Doing Media History - Come Join the Discussion!

How do you conceptualize the history of media?  What can mediahistory teach us?  What kinds of cultural negotiations are involved in refashioning the past with new media? How does our own technological present affect the ways we define, interpret or even appropriate the past?

HASTAC Scholar Whitney Trettien had opened up the next HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum on "Doing Media History."  Come join the conversation!

Doing Media History: Archives, Ages, and the Accretionof the Past

New media, in the ordered ways by which they gather togetherhistoricalartifacts and thus endow them with historical weight, are perpetuallyproducing the past in various forms of coherence. -- Will Straw,"Embedded Memories," Residual Media, pg. 14

Whenever Samuel Pepys posts a blog entry or Rick Astley rolls anew young fan,the past asserts its (sometimes unwelcome) presence through media.These cultural residues invite us to re-examine our relationship tohistory, particularly within a field obsessed with "newness."Thisforum explores how we do media history, and is open to discussions on(among other topics): media archaeology; media in transition; residualmedia and the role of nostalgia; theorizing the archive; the "fourinformation ages"; periodicity; and our relationship to otherhistorical studies of the book, film and culture.

The HASTAC Scholars Program recognizes graduate andundergraduate students who are engaged in innovative work across theareas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.This group of select Scholars from institutions across the nation actas the eyes and ears of HASTAC?s virtual network, bringing the workhappening on their campuses and in their region to internationalattention. The HASTAC Scholars facilitate regular discussion forums onwww.hastac.org,sometimes in conjunction with guest presenters, on awide range of topics related to digital media and learning.  Pastdiscussions have focused on "ParticipatoryLearning" (with social networking pioneer Howard Rheingold, led byJoshua McVeigh-Schultz) and "Metaversesand Scholarly Collaboration" (led by Ana Boa-Ventura).  Forthcoming discussions will likely include such topics as fair use,digital publishing, online activism, the open source movement, anddigital archiving.  The HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forums are open topublic and we invite your participation!

Whitney Trettien is a graduate student in Comparative MediaStudies at MIT, where sheworks for the HyperStudio Lab for the Digital Humanities. Her academicinterests include computational poetry, medieval robots, history of thebook, dictionaries, ars combinatoria and systems for organizinginformation, both digital and analogue. Whitney is also a TrumanScholar and political activist, having worked with the Green Party,Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-LiteracyCouncil, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology ofstories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peacemovement entitled Cost of Freedom. In her free time, shemakes clothing and music.

Thanks to "dizzyjosh" for posting this image of "the inimitable and brilliant Whitney Trettien" on his flickr stream.