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With our unique focus on writing, our innovative web-born format and our open review process, we seek to move beyond the traditionalist ways humanities scholars – and historians in particular – have tended to think about and to use digital technologies. In a recent lecture delivered in advance of his forthcoming book, The Ivory Tower and the Open Web, Dan Cohen (2011) observes that most scholars have preferred “to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the web” rather than accept its most successful models, such as blogs and social media. What would happen, Cohen asks, if we reversed this flow and “embraced the genres of the open web?” How might the web challenge prevailing norms of scholarly work, particularly in how we generate and communicate knowledge with one another? This, in short, is what we seek to explore in our Writing History volume.

Writing --- digital age --- history

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Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

object --- digital age --- arts --- museum

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Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers-ethical, practical and conceptual-in digital documentation projects. Oral literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions. This book is part of the World Oral Literature Series, developed in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Protect.

digital age --- linguistics --- oral literature --- digital humanities

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Large parts of our culture are characterised by a blurring of corporeal and virtual realities. Computer industry has opened up all sorts of hybrid spaces and has itself, in turn, become a space for uncountable fantasies and expectations. Which are the principles of cultural order depicted by this desire commonly termed cyberspace? In offering novel narratives of modern architecture the author explains how the digital age couples notions of knowledge, life and future with long-known dimensions of architectonic space. Amongst the issues being discussed the reader will find Boullee's visionary designs, classical modern architecture, museums, shopping malls, science fiction, advertising, CAD, biotechnology and the construction of a utopian cyberspace at the turn of the millennium.

architecture, cyberspace, virtual realities, digital age --- Architektur, Subjektivität, Cyberspace, Visuelle Kultur, Virtualität, Neue Medien

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The idea that the digital age has revolutionized our day-to-day experience of the world is nothing new, and has been amply recognized by cultural historians. In contrast, Stephen Robertson’s BC: Before Computers is a work which questions the idea that the mid-twentieth century saw a single moment of rupture. It is about all the things that we had to learn, invent, and understand – all the ways we had to evolve our thinking – before we could enter the information technology revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. Its focus ranges from the beginnings of data processing, right back to such originary forms of human technology as the development of writing systems, gathering a whole history of revolutionary moments in the development of information technologies into a single, although not linear narrative.Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers. The book is wide in scope, exploring the development of technologies in such diverse areas as cryptography, visual art and music, and the postal system. Through all this, it does not simply aim to tell the story of computer developments but to show that those developments rely on a long history of humans creating technologies for increasingly sophisticated methods of manipulating information.Through a clear structure and engaging style, it brings together a wealth of informative and conceptual explorations into the history of human technologies, and avoids assumptions about any prior knowledge on the part of the reader. As such, it has the potential to be of interest to the expert and the general reader alike.

history of computer developments --- digital age --- computer --- information technology revolution --- data processing --- cryptography --- visual art --- music --- postal system