Non-Textual Technologies
In the fall quarter CDH will consider the following questions about non-textual technologies. What have been the forms and effects of the digital essay since the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web? What are the critical potentials for digital essays that deploy textual, audiovisual, and interactive elements? How have scholars and activists turned social media sites such as YouTube to the interests of the critical essay? What constitutes a scholarly or critical use of music, digital video, animation, performance or social media such that an essayistic dimension comes to the foreground in an online setting? How does the inclusion of such elements extend or challenge the structural and analytical logics of the traditional academic essay?
Fan Cultures/Communities
For the winter quarter, the Critical Digital Humanities Research Collective will be examining the growing role of fandom and community in the production of digital media. The treatment of both traditional and aesthetic narratives surrounding popular media forms as communally owned and controlled is indicative within fan communities of a personal investment in those narratives that simultaneously relies upon and attempts to undermine the sanctity of “official narratives.”
The Digital Archive
Perhaps no other academic resource has seen greater reassessment in the digital age than archive and in the spring quarter we will look at how those changes are affecting scholarship. Jan-Christopher Horak, director of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, calls “the move to digitality…a paradigm shift of monstrous proportions.” For scholars, the need for the traditional archive has not ceased, while new methods of digitizing, storing and searching archives have changed the way we do academic work. They have also raised new questions about the methods and priorities of digital archiving, exemplified by the debate surrounding the Google Books project. This shift has also raised questions about the effects that the loss of materiality have on scholarship.
