astrid’s most recent monograph is The Language of Gaming (2011); she has published widely, and other work includes Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (2007) and, with Eben Muse, Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (2011). Her forthcoming work will be published by MIT Press, and will be on Literary Gaming.