2012 6.1
Articles
A Life Lived in Media
Mark Deuze, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University; Peter Blank, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University; Laura Speers, King's College, London
Research since the early years of the 21st century consistently shows that through the years more of our time gets spent using media, that being concurrently exposed to media has become a foundational feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Contemporary media devices, what people do with them, and how all of this fits into the organization of our everyday life disrupt and unsettle well-established views of the role media play in society. Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, this contribution proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it are framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by (immersive, integrated, ubiquitous and pervasive) media.
Comic Book Markup Language: An Introduction and Rationale
John A. Walsh, Indiana University
Comics, comic books, and graphic novels are increasingly the target of seriously scholarly attention in the humanities. Moreover, comic books are exceptionally complex documents, with intricate relationships between pictorial and textual elements and a wide variety of content types within a single comic book publication. The complexity of these documents, their combination of textual and pictorial elements, and the collaborative nature of their production shares much in common with other complex documents studied by humanists—illuminated manuscripts, artists’ books, illustrated poems like those of William Blake, letterpress productions like those of the Kelmscott Press, illustrated children’s books, and even Web pages and other born-digital media. Comic Book Markup Language, or CBML, is a TEI-based XML vocabulary for encoding and analyzing comic books, comics, graphic novels, and related documents. This article discusses the goals and motivations for developing CBML, reviews the various content types found in comic book publications, provides an overview and examples of the key features of the CBML XML vocabulary, explores some of the problems and challenges in the encoding and digital representation of comic books, and outlines plans for future work. The structural, textual, visual, and bibliographic complexity of comic books make them an excellent subject for the general study of complex documents, especially documents combining pictorial and textual elements.
Envisioning the Digital Humanities
Patrik Svensson, University of Umeå
Over the last couple of years, it has become increasingly clear that the digital humanities is associated with a visionary and forward-looking sentiment, and that the field has come to constitute a site for far-reaching discussions about the future of the field itself as well as the humanities at large. Based on a rich set of materials closely associated with the formation of the digital humanities, this article explores the visions and expectations associated with the digital humanities and how the digital humanities often becomes a laboratory and means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities. It is argued that this forward-looking sentiment comes both from inside and outside the field, and is arguably an important reason for the attraction and importance of the field. Furthermore, the author outlines a visionary scope for the digital humanities and offers a personal visionary statement as the endpoint to the article series.
The Materialities of Close Reading: 1942, 1959, 2009
David Ciccoricco, University of Otago
This article identifies some of the popular and historical contradictions inherent to the very notion of close reading digital literature, and puts forth an updated conception of what the author argues continues to be a vital practice of literary study. More specifically, it establishes continuities between a pre-digital historical conception of close reading and the sort of materially-conscious hermeneutics that digital textuality requires. The author applies the updated conception of close reading digital literature to Steve Tomasula's TOC , a self-described new media novel.
Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media: Selected, Annotated Bibliographies
Ray Siemens, University of Victoria; Meagan Timney, University of Victoria; Cara Leitch, University of Victoria; Corina Koolen, University of Victoria; Alex Garnett, University of Victoria
The two annotated bibliographies present in this publication document and feature pertinent discussions toward the activity of modeling the social edition, first exploring reading devices, tools and social media issues and, second, social networking tools for professional readers in the Humanities. In this work, which is published conjointly with the LLC piece "Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media," we consider a typology of electronic scholarly editions adjacent to activities common to humanities scholars who engage texts as expert readers, noting therein that many methods of engagement both reflect the interrelated nature of long-standing professional reading strategies and are social in nature; extending this framework, the next steps in the scholarly edition’s development in its incorporation of social media functionality reflect the importance of traditional humanistic activities and workflows, and include collaboration, incorporating contributions by its readers and re-visioning the role of the editor away from that of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement.
