Signs: Studies in Graphic Narrative - new scholarly journal

SIGNs – Studies in Graphic Narratives – is a new, international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Comics (or, in contemporary jargon, Graphic Novels), from modern times up to the early decades of the 20th century. Read more here.

Open-Access Student Video Contest

North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access Video Contest

via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/22/08

A library group that promotes open access to scholarly data today announced the winners of a contest that had students producing short videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video called “Share.”

The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, of Carleton College, titled “Pri Vetai: Private Eye.” And the second runner-up was “An Open Access Manifesto,” by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of the Pratt Institute. —Andrea L. Foster

Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!

Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.

He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

New Journal: Memory Studies

New Journal: Memory Studies

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/23/08

Via the H-Net’s H-Memory:

SAGE Publications has released the first issue of Memory Studies. They describe the journal thusly

Memory Studies responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era, and examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. [Read more.]

They’re allowing free access to the first issue (with registration), and it is most definitely worth checking out.

Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

A newly completed Ph.D. dissertation by Jeremy Douglass:

Abstract:

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended “close interactions” include Plotkin’s Shade (1999), Barlow’s Aisle (2000), Pontious’s Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Currently seeking proposals, but also held next spring in our own backyard of Vancouver, WA.

MediaCommons: a digital scholarly network

"MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network."

FlowTV

"FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves."

Their site also offers their journal articles, reader polls, columns, and more.

Museums and the Web

Museums and the Web

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 9/27/07

Museums and the Web

April 9-12,2008
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Join hundreds of your colleagues at the only annual conference exploring the on-line presentation of cultural, scientific and heritage content across institutions and around the world: Museums and the Web.

Call for Participation Closes September 30, 2007.

Demonstration Proposals will be accepted through December 31, 2007.

For more information go to: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/

Museums and the Web addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Together, we are transforming communities and organizations.

The MW Program
MW features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional forums, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. The primary language of the conference has always been English, but in 2008, the sessions will be simultaneously translated English/French and /French/English to encourage a wide francophone participation.

Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours, including one to the museums of Ottawa, Canada's national capital.
Social events include receptions each evening, a Birds-of-a-Feather Breakfast, and plenty of refreshment breaks to provide hours of discovery and debate among hundreds of colleagues from around the world.

The MW2008 Program will be selected through peer-review by an International Program Committee based on proposals due September 30, 2007.

Who Attends MW?
Webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centers, and archives join the professionals, companies, foundations and governments that support them and attend Museums and the Web every year.

Scholarships and Volunteers
Archives & Museum Informatics awards MW Scholarships to museum professionals from small institutions and developing countries. For MW2008, The Department of Canadian Heritage has sponsored Scholarships for Canadian Professionals. Scholarship applications are due December 31, 2007.

Students are invited to volunteer at MW; they may attend the conference in exchange for helping out. Preference in 2008 will be given to fully bilingual volunteers. Volunteer applications are accepted until all spaces are filled.

Can't Make It? Get the Book.
MW2008 Presenters will be required to submit written papers; the best will appear in print in Museums and the Web 2008: Selected papers from an international conference. All papers are also published on-line and on CD-ROM. Discounted advance orders of the Selected Papers and CD-ROM Proceedings are now being taken.

Past papers from all Museums and the Web conferences – since 1997 – are on-line. Printed volumes of Selected Papers from MW97 – MW2007 are also available to order.

Conference Co-Chairs
Jennifer Trant and David Bearman
Archives & Museum Informatics
158 Lee Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M4E 2P3 Canada

ELPUB2008: Open Scholarship in the Age of Web 2.0

ELPUB2008

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 10/29/07

CFP: ELPUB2008 (Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0)

Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0
12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing
25 to 27 June 2008, Toronto, Canada

Submission Deadline: January 20, 2008
http://www.elpub.net
CFP URL: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/call.html

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences, and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

* New Publishing models, tools, services and roles
* New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
* Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
* Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
* Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
* Content search, analysis and retrieval
* Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
* Personalisation technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS, microformats)
* Metadata creation, usage and interoperability
* Semantic web issues
* Data mining, text harvesting, and dynamic formatting
* User generated content and its relation to publisher's content
* Usage and citation impact
* Security, privacy and copyright issues
* Digital preservation, content authentication
* Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines
Contributions are invited for the following categories:
- Single papers (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Tutorial (abstract minimum of 500 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Workshop (abstract max of 1000 words)
- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

Abstracts must be submitted following the instructions on the conference website

Key Dates:
January 20th 2008: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories):

February 28, 2008: Authors will be notified of the acceptance of submitted
papers and workshop proposals.

April 11th, 2008: Final papers must be received. See website for
detailed author instructions.

Posters (A1-format) and demonstration materials should be brought
by their authors at the conference time. Only abstracts of these
contributions will be published in the conference proceedings.
Information on requirements for Workshops and tutorials proposals
will soon be posted on the website.

All submissions are subjected to peer review (double-blind) and
accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted
full papers will be published in the conference proceedings.
Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference.
Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at:
http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB

The ELPUB 2008 conference will keep the tradition of the previous
international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the
United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999),
Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil
(2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006) and Austria (2007), which
is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians,
developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users
and all those interested in issues regarding electronic
publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the
human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal,
commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting
theme encompasses.

Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope
of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange
and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications
and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical
issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and
publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most
recent work.

ELPUB 2008 offers a variety of activities, such as workshops,
tutorials, panel debates, poster presentation and demonstrations.
A variety of social events and sight-seeing tours will be
available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the
conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Toronto, Canada. Toronto is one of the most
vibrant cities in North-America. It has a large multicultural
population, is the largest city in Canada and the 5th-largest
city in North America. There are many world class galleries and
museums across the city and you will find authentic cuisines from
around the world at reasonable prices.

Conference Host: Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI),
University of Toronto. KMDI is a graduate research and teaching
institute at the University of Toronto, and an intellectual
incubator fostering cross-disciplinary initiatives across the
university. The work of the institute spans both the scientific
study of the ways in which media shapes and is shaped by human
activity, and the practical work of founding an interdisciplinary
nexus for design and evaluation of both media and media
technologies. KMDI has acknowledged leadership, substantial
research programs and broad participation in three major areas:
collaboration and collaboration technologies, the phenomenon of
openness and new forms of knowledge production and dissemination,
and public policy and citizen engagement.

General Chair: Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough
chan@utsc.utoronto.ca

Programme Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA - Inter-Academic
Consortium for ICT, Italy: mornati@cilea.it

On her blog, scholar Danah Boyd wrote a short essay for review by her colleagues entitled "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace". The idea was consumed - and transformed - by bloggers and news outlets world wide.

She wrote an interesting response to the criticism and misinterpretation her essay received, indicating that "I didn't write my piece for the audience who ended up consuming it." A fascinating example of how the web is transforming academic scholarship.