Textual Machinery

We seek papers from a broad range of academic disciplines and creative works in a variety of media that focus on issues that could be briefly summed as “technology and society,” or, perhaps,“technologies and societies.”

Successful papers for Technoculture will focus on the ways technology plays out in a range of historical periods; thus, we write about technology and its uses as a special case of cultural studies. Creative works in a variety of media (including digital representations of still images) on the subject of technology are also of interest to us.

Topics could include depictions of technologies that treat a wide range of subjects related to the humanities and the arts. These subjects might include:

•literature, film, theater, and television as technologies;
•the cultural impact of technology on particular cultures or subcultures;
•technology and its affect on the production of contemporary/historical artistic works and/or the work of artists;
•technology as the dream (or nightmare) that drives novelists, poets, artists, playwrights and essayists to their notebooks, brushes, canvasses, stages and screens;
•the economics of technology in the humanities;
•computer/video gaming;
•hypertext (especially hypertext and the arts or literature);
•the dissemination of the arts via technology to broad or to specialized audiences;
•the death of the book;
•the myth of the “death of the book”;
•the disappearance of a given technology or technologies and what that disappearance/disappearances means/mean for the archival issues that surround the humanities.

In particular, we are interested in a conception of “technology” and the “humanist impulse” that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; we seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any number of historical periods from any relevant theoretical perspective. We are not interested in “how to” pedagogical papers that deal with the use of technology in the classroom.

We will publish scholarly/critical papers in the latest MLA citation style, but also creative works including poetry and creative non-fiction are of interest to us. We will publish art work and media in a variety of media (but designed for display on a computer monitor) including still images, video or audio.

Inquiries are welcome.

Please submit article proposals/abstracts for critical articles (the “journal article”) by June 15, 2011. The editorial staff will then request full length drafts from those abstracts still under consideration.

Length: For print texts, we seek 6,000 to 7,500 word manuscripts. Creative works in any genre may vary wildly and may be submitted via our web submission form by October 1, 2011.

See the web page for a publication process timetable.

When we were discussing ways the discipline is currently exploring the practical potential of new media compositions, I mentioned this recent installation that Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Anne Wysocki put together at C’s that played with the idea of “full-body twitter.” The project relied on not just new media interfaces, but also addressed varied notions of ecology. They/It automagically gathered words supplied by a wide audience by pulling in tweets with the official conference hashtag (#cccc2011). These words were then physically manipulated by volunteers who came to the open, designated location in the conference hotel. Noel Radley described the physical composing process this way:

The media station they created coordinates Twitter with a video recognition interface (the Kinect gaming console). When you approach the t.v. screen, your body’s form appears/moves in pixelated green. Near the top of the screen, words appear and disappear in large white text. You use an orange cursor (a circle), which recognizes and follows the human hand, and with the cursor, you move the words, one by one, into a green box. The system interacts with Twitter at two points: the white floating words are taken in real time from a Twitter feed. When you string together the words and hold send, your phrase appears via the Twitter feed @t3xtile.

For an intro to the Kinect, see here and here. Johndan was kind enough to share the prototype video with me, so we’ll take a look at that in class so you can get a better idea of how it functions.

Link to his work and this image here.

In case you guys didn’t catch the news yesterday, it’s been revealed that the geolocation device in iPhones and 3g iPads keeps a record of its own movement. (Of course, that movement is most often attached to a human.) This hidden data is not just stored in the phone, but also synced to the relevant laptop. As you imagine, there are a host of issues to consider here.

Guardian article
O’Reilly Radar article
iPhone Tracker

Apropos of yesterday’s discussion, from pages 140-41:

“I’ve spent my scholarly life under the spell of such yearnings, and still feel drawn to them. The ideal undergraduate curriculum, as we all know, is the one each of us followed, and I spent my first two undergraduate years in a planned core curriculum, the Directed Studies Program that flourished at Yale during the early fifties. Since it did indeed make me what I am today, it is hard for me to quarrel with its wisdom. Furthermore, all my intellectual marbles are invested in the game of traditional Western culture. The now maligned Great Books are the ones I like best, the ones I teach (I paid my devoirs to the Iliad only last year), the ones I write about, and the ones written in languages that I can at least pretend to understand.

But in spite of my fondness, I cannot persuade myself that this traditional curriculum is any longer workable, or would bring the longed-for coherence were it imposed. … What are we to do then? Our intellectual world is too various and volatile to accept an imposed conceptual coherence even if we could agree on one to impose — and of course we can’t, one person’s Republic being, as we have come to learn, another’s Thoughts of Chairman Mao.”

This is a long-ish excerpt from Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life. In it, he discusses meeting Mick Jagger and being in the midst of a community that was almost entirely centered on acquiring and listening to records (now just referred to as vinyl) (pp. 79-82). I was struck by how much this says about some of the things we’ve been talking about: physical artifacts as fetish, social capital, networks, subjectivity, and so forth and so on. Here you go:

Did we hit it off? You get in a carriage with a guy that’s got Rockin’ at the Hops by Chuck Berry on Chess Records, and The Best of Muddy Waters also under his arm, you are gonna hit it off. He’s got Henry Morgan’s treasure. It’s the real shit. I had no idea how to get hold of that. …

“Where the hell did you get this?” It was, always, all about records. From when I was eleven or twelve years old, it was who had the records who you hung with. They were precious things. I was lucky to get two or three singles every six months or something. And he said, “Well, I got this address.” He was already writing off to Chicago, and funnily enough to Marshall Chess, who had a summer job with his dad in the mail room there, and who later became the president of Rolling Stones Records. It was a mail-order thing, like Sears, Roebuck. He’d seen this catalogue, which I had never seen. And we just started talking. He was still singing in a little band, doing Buddy Holly stuff, apparently. I’d never heard about any of that. I said, “Well, I play a little.” I said, “Come on round, play some other stuff.” I almost forgot to get up at Sidcup because I was still copying down the matrix numbers of the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records he happened to have with him. Rockin’ at the Hops: Chess Records CHD-9529. …

Mick and I must have spent a year, while the Stones were coming together and before, record hunting. There were others like us, trawling far and wide, and meeting one another in record shops. If you didn’t have money you would just hang and talk. But Mick had these blues contacts. There were a few record collectors, guys that somehow had a channel through to America before anyone else. There was Dave Golding up in Bexleyheath, who had an in with Sue Records, and so we heard artists like Charlie and Inez Foxx, solid-duty soul, who had a big hit with “Mockingbird” a little after this. Golding had the reputation for having the biggest soul and blues collection in southeast London or even beyond, and Mick got to know him and so he would go round. He wouldn’t nick records or steal them, there were no cassettes or taping, but sometimes there would be little deals where somebody would do a Grundig reel-to-reel copy for you of this and that. And such a strange bunch of people … It was funny to walk into a room where nothing else mattered except he’s playing the new Slim Harpo and that was enough to bond you all together.

There was a lot of talk of matrix numbers. There would be these muttered conversations about whether you had the bit of shellac that was from the original pressing from the original company. Later on, everybody would argue about it. … But the people you have to meet to get the latest Little Milton record! The real blues purists were very stuffy and conservative, full of disapproval, nerds with glasses deciding what’s really blues and what ain’t. I mean, these cats know? They’re sitting in the middle of Bexleyheath in London on a cold and rainy day, “Diggin’ My Potatoes”… Half of the songs they’re listening to, they have no idea of what they are about, and if they did they’d shit themselves. They have their idea of what the blues are, and that they can only be played by agricultural blacks. For better or worse it was their passion.

And it certainly was mine too, but I wasn’t prepared to discuss it. I wouldn’t argue about it; I would just say, “Can I get a copy? I know how they’re playing it, but I just need to check.” That’s what we lived for, basically. It was very unlikely that any chick would get in the way, at that point, of getting a chance to hear the new B.B. King or Muddy Waters.

July 12-13, 2011

The Rhetoric Society of Old Dominion University (RSODU) is excited to be hosting our first symposium this summer, with support from the Rhetoric Society of America. The symposium will be held on July 12th and 13th at Old Dominion University and will also be available online for participants at a distance. We invite everyone who is interested in the recent development and interdisciplinary expansion of our field to join with us in exploring these areas and their influences at this year’s symposium.

Rhetoric itself has experienced a re-emergence as an academic subject, and with the growth of new technologies, interdisciplinary networks and (restorative/revival/historical) studies, the topics of study in our field are quickly multiplying. The emanation of these topics as areas for inquiry highlights the value of rhetorical study and the widespread influence of rhetoric in our society. To explore these developments and their influences, our symposium will focus on emergence(s). How do new technologies impact our field? How can theories or topics from other fields enhance our current studies of rhetoric? How should we understand and apply traditional approaches to rhetoric today?

RSODU welcomes paper and panel proposals that address these questions or any related topics, including pedagogical approaches to rhetoric, issues of intercultural communication, and the development of new theories of rhetoric. Any presentation that can enrich the study of our burgeoning field will be considered.

If you are interested in presenting at the 2011 RSODU conference, please submit 250-500 word abstracts for paper or panel presentations to rhetoricsocietyodu@gmail.com by April 20, 2011. Abstracts should include the title of your presentation or panel, your name, institutional affiliation, email-address, and the names and affiliations of co-presenters (if applicable). Also, indicate whether you plan to attend the symposium on site or at-a-distance.