Monday 8 March, 1pm
Centre for Media and Culture Research, London South Bank University
Lecture Theatre 4, K2 Building, Keyworth Street, London SE1
This event is open to all, but places are limited. To reserve a place please
email Anna Reading, Head of the Centre for Media and Culture Research,
at [log in to unmask]
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How to study 1000000 Manga pages? Visualization methods for humanities and
media studies
Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in
science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However,
the use of visualization in humanities is still in its infancy. Based on the work in
the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media
carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego
over last two years, this paper presents a possible taxonomy of visualization
techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research.
Software studies initiative: http://lab.softwarestudies.com / Examples of media
visualizations: www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis
Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, San
Diego. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license,
2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005), and The
Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), hailed as ‘the most suggestive and
broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.’
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Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Digital Media
Theorists of technology such as Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour and Adrian
Mackenzie argue that the creation, transmission and use of technical objects
emerge from a temporal ‘folding’ in which past, present and future intermingle.
At stake is not only the nature of temporalities but also the complex ways in
which humans and technical objects engage in technogenesis, that is, cycles
of mutual co-evolution. These theories will be interrogated to propose a model
whereby our contemporary technological landscapes interact with human
cognition and biology on both conscious and unconscious levels. The model will
then be explored through Steve Tomasula's electronic multi-modal novel, TOC,
in which time, biology, and technology interpenetrate one another.
N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and
writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and
21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best
Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the
Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Other recent books
include My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts and
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently writing a
book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.
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