CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy 2012

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 more details–or click here.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

12:00 – 14:00
Location: CRASSH, 7 West Road [please note new location]

At a symposium on digital editions held at CRASSH in May 2011, we resolved to convene a series of informal, termly meetings to stimulate development of and foster collaboration on digital editing projects in the Cambridge research community. For those interested in, or working on, digital editing projects, this will be a great opportunity to get together, share methodological and conceptual insights, and talk about the field of practice. This event is designed to challenge traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries, and we hope it will appeal to a wide range of participants from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. If you are in any doubt about participating, please get in touch.

As this is the first meeting of the group in 2011-2012, we will use the occasion to constitute the group and introduce participants to one another. We will also discuss two short readings from a 2009 special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, ‘Special Cluster: Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future’:

• Kenneth M. Price, ‘Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.
• Julia Flanders, ‘The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.

See http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/index.html for the relevant issue, and do feel free to read the other essays in the collection, which might also stimulate discussion.

It would be very helpful if participants could come to the meeting ready to share ideas about their own projects – whether already achieved, or still in embryo. We will suggest and briefly present at the meeting a few resources that present models and challenges to editors working in the electronic environment.

At some point we will decamp for lunch into ‘The ARC’ (the tearoom in the new Alison Richard Building at 7 West Road).

For further information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) or Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk). We look forward to a lively discussion and creative planning for the rest of the year’s meetings.

The event is free to attend but registration is required.  To book your place please visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1820/ and click on the link.

9 February New Directions in Early Modern Book History

Yesterday the West Road Concert Hall was packed for the libraries@cambridge conference, entitled ‘Blue skies … thinking and working in the cloud’. What will university libraries look like in 2020, 2040, 2060? Will there still be research libraries, or will they have gone the way of the dodo? Will they be operating in a society that looks more like the wild west, a walled garden or a beehive? (Those are among the scenarios for 2050 explored by the ‘Libraries of the Future‘ project). Will they have any books in them, or will they be beautiful light-filled atria full of bean-bags and plasma screens, open to endlessly spatial reconfiguration as users flow through them? Will academics still write books, or will they create online content? Will we need subject librarians if interdisciplinarity and specialization have annihilated the very concept of a subject? These were just some of the questions raised in the first two hours… (Answers on a postcard, please!)

Call for Papers

The 7th Annual Conference of The Association of Adaptation Studies

‘Visible and Invisible Authorships’

27th-28th September 2012

The University of York’s Film and Literature programme, in association with the Centre for Modern Studies and the Humanities Research Centre, is delighted to be hosting the 7th annual international conference of the AAS. The conference provides a lively forum for current thinking on adaptation issues and this year specifically invites reflection on the relationship of acts of authoring to the ongoing lives of adapted texts.

• How have different authorial voices and authorial inscriptions (screen writers, directors, designers, editors, studios, composers, writers, illustrators etc) of inherited tales been present in, and/or effaced by the processes of transmission?

• How might we reflect on these processes of authorial visibility and invisibility in the cultural circulation of adapted texts across media and moment?

• What is it to ‘author’ a contemporary telling of a tale that is already authored, or even that is received from history as, in effect, implicitly but eloquently authorless? And what happens in the process of visiting a revised or renewed authorial inscription upon a work?

• Why do some adapted works slough off almost all authorial designations (or cling to unlikely or peripheral ones) in their cultural reputations while others are emphatically branded in terms of an identifiable authorial voice? In line with the broad interests of the Association of Adaptation Studies, proposals on any aspect of adaptation will be considered.

Papers that speak to the conference theme will be particularly welcome. The deadline for receipt of proposals for papers and panels has been extended to 10 February 2012. Please send abstracts (within the body of your email) of not more than 250 words to film-and- literature@events.york.ac.uk and include a biog-sketch of not more than 100 words.

On today’s feast of the Epiphany it is a custom in many parts of the world for people to mark the front door of their house using specially blessed chalk. The date of the new year is inscribed as above, along with the letters C, M, and B, which stand for the three names traditionally given to the Magi – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar – or for Christus mansionem benedicat, ‘may Christ bless the house’. As well as the highly symbolic location of these letters, the use of chalk is also symbolic –  it is a substance from the earth itself, and while its traces will gradually fade away as the year passes, their meaning is invisibly inscribed forever in the hearts of the faithful.

There is a prayer for blessing chalk in the Rituale Romanum, one of the official Roman Catholic ritual books, but I don’t know how far back this tradition goes. Can anyone enlighten me?

‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…’ Probably not eleven lords a leaping. Perhaps a book, perhaps a book all about things—last year, Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects; this year, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. This remarkable book reconstructs the history of a collection of exquisite Japanese carvings that passed down through the generations of a single illustrious family, from their first acquisition in the 1870s to the present day. History–a global history of trade and nationalism and war–swirls round the netsuke as they pass from Paris to Vienna to Tokyo. And de Waal—an accomplished potter—is uniquely qualified to convey that history in tactile terms, fleshing out ever-changing relations between the carvings and the cabinets, rooms, buildings and cities that held them.

For connoisseurs of material textuality, The Hare offers all the pleasures of digging into a typically happenstance family archive. Among the grainy reproductions in my paperback copy there is the neatly-tabulated page of an opera and theatre notebook from 1916, showing that Wagner, Delibes and Shakespeare continued to enchant Viennese audiences in the middle of the First World War. There is the stylish little card that an uncle who had fled anti-Semitic mitteleuropa for Sunset Boulevard sent out to advertise his new collections ‘of Smart Accessories’—‘Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry / Compacts, Handknit Suits and Blouses’. And many other documents are evoked verbally, as they are fished up from beneath the bed by the author’s father, or as they fall out from the magazines on a bookshelf. So de Waal finds ‘sandwiched between June and July 1966 an envelope containing very old documents, official-looking, in Russian’. He shows the documents to an expert: ‘This is the old paper … they changed this in 1870; that is the stamp, that is the fee. Here is the signature of the governor, always so emphatic—look, it has almost gone through the paper … This is a clerk’s copy, poor writing’. In such hands, ‘the dessicated records … flicker into life’.

Elsewhere, though, de Waal is sceptical about the dessicated record. At one point, sketching his grandmother Elisabeth’s epistolary relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he turns to consider some books that he inherited from her. He combs through them for clues: ‘comments in the margins, scraps of a forgotten lyric, a lost letter’. But ‘when I do find things, I wish I hadn’t’. There’s a transcribed Rilke poem on a page torn from a diary, ‘black and red like a missal’. There’s a ‘translucent gentian marking a page’ in a Rilke collection, a photograph of the sitting-room in her Proust. ‘I feel like a bookseller judging the sunning of the cover of a book, marking the annotations, assessing its possible interest,’ de Waal comments. ‘It is not only a trespass on her reading, which feels strange and inappropriate, but close to a cliché. I am turning real encounters into dried flowers’. And later: ‘What she loved was poetry, the world of things, hard and defined and alive, made lyrical. She would have hated my fetishising of her books’.

It’s interesting that the word ‘fetishising’ should appear here—and, to my recollection, nowhere else in The Hare—since the word inevitably hovers over any project so closely focused on things. Peter Stallybrass and Anne Rosalind Jones have a fascinating discussion of this subject in their book on Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; drawing on the work of William Pietz, they trace the roots of the term in European colonialism (it was ‘the natives’ who were guilty of fetishism, whilst colonizers had a properly detached, capitalist attitude to possessions). For Marx, by contrast, fetishization meant the capitalist investment in fungible commodities, the very opposite of attention to the individual object with all of its personal associations, its precious freight of memories.

I wonder whether de Waal’s dealings with his netsuke and his abortive engagement with his grandmother’s books are really so different—why should the first be permissible, the latter out of bounds?

Some New Year spring-cleaning uncovered these images of a couple I spotted gracing the windows of a high street shoe shop some time in the autumn.  I couldn’t see through the glass which books they were wearing, but the use of printed texts to emulate textiles certainly gives a visually impressive effect.

On which note, let these two also be harbingers of an exciting CMT event planned for later in the year… the details are secret at the moment, but look out for news before too long!

Some of the most beautiful festive material texts are those aimed at children. Jan Pienkowski’s creations have already been mentioned amongst the CMT stocking-fillers, but today’s treats are from the American ‘paper engineer’ Robert Sabuda, who has designed numerous pop-up books. He often uses only white card to construct his pop-ups, emphasising shapes and forms rather than colour. On the left (apologies for the poor photography) is a page from his version of the classic poem The Night Before Christmas; ‘as dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly’, Sabuda’s energetic white reindeer burst out of the book, seemingly restrained only by their silver ribbon harnesses. Just as lovely is his A Christmas Alphabet, below, in which each flap conceals elaborate snippets of festivity.

Sabuda’s comprehensive website offers some fascinating designer’s insights into the pop-up world. Usually intended for children, such books are thought of as novelties, objects which are not as seriously bookish as other books. However, Sabuda’s descriptions of the processes involved in designing and mass-producing these objects is thought-provoking. These are books which emerge at the skilled hands of the designer, and then go on to depend on the hands of the reader to open them and reveal the surprises they contain, not to mention to carefully fold them away again and ensure they do not get damaged. When we read a pop-up book, we cannot but be highly conscious of its materiality; of the simultaneous strength and fragility of paper and glue and stitches. Sabuda writes: ‘people love the surprise of not knowing what is going to be on the next page of a pop-up book. At our studio we call that the “WOW” moment. When someone opens a pop-up book and goes “WOW!” they are really affected by the magic of a pop-up and amazed that they have the power in their hands to make it happen because they themselves are turning the pages.’

In France, seasonal greetings cards are traditionally exchanged at New Year rather than Christmas.

This village scene with houses made from postage stamps is a lovely handmade example of one such carte de voeux from exactly a century ago.

Best wishes for 2012 from all at the CMT!