It is with gratitude that I share with you the news that I am one of 31 recipients of the 2018 Carnegie Fellowship. This is a career-defining honor for which I am supremely grateful and by which I am deeply humbled. I was able to respond to the news this morning on Twitter, and then… Continue reading Carnegie Fellows 2018 – An Honor
Tag: Gaming
Spotlight on “Analog Gaming in Libraries”
ubiquity75 "I had an empty shelf when I started this class and now it's full of games." --student in #lis9371 Analog Games in Libraries @westernuFIMS 2/26/16, 3:50 PM This term, students in FIMS' Master's in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) program have the opportunity to participate in a new class I am teaching, offered as… Continue reading Spotlight on “Analog Gaming in Libraries”
IAMCR Dublin
Just a brief note to share that my colleagues Miriam Sweeney, of GSLIS, Ergin Bulut, of the ICR, and I have had our panel proposal accepted for IAMCR 2013 Dublin, to be held June 25-29th at Dublin City College. This year's conference theme is "Crises, ‘Creative Destruction’ and the Global Power and Communication Orders," and had… Continue reading IAMCR Dublin
The Vast World of Vast Narratives, Fandom and Participatory Culture
What makes a narrative vast, according to the contributors to the recent MIT volume Third Person? Based on the varied content, spread across multiple media, covered by the book, vast narratives receive their designation not only due to the interior nature of the narrative, which may span unusual lengths when measured in years, amount of content produced, number of media in which the world is present, among other features (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2). Yet the volume is also vast, as in catholic, given its broad interpretation of what constitutes a narrative: consider outsider artist/author Henry Darger's inclusion alongside other constructed worlds and universes of comic books (Ford and Jenkins), traditional paper and pen gaming (Laws), video games, television programs whose mythologies extend beyond the reach of traditional broadcast and into transmedia, such as in the case of Lost (Lavery). (In the interest of full disclosure: Lost is of particular interest to me at present, as I only discovered it last semester, watching five seasons on Netflix while I read about the show elsewhere.)
Digital Labor, Cold-War Roots
Doing some reading over the past week, I was prompted to think about, then comment on, a chapter by Friedrich Kittler on Cold War computing technology and the implicit (and explicit) ways in which an examination of so-called "defense technology" comes into direct contact with, and within the purview of, media studies, information studies and labor studies. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the history of these technologies and their development, particularly when the when many defense technologies have been considered value-neutral or even as beneficial (and perhaps were, particularly when they moved from the province of military applications to consumer or mass-market ones). Additionally, the process of uncovering the hidden labor embedded in digital and computing technologies and processes, is inextricalbly tied to the critically important task of uncovering their hidden agendas, applications and roots within the military-academic-industrial complex.