White Paper Report Report ID: 100089 Application Number: HT5003610 Project Director: Philip Ethington (philipje@usc.edu) Institution: University of Southern California Reporting Period: 9/1/2011-8/31/2012 Report Due: 11/30/2012 Date Submitted: 12/17/2012 Office of Grant Management Room 311 National Endowment for the Humanities 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D. C. 20506. 30 Nov. 2012 Dear Office of Grant Management: Please find attached the White Paper for the “Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies,” 18 July to 12 August 2011. (ID Number: HT-50036-10) awarded to the University of Southern California. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require additional materials. Sincerely, Philip J. Ethington, Tara McPherson, John Carlos Rowe   2 White Paper Grant ID Number: HT-50036-10 Grant Term: 7/18/2011 to 8/12/2011 Grant Title: “Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies,” 18 July to 12 August 2011. Project Directors: Philip Ethington, Tara McPherson, John Carlos Rowe Grant Institution: University Southern California 30 Nov. 2012   3 WHITE PAPER: “Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies,” co-hosted by The Vectors-Center for Transformative Scholarship, and American Studies and Ethnicity Department at USC, 18 July to 12 August 2011. 30 Nov. 2012 Background: During the summer of 2011, we held a very productive four-week Summer Institute on “Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies,” co-hosted by The Vectors-Center for Transformative Scholarship, and American Studies and Ethnicity Department at USC, 18 July to 12 August 2011. Our primary audience was the American Studies humanities scholar who does not have a great deal of computing experience but who has begun to express an interest in the digital humanities and in interactive media more broadly. Scholars were offered the opportunity to explore the benefits of interactive media for scholarly analysis and authorship, with an emphasis on two, interoperable authoring and publishing platforms: the multimedia authoring platform Scalar, and the geohistorical narrative visualization platform HyperCities. Please “Outcomes”, p. 7 below, for detailed project descriptions and post-Institute project developments. Response to the Call for Proposals: The response to the call for proposals was very strong. Ninety-nine (99) proposals were submitted and reviewed, indicating a high level of interest in the Institute’s vision. After review, seventeen fellows representing fourteen proposals were selected. Both the submitted proposals and the selected fellows came from applicants from a range of career levels (from advanced Ph.D. student to an endowed professor), a variety of colleges and universities, and a broad geographic distribution. (See below for a list of 2011 Summer Fellows.) Additionally, an advanced undergraduate was included in the pool, working alongside his father, a professor of Africana Studies. We were quite gratified at the strong overall quality across the applicant pool and could easily have accepted additional high-caliber proposals. In fact, narrowing the final pool to ten proved very difficult and, in the end, the decision was made to accept seventeen fellows, through tapping additional USC financial resources. Our selection criteria was threefold: to achieve a diversity of content matter and theoretical frameworks: to optimize the match-up between our expertise and that of the applicants; and to achieve a balance of junior and senior scholars. In keeping with the value that many place on collaborative scholarship in digital humanities, we accepted four two-scholar partnerships, pushing the total number of fellows to 20, all of the highest caliber.   4 2011 NEH Summer Institute Fellows: Fellows Project Titles Nicholas Brown and Sarah Kanouse Recollecting Black Hawk Wendy Cheng A People’s Guide to Los Angeles Elizabeth Cornell Keywords Collaboratory Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn and Nick Shapiro Networking Asthmatic Spaces Matt Delmont The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia Kara Keeling and Thenmozhi Soundararajan Digital Media and Social Movements David Kim and Mike Rocchio Mapping the Murals: Chicano Community Murals in LA Debra Levine ACT UP Oral History Project Curtis Marez Cesar Chavez’s Video Library Mark Marino Critical Code Studies Carrie Rentschler There/Not There: Witness in Genovese Case Nicholas Sammond Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and Animation Jonathan Sterne MP3: The Meaning of a Format Kara Thompson A Future Perfect: Time, Queerness, Indigeneity Oliver Wang Legions of Boom: Mobile Sounds, Sights and Sites Scott Wilson Century Villages of Cabrillo (adjacent to the Port of Long Beach) USC Instruction Team: Steve Anderson Craig Dietrich Phil Ethington (PI) Erik Loyer Tara McPherson (Co-PI) Jillian O'Connor John Carlos Rowe (Co-PI)   5 Visiting Presenters (Please see Appendix, p. 23 for biographical sketches) Mark Allen Anne Balsamo Randy Bass Anne Burdick Sharon Daniel Kathleen Fitzpatrick Gary Hall Alexandra Juhasz Marsha Kinder Caroline Levander Work Timeline: Based upon our assessments and those of our fellows, the Institute was a strong success. The institute began July 18, 20101, ran for four weeks, and brought 20 fellows to the USC campus. Our work on the grant began well in advance of the institute and continues on to the present, as we continue to support various fellows in ongoing projects. Specifically, we have undertaken the following, in line with our proposed activities in the initial grant proposal: Fall-Winter 2010-11  Call for Proposals, Curriculum, Lining-up Visiting Presenters  Call for Proposals posted online and broadcast via discussion lists.  Logistical Planning for the summer institute began (housing, lab schedule, etc.)   Spring 2011  Erik Loyer and Craig Dietrich worked with Todd Presner and Dave Shepard of HyperCities to established interoperability between the platforms. HyperCities was established as a partner archive and HyperCities can be inserted into Scalar pages.  Proposals received and evaluated by Review Committee  Participants announced and confirmed  Visiting faculty for the institute confirmed  Travel and housing plans established  Workshop curriculum fine-tuned. June 2011  Finalized logistics, technical support, and curriculum  Finalized daily schedule  Opened Institute wiki  Assisted fellows with travel and housing needs  Finalized travel for guest presenters   6 July-August 2011  Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies,” 18 July to 12 August 2011NEH July 18 – August 12 Fall 2011-present  Continued assessment of outcomes  Continued support of several fellows projects  Publication and publicity support for fellows Evaluation of the Institute: Fellows and presenters quickly established an atmosphere of risk-free learning and creativity. Institute co-PIs and instruction team carefully interviewed and tracked each participant to support participants’ visions, helping them to understand the affordances of each platform, strategies for choosing between goals for each project, and how best to position the project to become a “publication.”. Each participant received weekly instruction concerning a) needed tutorials and support, arranging for hands-on expert help and lab time on specific topics from spatial data processing, 3-D tools, to audio and video processing and archiving; b) reasonable goals and best use of time. The morning sessions of the institute were comprised of seminar-style discussions led by guest presenters, the grant PIs, or the fellows themselves. Afternoon sessions were comprised of labs, technical workshops and demonstrations, and project development time. This mix of activities seemed to strike a balance that allowed “something for everyone.” While some fellows seemed to garner more from the seminars, others gravitated toward the hands-on aspects of the workshops and lab time. There were several things that the fellows all seemed to appreciate. Most found the quality of the guest presenters to be top notch, and many commented on how useful it was to see a range of types of work presented. Each also expressed gratitude for the way in which the institute interwove both conceptual questions and technical approaches. For this set of scholars (all tied to the “traditional” humanities), lodging questions of the digital within larger intellectual frames proved deeply satisfying. This indeed proved key to “broadening” the digital humanities (as was our theme.) Assessment Protocol: PIs and Instruction Team met weekly with each fellow in scheduled meetings, to assess each participant’s satisfaction with the curriculum and rate of progress, immediate, intermediate, and longer-term goals. Assignment of hands-on experts, lab topics, and demos were adjusted accordingly.   7 Outcomes: Projects Update Reports, as of November 2012 We are very pleased that about half of the projects launched during the 2011 Summer Institute are either already published (eg Matt Delmont, UC Press), are being submitted (eg, Curtis Marez, to the journal American Literature), or are being presented at major conferences (eg Keeling and Soundarajan). These projects are listed first under “A. Projects Being Published, Submitted, or Presented at Conferences.” Of course, several of the projects have entered longer development cycles, but these also seem to hold promise for the participants. These projects are listed second below, under “B. Projects With Longer Development Timelines.” A. Projects Being Published, Submitted, or Presented at Conferences We followed our work in the four-week summer institute with several reports at the American Studies Association annual conventions. At the 2010 Convention, John Carlos Rowe advertised the Institute at the Digital Caucus and with handouts at the Convention; at the 2011 Convention, he reported on our results to the Digital Caucus. Finally, at this year's 2012 ASA Convention, he discussed long-term implications of the Institute at a panel on Transnational Publishing and another on Digital Education for Graduate Students. ************* Matt Delmont, Professor of American Studies, Scripps College http://mattdelmont.com/ Project title: The Nicest Kids in Town   8 I used Scalar to create working on a digital project companion to my book. I "published" the Scalar project in January 2012. The Scalar project adds to the book because I was able to include 100+ images (compared to 27 in the book), as well as video clips related to my research. The link is here: http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/nicest-kids Excerpt from Review citing the Scalar Site Gayle Wald (2012). The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. By Matthew F. Delmont. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012./The Nicest Kids in Town digital project, http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/nicestkids/index.. Journal of the Society for American Music, 6, pp 489492 doi:10.1017/S1752196312000399 “Some of the sources that Delmont uses in this regard are available in a free online companion to TheNicest Kids in Town, constructed using innovative Scalar software developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Scalar allows content producers to author projects, or “books,” that combine text and media, without subordinating the former to the latter. As users navigate the text of the Scalar-based Nicest Kids in Town, images and video clips scroll into view, accompanied by useful links to information about their provenance and content. A “stripe,” or index, running down the left-hand side of the page provides the user with an index to the material, making it easy to navigate among the three “paths,” in addition to an introduction, which constitute the main body of the project. The dozens of images on the digital Nicest Kids in Town are of far higher quality than the illustrations in the book, with its grainy black-and-white reproductions. Users will also appreciate what amount to visual “footnotes”—images of the newspaper clippings from which Delmont quotes. It’s easy to imagine the digital Nicest Kids as a nice tool for helping undergraduates understand the significance and use of primary sources and other archival materials in the production of knowledge.”   9 ************* Kara Keeling and Thenmozhi Soundarajan Project title: Digital Media and Social Movements Kara Keeling, Assistant Professor in the Division of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California http://dornsife.usc.edu/ase/people/faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1016530 Thenmozhi Soundarajan, Ph.D. student, School of Cinematic Arts, USC From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema is a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project consisting of an archive that contains the materials produced by Third World Majority (TWM) during the years of their existence as a collective and a collection of scholarly pieces, historical retrospectives, and other dialogues with the work of TWM. TWM was one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States. It operated from 2001 to 2008. Both the TWM archive and the writings about it are part of the Scalar project. Since the Institute ended, we have successfully uploaded the entire TWM archive to the Internet Archives and begun the process of linking that material to the Scalar anthology. We also have collaboratively produced content for the anthology, started recruiting others to contribute to the volume, presented about the project on a plenary for the US Cultural Studies Association's annual conference in San Diego. We are scheduled to present about it at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI and the Association for Cultural Studies conference in Paris, France in June and July of 2012. Both presentations provide opportunities to produce additional content for the anthology and to identify and solicit contributors to the volume. We plan to have the archive available in Scalar and issue invitations to contributors by the end of August 2012.   10 ************* Elizabeth Cornell Project title: Keywords Collaboratory Elizabeth Cornell, Project Coordinator, Keywords Collaboratory, Fordham University http://www.elizabethfcornell.net/ I worked on a digital version of the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler and published by NYU Press. At the moment, we plan to use Scalar for 30 keyword essays, to be published alongside the second edition of the print version, which will contain 60 other essays. We anticipate publication to be the fall of 2013.   11 ************* Curtis Marez Project title: Cesar Chavez’s Video Library Curtis Marez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego My project is called “Cesar Chavez’s Video Library, or Farm Workers and the Secret History of New Media” It argues that farm workers have been influential actors in the political history of new media. Farm worker unions, most notably the UFW, have been early and innovative adopters of older forms of “new media,” such as portable film and video technology, in ways that illuminate the political limits and possibilities of more recent new media practices among immigrant rights activists. I have continued to work on the project and have recently submitted a multimedia “essay” to the journal American Literature.   12 ************* David Kim and Mike Rocchio Project title: Mapping the Murals: Chicano Community Murals in LA David Kim, Ph.D. student, Department of Information Studies (expected 2012), UCLA Mike Rocchio, Ph.D student, Department of Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA Mapping Chicano Murals in LA is a digital model and simulation of the Estrada Court public housing in East Los Angeles which features 60+ community murals installed in the 70s and the 80s. During the 2011 Summer Institute, we built the beta version of the model in Google Sketchup and integrated the model into Hypercities platform, which allowed us to combine narratives, archival materials and other resources towards spatial analysis of race, ethnicity and cultural nationalism as these concepts are embodied in the murals. Currently, we wrapped up the digital publication version of the project in Hypercities and will be presenting it in MLA (special session: race in the digital humanities) and architecture studies conference. We submitted the online version for peer-review in the Cambridge University Press journal Urban History in October 2012.   13 ************* Nick Shapiro and Brandon Costelloe-Keuhn Project title: Networking Asthmatic Spaces Nick Shapiro, Graduate student, University of Oxford http://oxford.academia.edu/NickShapiro Brandon Costelloe-Keuhn, PhD candidate, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute http://rpi.academia.edu/BrandonCostelloeKuehn We created a Scalar site that includes a short film, GIS maps and an oral history journey through the experiences of residents in the "FEMA" trailers. These temporary housing units, originally built to accommodate Gulf Coast residents who were displaced by the hurricanes of 2005, were found to contain potentially toxic chemicals, and have been resold across the United States in tandem with a widening foreclosure crisis. The project enhances users' capacity to 1) visualize connections between environmental, public health and economic crises, 2) move across scales, engaging material that situates them inside the trailers and the lives of residents, and then zooming out to see how hazards at the local level are distributed nationally, 3) understand how scientifically-engaged media can generate new perspectives on complex problems. As these units continue to be sold to every corner of the U.S., we have been interviewing residents with irritated eyes, bloody noses, memory loss, insomnia, diarrhoea and respiratory issues. We have launched an auxiliary study in collaboration with a private indoor air quality lab which questions the prevailing scientific consensus that the trailers have off-gassed their store of potentially toxic chemicals in the almost seven years since they were manufactured. To date, the average level of formaldehyde found, across eight states, is over 100 parts per billion, the EPA’s recommended maximum indoor air concentration. We are currently working on a paper that layers the embodied knowledge of FEMA trailer inhabitants and our numerical data on the   14 ongoing toxicity of these domestic spaces. Building on our work with Scalar, we aim to craft new contexts in which layered claims of toxicity, based on embodied awareness and technologically mediated measurements and visualizations, can be heard, making these trailers and the effects and affects they engender graspable as objects of epistemic action. We are in conversation with the interactive web designer at wired.com to develop a website and we have lectured internationally on our research in addition to having been featured in internationally syndicated news media.   15 ************* Oliver Wang Project title: Legions of Boom: Mobile Sounds, Sights and Sites Oliver Wang, Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, California State Long Beach http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/sociology/people/OliverWang.htm My digital project is a research repository focused on the history of the Filipino American mobile disc jockey community in the San Francisco Bay Area. It includes text, audio and visual resources, designed to introduce the social history of this community to both newcomers and those who grew up in the scene. The long-term goal is to create a dynamically-updated repository that can include contributions from visitors, thus emphasizing the community aspect of "community history." As I was preparing for my tenure file and book revisions (the latter of which relates to the research on the site), I have made minimal progress this past year. However, now that I have gained tenure and a fall semester sabbatical, I will be completing the site this summer and publicly launch it by early fall (2012).   16 B. Projects With Longer Development Timelines Wendy Cheng Project title: A People’s Guide to Los Angeles Wendy Cheng, Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies and Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/1634360 Project title: A People’s Guide to Los Angeles I worked to develop a digital, interactive version of my coauthored book, A People's Guide to Los Angeles, which presents 115 sites of struggles over power and alternative and minority histories throughout Los Angeles County. Although the book has now been published, unfortunately I have not made any progress on the digital project since the end of the institute. We (my coauthors and I, in conversation with UC Press) are currently working to develop A People's Guide book series and would like to return to the question of a digital, interactive online presence in the future that would serve as a hub for these various projects, but I don't have a sense of when or how that would develop. The institute helped tremendously, however, to identify what the digital project might look like, and what the questions, problems, and needs would likely be in order to realize the project.”   17 ************* Nicholas Sammond Project title: Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and Animation Nicholas Sammond, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies Institute and Department of English, University of Toronto http://www.utoronto.ca/cinema/faculty-sammond.html My project entailed developing an online companion to my upcoming book, Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Industrialization of American Animation (Duke University Press, forthcoming). The companion is not a literal translation of the book, but a complementary resource, one that permits the reader (or stand-alone visitor) to view the cartoons, minstrel ephemera, and other media elements to which the book refers, but which the book cannot deliver in substantial form. To date, the companion, which is only a prototype, has been undergoing beta testing by student workers, with the goal of refining its organization, structure, and flows. With the book slated to be under review by the end of the summer, significant development on the companion will commence from July forward, intensifying in September and October.   18 ************* Sarah Kanouse and Nicholas Brown Project title: Recollecting Black Hawk Sarah Kanouse, Assistant Professor�Intermedia Program�School of Art and Art History http://www.readysubjects.org/bio.html Nick Brown, PhD Candidate, Department of Landscape Architecture and American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://walkinginplace.org/ http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/ Last summer, we set out to work on a digital supplement to the photo-text book Re-collecting Black Hawk. Immersion in the discussion of digital humanities at the summer institute helped us to realize that a spin-off project--related but stand alone--would be more appropriate than what we initially envisioned. The reconceptualized project has been delayed by the need to finish the print book, but we plan to return to it, using resources at our home campuses, once the publication timeline is firmed up.   19 ************* Carrie Rentschler Project title: There/Not There: Witness in Genovese Case Carrie Rentschler, Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University http://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/about/staff My digital project is an annotated archive of materials that animate the cultural life and case construction of the infamous 1964 Kitty Genovese murder. While the archive constitutes the research materials for a book I am writing, when complete, the digital archive will have significance beyond that publication, and will be of interest to students who are taught the case in high school and university classrooms. The project is not yet complete. It is much as it was at the end of the seminar last summer due to my current administrative responsibilities. I am, however, quite eager to complete it, because of how useful I believe it will be pedagogically and as a small research archive.   20 ************* Jonathan Sterne Project title: MP3: The Meaning of a Format Jonathan Sterne, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University. http://media.mcgill.ca/en/jonathan_sterne My project was to create a digital companion to my book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. I was especially interested in expanding the audio capabilities of Scalar and companion sites like Critical Commons. I've made some progress but am not yet that close to done. I hope to "go live" with something in August when my book comes out. I've replotted the project -- the concept was a little foggier last summer and I tried using existing models like pouring in text. Instead, what I need to do it pick a few core "takeaway" concepts and provide additional illustration and material to the book, especially audio material.   21 ************* Kara Thompson Project Title: Colonized Time Kara Thompson, Assistant Professor of English & American Studies College of William and Mary ktthompson@wm.edu I submitted a project proposal for “Mapping with Reservations,” a multimedia, multilayered cartographic representation of the reservation system in the U.S., beginning in 1880 and continuing to the present day. This was clearly a project much too onerous for the time and scope of the fellowship. After some training with Scalar, I created a minimal framework for “Colonized Time,” which is a cultural history of the Black Hills from 1850-1890. I try to use the paths and visual orientations of Scalar to show how the Black Hills is a site well known in a dominant tourist imagination, but underneath the venerated, re-enacted “wild west” is the very present colonization of the Lakota people. I have not made any progress on the project since I left the Institute. Immediately following our time at the IML, I began my first tenure track position, which completely consumed my research and writing time. I do hope to take up the project again and devise a way to use it for either research or teaching. http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/kara-thompson/index. [I notice the HyperCities inserts are not loading properly, at least not on my computer, which is why I am sending a link instead of a screen shot].   22 ************* Debra Levine Project Title: ACT UP Oral History Project     23   Appendix Visiting Presenters Mark Allen is the founder of Machine Project, a non-profit community space in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food. In the Machine Project storefront on North Alvarado Street, Allen and his colleagues produce events, workshops and site-specific installations using hands-on engagement to make rarefied knowledge accessible. In his own work, Allen is interested in sculpture and performance, asking how they can affect the viewer in a deep, personal way. How can the viewer be moved from a passive position to a state of engagement and communal experience? Allen has been working with these concerns since graduate school, and his practice has transformed from studio artist to include collaborator, facilitator and producer as he has investigated these questions. Under his direction, Machine functions as a research laboratory, investigating performance, sculpture and installation as lived experience for the viewer. Anne Balsamo is Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. From 2004-2007, she served as Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. her work focuses on the relationship between culture and technology. In 2002, she co- founded Onomy Labs, Inc., a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her new book project, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, examines the relationship between cultural reproduction and technological innovation. Randy Bass is Executive Director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, a University-wide center supporting faculty work in new learning and research environments. He is the director of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP). In conjunction with the VKP, he is also the Director of the American Studies Crossroads Project, an international project on technology and education in affiliation with the American Studies Association, with major funding in the past by the US Department of Education and the Annenberg/CPB Project. In conjunction with the Crossroads Project, Bass is the supervising editor of Engines of Inquiry: A Practical Guide for Using Technology to Teach American Studies, and executive producer of the companion video, Engines of Inquiry: A Video Tour of Learning and Technology in American Culture Studies. He has served as co-leader of the NEH-funded "New Media Classroom Project: Building a National Conversation on Narrative Inquiry and Technology," in conjunction with the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (at the CUNY Graduate Center). He is also co-editor of the Electronic Resources Editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature (third edition, Paul Lauter, ed.). Anne Burdick is Chair of the Media Design Program at the Pasadena Art Center. She is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the future of graduate education and research in design. In addition, she designs experimental text projects in diverse media, for   24 which she has garnered recognition, from the prestigious Leipzig Award for book design to I.D. Magazine’s Interactive Design Review for her work with interactive texts. Burdick has designed books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles and she is currently developing electronic corpora with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Burdick’s writing and design can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine and Electronic Book Review, among others, and her work is held in the permanent collections of both SFMOMA and MoMA. Burdick studied graphic design at both Art Center College of Design and San Diego State University prior to receiving a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in graphic design at California Institute of the Arts. Sharon Daniel is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her research involves collaborations with local and online communities, which exploit information and communications technologies as new sites for “public art.” Daniel is the co-creator of the Web- based interactive project Public Secrets, which examines the spaces of the prison system through the voices of incarcerated women. The award-winning project exemplifies precise and elegant interface design and the use of an algorithm to generate random “text boxes” that act as metaphors for the project’s central thesis. Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies and chair of the MediaStudies program at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt UP, 2006), which was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2007 by CHOICE. She serves on the editorial board of the Pearson Custom Introduction to Literature database anthology, as well as of the Journal of e-Media Studies and the Journal of Transformative Works, and is a member of the executive committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Media and Literature. She has recently finished a book-length project, to be published by New York University Press, entitled Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. She is a founder of MediaCommons and a frequent blogger and has recently been appointed the first Director of Scholarly Communication for the MLA. Gary Hall is a London-based cultural and media theorist working on new media technologies, continental philosophy and cultural studies. He is Professor of Media and Performing Arts in the School of Art and Design at Coventry University, UK. He is the author of Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002) and Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008) and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (Fordham UP, 2007). He is also founding co-editor of the open access journal Culture Machine, director of the cultural studies open access archive CSeARCH, co-founder of the Open Humanities Press and co-editor of the OHP's Culture Machine Liquid Books series. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, Parallax and The Oxford Literary Review. He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions - recently dubbed 'deconstructions in the public sphere' - which use digital media to creatively perform critical and cultural theory. In 2009/10 he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge University.   25 Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics, www.mediapraxis.org. She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She recently completed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005) and Dear Gabe (2003) as well as Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998) and the shorts, RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The OWLS (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about YouTube: www.youtube.com/mediapraxisme and www.aljean.wordpress.com. Marsha Kinder is a cultural theorist and prolific film scholar, whose specializations include narrative theory, digital media, children's media culture, and Spanish cinema. She has published more than 100 essays and 10 books, including Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain with companion CD-ROM (1993), Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1991), Self and Cinema (1982) and Closeup (1978). Since 1997 Kinder has directed The Labyrinth Project, an art collective and research initiative on interactive cinema and database narrative. Labyrinth has produced a series of award-winning interactive installations and DVDs that have been exhibited at museums, conferences, film festivals and new media festivals worldwide. Kinder has worked for Sega as a rater of violence in video games, has written, directed and produced game protoypes and online courseware projects, and received a number of awards, including the Sundance Online Festival Jury Award for New Narrative Forms, British Academy of Film & TV Arts for Best Interactive Project in the Learning Category, and New Media Invision Award for Best Overall Design. Caroline Levander is the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Carlson Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of English at Rice University. She is currently writing Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S. Mexico Border (Oxford University Press) and Where Is American Literature? (Wiley-Blackwell’s Manifesto Series). Levander has recently co-edited Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010), A Companion to American Literary Studies (2011), and "The Global South and World Disorder," with Walter Mignolo, for The Global South (2011). She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science's National Leadership grant, among other agencies. In addition to co-editing a book series, Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, Levander is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke UP 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge UP 1998, paperback reprint 2009) and co-editor of Hemispheric American Studies (2008) and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (2003). She is also involved in the Our Americas Archive Partnership   26 (OAAP), a digital archive supported by search tools and teaching materials that provides open access to historical documents on the Americas, which are housed at collaborating institutions. Ramesh Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in Design|Media Arts. Srinivasan, who holds M.S and Doctoral degrees, from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard's Design School respectively, has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities. He is interested in how an information system can function as a cultural artifact, as a repository of knowledge that is commensurable with the ontologies of a community. As a complement, he is also interested in how an information system can engage and re-question the notion of diaspora and how ethnicity and culture function across distance. His research therefore involves engaging communities to serve as the designers, authors, and librarians/archivists of their own information systems. His research has spanned such bounds as Native Americans, Somali refugees, Indian villages, Aboriginal Australia, and Maori New Zealand. He has published widely in scholarly journals.