Peter Lunenfeld (ed.): The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)

The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages

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Chaomei Chen: Information Visualization. Beyond the Horizon, 2nd ed. (2006)

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures; it contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective.

This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students. This new edition is forwarded by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland.

Key features:
* Latest advances in information visualization.
* Applications of information visualization, including knowledge domain visualization, knowledge diffusion, and social networks.
* Detecting topics, emergent trends, and abrupt changes.
* Empirical findings concerning information visualization.
* Virtual environments and collaborative virtual environments.

Edition 2
Publisher Springer, 2006
ISBN 184628340X, 9781846283406
Length 316 pages

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Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik. An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)

Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.

Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.

Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
Length 416 pages

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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)

In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson’s electronic poem “Agrippa.”

Drawing on newly available archival resources for these works, Kirschenbaum uses a hex editor and disk image of Mystery House to conduct a “forensic walkthrough” to explore critical reading strategies linked to technical praxis; examines the multiple versions and revisions of Afternoon in order to address the diachronic dimension of electronic textuality; and documents the volatile publication and transmission history of “Agrippa” as an illustration of the social aspect of transmission and preservation.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262113112, 9780262113113
Length 296 pages

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Neil Rhodes, Jonathan Sawday (eds.): The Renaissance Computer. Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (2000)

In the fifteenth century the printing press was the ‘new technology’. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organising and disseminating knowledge.

As early as 1500 there were already 20 million books in circulation in Europe. How did this rapid explosion of ideas impact upon the evolution of new disciplines?

The Renaissance Computer looks at the fascinating development of new methods of information storage and retrieval which took place at the very beginning of print culture. And it asks some crucial questions about the intellectual conditions of our own digital age. A dazzling array of leading experts in Renaissance culture explore topics of urgent significance today, including:
* the contribution of knowledge technologies to state formulation and national identity
*the effect of multimedia, orality and memory on education
*the importance of the visual display of information and how search engines reflect and direct ways of thinking.

Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415220637, 9780415220637
Length 212 pages

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Robert Burnett, P. David Marshall: Web Theory: An Introduction (2003)

Web Theory is a comprehensive and critical introduction to the theories of the internet and the world wide web. Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall examine the key debates which surround internet culture, from issues of globalisation, political economy and regulation, to ideas about communication, identity and aesthetics.

Web Theory explore the shifts in society, culture and the media which have been brought about by the growth of the world wide web. It identifies significant readings, web sites and hypertext archive sources which illustrate the critical discussion about the internet and it mediates these discussions, indicating key positions within each debate and pointing the reader to key texts.

Web Theory includes:
*Chapters showing how specific media have been affected by the internet
*Boxed case studies and examples
*References, an extensive bibliography and a list of web sites
*A glossary of key terms with important words highlighted in the text
*A Web Theory timeline which details important events
*A comprehensive and regularly updated website at www.webtheory.nu with inks and support material

Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415238331, 9780415238335
Length 242 pages

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Peter Lunenfeld: The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)

The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages

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Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
Length 399 pages

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Jill Walker: Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World (2003)

“This thesis is about works in which the user is a character in the fictional world, and it is about the kind of interaction that such works allow. In this introduction I will explain my research goals and introduce the theme of control, which is important in the thesis. I’ll also describe the genres I’m looking at, define some basic terms and present a summary of what each chapter deals with.”

Dr. art. thesis
Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, 2003
Length 191 pages

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Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)

“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.

In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.

In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
Length 368 pages

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Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
Length 236 pages

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Zuzana Husárová: Písanie v interaktívnych médiách. Digitálna fikcia (2009) [Slovak]

Predmetom dizertačnej práce je predstavenie a kontextualizácia možností písania v interaktívnych médiách a skúmanie literárneho umenia interaktívnych médií v anglofónnom priestore. Pre dnešnú tvorbu umeleckých diel v interaktívnych médiách je príznačný intermediálny charakter; autori pre predstavenie fiktívneho sveta často prepájajú text, obraz a zvuk do výpovedného celku. Cieľom práce je vyjadriť sa jednak k otázkam, ktoré síce nie sú nové, avšak digitálny formát a priestor internetu im umožnili nadobudnúť nové rozmery a aj k otázkam pre výskum digitálnej fikcie špecifickým. Výskum sa zameriava na digitálnu fikciu – v počítačovom programe napísané digitálne dielo, v ktorom autor ponúka svet fikcie. V práci sú predstavené viaceré aspekty digitálnej fikcie, ktorých kombinácia je indikátorom jej charakteristického postavenia v rámci ostatného digitálneho umenia – fragmentárnosť rozprávania, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamika, intermedialita a princípy hry a hravosti. Fenoménmi súčasnosti, ktoré pôsobia aj na tvorbu skúmaných diel a ich čitateľskú popularitu sú estetická atraktivita, ktorú v tomto kontexte prináša predovšetkým využitie diverzity medialít a pokus o vyvolanie čo najintenzívnejšieho zážitku v čo najkratšom čase. Práca pozostáva okrem úvodu, záveru a interlúdia (venovanému kategórii materiality digitálnej fikcie) zo štyroch kľúčových kapitol. V týchto kapitolách sú vedecké prístupy k skúmanej problematike písania v interaktívnych médiách následne využité pri analýze-interpretácii konkrétnych digitálnych fikcií.

Kľúčové slová : digitálna fikcia, interaktívne médiá, fragmentárnosť, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamickosť, intermedialita, hra, literárna veda, teória nových médií, teória digitálnej fikcie, hypertext, kybertext, materialita, metamedialita

Dizertačná práca
Ústav svetovej literatúry Slovenskej akadémie vied v Bratislave
Školiteľ: Mgr. Bogumiła Suwara, PhD.
Bratislava: ÚSvL SAV, 2009
Dizajn: Pavlinka Morháčová

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Writing in the interactive media. Digital fiction
The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play. The current phenomena that influence also the creation of the analysed art pieces and their popularity among readers are the aesthetic attraction, in this context brought mainly by the use of media diversity, and the effort to evoke the most intensive experience in the shortest time span. The thesis consists apart from the introduction, conclusion and interludium (dealing with the materiality of digital fiction) of four chapters. The scientific approaches to the problematics of writing in the interactive media are in the second parts of these chapters used in the process of analysis-interpretation of particular digital fiction pieces.

Key words : digital fiction, interactive media, fragmentarity, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality, play, game, literary science, new media theory, digital fiction theory, hypertext, cybertext, materiality, metamediality

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New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition (2008)

New Media: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive introduction to the culture, history, technologies and theories of new media. Written especially for students, the book considers the ways in which ‘new media’ really are new, assesses the claims that a media and technological revolution has taken place and formulates new ways for media studies to respond to new technologies.

The authors introduce a wide variety of topics including: how to define the characteristics of new media; social and political uses of new media and new communications; new media technologies, politics and globalization; everyday life and new media; theories of interactivity, simulation, the new media economy; cybernetics, cyberculture, the history of automata and artificial life.

Substantially updated from the first edition to cover recent theoretical developments, approaches and significant technological developments, this is the best and by far the most comprehensive textbook available on this exciting and expanding subject.

At www.newmediaintro.com you will find:
* additional international case studies with online references
* specially created You Tube videos on machines and digital photography
* a new ‘Virtual Camera’ case study, with links to short film examples
* useful links to related websites, resources and research sites
* further online reading links to specific arguments or discussion topics in the book
* links to key scholars in the field of new media

New Media
A Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition
By Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly
ISBN: 978-0-415-43161-3
Published by: Routledge
Publication Date: 12/12/2008
Pages: 464

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