The area of “new media studies” has recently emerged at the intersection of humanities, arts, social science, and computer science research into digital, networked technologies and their cultural implications. Research fields in this area include humanities computing, digital and network art, electronic literature, critical internet studies, computer-mediated communication, information technology and society, digital textual scholarship, text encoding, human computer interaction (HCI), networking protocols, data mining, data visualization, GIS, game studies, and others. New media studies also has a reverse time-arrow dimension: “media archaeology,” or the study of earlier media (oral, manuscript, print, early industrial) from a postindustrial media perspective.

The UC New Media Directory provides a guide to new media researchers and programs in the University of California system, which has invested strategically in this area. (This site is currently under construction. It is managed by the Transliteracies Project, a UC Multi-campus Research Group.)

UC Berkeley Center for New Media starts up

“Our Goal: To understand the full philosophical, aesthetic, practical and historical significance of the information-age transformations in which we are now immersed, and to place our institution of liberal education at the center of this cultural and technological revolution so we can inform and help direct the design of future media.”

Transliteracies Project’s History of Reading Group holds workshop/colloquium.

Presenters include Giles Bergel, Robin Chin, Lisa Gitelman, Mark Goble, James Kearney, Alan Liu, Paula McDowell, Joshua Neves, Carol Braun Pasternack, Clifford Siskin, Lisa Swanstrom, Alison Walker, William Warner.

A former computer applications developer, Barbara Hui is at present a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her dissertation looks at the complex global networks at play in the historical fiction of a handful of twentieth-century German-language authors. Methodologically, she utilizes traditional close-reading techniques alongside a new media mapping tool of her own design to examine these texts. While at UCLA she has worked as programmer and literary specialist on several digital humanities projects. She has also presented widely on literature and media at both academic and technical conferences.

 Links:      Home page

Stephen Travis Pope, is a composer of computer music, software developer, and social and spiritual activist based in Santa Barbara, California. He is affiliated with the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), in the Dept. of Music at UC Santa Barbara, and the Graduate Program in Media Arts and Technology (MAT). His music and video compositions are released through HeavenEverywhere, and the NY-based Electronic Music Foundation released a triple-disc set (2 CDs and 1 DVD) retrospective of his music/video works in 2007. Stephen is also a practising Quaker, a conscientious objection counsellor, a trained Reiki practitioner, a facilitator in the Alternatives to Violence Project, and prison clergy registered with the California Dept. of Corrections.

In his 25 years experience in software research and development, Stephen has undertaken projects at the Vienna Music Academy, the Mozarteum, Stanford University, U. C. Berkeley, the Swedish Institute for Computer Science, the Technical University of Berlin, STEIM in Amsterdam, and U. C. Santa Barbara. He has over 100 publications on topics related to artificial intelligence, graphics and user interfaces, integrated programming environments, object-oriented programming, music theory and composition, distributed systems, and digital multimedia.

In parallel with his academic career, he has held technical and managerial positions at PCS/ Cadmus Computers in Munich, Xerox PARC, ParcPlace Systems (now Cincom), Predixis (now MusicIP) and Expertcity.com (now Citrix-Online) in California, and a variety of other US-based, European and Asian industry and defense organizations. Stephen lived in Europe (Austria, France and Germany) from 1977-86, and has spent several years there since then (Holland, Sweden and Germany).

Stephen’s primary multi-year research projects have revolved around the issues of models and languages for sound/music processing, tools for developing and deploying distributed real-time software, multi-channel spatial sound processing and performance, and signal analysis and statistical processing for music information retrieval.

 Links:      Home page | Heaven Everywhere | FASTLabInc

Paul Nadal is a doctoral student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley working on Asia-Pacific cultural studies, literature, and film. Paul holds a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from the University of Washington, an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA, and has studied at the University of the Philippines and Duke University’s Literature Program. One of his current projects includes research on queer aesthetics within the digital filmmaking movement in contemporary Philippine cinema, which is part of his broader concerns around sexuality, postcoloniality, and globalization

 Links:      Home Page

Renee Hudson received her BA in English at Stanford University and is currently a PhD student in English at UCLA. She specializes in twentieth century American literature. Her research interests include media theory, terrorism, and political violence.

 Links:      Under Construction

Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

He is the founder and director of two digital mapping projects that utilize GIS to explore the layered cultural histories of city spaces: Hypermedia Berlin (an interactive, web-based research tool and collaborative authoring environment for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of Berlin) and HyperCities, a dynamic platform for linking physical space with geo-temporal information. His current research focus on the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces.

At UCLA, he directs an initiative called “Media, Technology, and Culture,” which is charged with creating new intellectual tools, pedagogical and curricular practices, research methodologies, and disciplinary paradigms for the humanities in the 21st century. He is also the Chair of the Center for Digital Humanities Faculty Advisory Committee.

 Links:      Home page | Hypermedia Berlin | HyperCities

Sven Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to the visual arts and aesthetic theory in Eastern and Central Europe. At UCSB he specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar and contemporary literature and art (especially in Eastern and Central Europe), and media history. Spieker’s recent graduate seminars have included a seminar on the digital image at the intersection of art and science. In 2005, Spieker organized a two-day conference devoted to the same issue at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Spieker is the editor of a collection of essays on the uses of the administrative bureaucracy and its media in art and literature (Leidenschaften der Bürokratie: Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv. Berlin, 2004). His most recent publication is The Big Archive. The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of the Bureaucracy (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2008). The book deals with analogue archives in art and science, mapping a conceptual field that allows us to say with greater precision where the boundary between analogue and digital archives might fall. For more information, visit Spieker’s web page.

 Links:      Home page | ARTMargins