The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities 2017014964, 9781138844308, 9781315730479

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA STUDIES AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking. Contributors: Isabel Cristina Restrepo Acevedo, Alyssa Arbuckle, Moya Bailey, Anne Balsamo, Jon Bath, Erika M. Behrmann, Nina Belojevic, Paul Benzon, Bryan Carter, Kimberly Christen, Alex Christie, Beth Coleman, Constance Crompton, Monica De La Torre, Jeanette M. Dillon, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Maureen Engel, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Mary Flanagan, Matthew Fuller, Jacob Gaboury, Jennifer Gabrys, Radhika Gajjala, Reina Gossett, Dene Grigar, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, Patrick Jagoda, Steven E. Jones, Alexandra Juhasz, Kat Jungnickel, Lauren F. Klein, Kim Brillante Knight, Kari Kraus, Virginia Kuhn, Elizabeth LaPensée, Derek Long, Elizabeth Losh, Angelica Macklin, Shaun Macpherson, Mark C. Marino, Shannon Mattern, Peter McDonald, Tara McPherson, Shintaro Miyazaki, Aimée Morrison, Stuart Moulthrop, Anna Munster, Timothy Murray, Angel David Nieves, Amanda Phillips, Kevin Ponto, Jessica Rajko, Howard Rambsy II, Sonnet Retman, Roopika Risam, Tara Rodgers, Daniela K. Rosner, Anastasia Salter, Jeffrey Schnapp, Ray Siemens, Patrik Svensson, Victoria Szabo, Tony Tran, Annette Vee, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Jacqueline Wernimont, Mark J. Williams, and Gregory Zinman Jentery Sayers is Associate Professor of English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, Canada.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA STUDIES AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES Edited by Jentery Sayers

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sayers, Jentery, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities / edited by Jentery Sayers. Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014964| ISBN 9781138844308 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315730479 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media. | Digital humanities. Classification: LCC P90 .R673 2018 | DDC 302.23—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014964 ISBN: 978-1-138-84430-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73047-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

This book is dedicated to everyone at HASTAC.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

xii xix

Introduction: Studying Media through New Media

1

JENTERY SAYERS PART I

7

Access, Praxis, Justice 1. Theory/Practice: Lessons Learned from Feminist Film Studies

9

TARA MCPHERSON

2. #cut/paste+bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action, and Production On and Offline

18

ALEXANDRA JUHASZ

3. Analog Girls in Digital Worlds: Dismantling Binaries for Digital Humanists Who Research Social Media

33

MOYA BAILEY AND REINA GOSSETT

4. (Cyber)Ethnographies of Contact, Dialogue, Friction: Connecting, Building, Placing, and Doing “Data”

44

RADHIKA GAJJALA, ERIKA M. BEHRMANN, AND JEANETTE M. DILLON

5. Of, By, and For the Internet: New Media Studies and Public Scholarship

56

AIMÉE MORRISON

6. Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities: Convivencia and Archivista Praxis for a Digital Era

67

MICHELLE HABELL-PALLÁN, SONNET RETMAN, ANGELICA MACKLIN, AND MONICA DE LA TORRE

7. Decolonizing Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice ROOPIKA RISAM vii

78

CONTENTS

8. Interactive Narratives: Addressing Social and Political Trauma through New Media

87

ISABEL CRISTINA RESTREPO ACEVEDO

9. Wear and Care: Feminisms at a Long Maker Table

97

JACQUELINE WERNIMONT AND ELIZABETH LOSH

10. A Glitch in the Tower: Academia, Disability, and Digital Humanities

108

ELIZABETH ELLCESSOR

117

11. Game Studies for Great Justice AMANDA PHILLIPS

12. Self-Determination in Indigenous Games

128

ELIZABETH LAPENSÉE PART II

Design, Interface, Interaction

139

13. Making Meaning, Making Culture: How to Think about Technology and Cultural Reproduction

141

ANNE BALSAMO

14. Contemporary and Future Spaces for Media Studies and Digital Humanities

152

PATRIK SVENSSON

15. Finding Fault Lines: An Approach to Speculative Design

162

KARI KRAUS

16. Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play

174

PATRICK JAGODA AND PETER MCDONALD

17. Critical Play and Responsible Design

183

MARY FLANAGAN

18. A Call to Action: Embodied Thinking and Human-Computer Interaction Design

195

JESSICA RAJKO

19. Wearable Interfaces, Networked Bodies, and Feminist Sleeper Agents

204

KIM BRILLANTE KNIGHT

20. Deep Mapping: Space, Place, and Narrative as Urban Interface MAUREEN ENGEL viii

214

CONTENTS

21. Smart Things, Smart Subjects: How the “Internet of Things” Enacts Pervasive Media

222

BETH COLEMAN PART III

Mediation, Method, Materiality

231

22. Approaching Sound

233

TARA RODGERS

23. Algorhythmics: A Diffractive Approach for Understanding Computation

243

SHINTARO MIYAZAKI

250

24. Software Studies Methods MATTHEW FULLER

25. Physical Computing, Embodied Practice

258

NINA BELOJEVIC AND SHAUN MACPHERSON

26. Turning Practice Inside Out: Digital Humanities and the Eversion

267

STEVEN E. JONES

27. Conjunctive and Disjunctive Networks: Affects, Technics, and Arts in the Experience of Relation

274

ANNA MUNSTER

28. From “Live” to Real Time: On Future Television Studies

283

MARK J. WILLIAMS

29. ICYMI: Catching Up to the Moving Image Online

292

GREGORY ZINMAN

30. Images on the Move: Analytics for a Mixed Methods Approach

300

VIRGINIA KUHN

31. Lost in the Clouds: A Media Theory of the Flight Recorder

310

PAUL BENZON

32. Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Critical and Generative Infrastructures

318

SHANNON MATTERN PART IV

Remediation, Data, Memory

327

33. Obsolescence and Innovation in the Age of the Digital

329

KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK ix

CONTENTS

336

34. Futures of the Book JON BATH, ALYSSA ARBUCKLE, CONSTANCE CROMPTON, ALEX CHRISTIE, RAY SIEMENS, AND THE INKE RESEARCH GROUP

35. Becoming a Rap Genius: African American Literary Studies and Collaborative Annotation

345

HOWARD RAMBSY II

36. Traversals: A Method of Preservation for Born-Digital Texts

351

DENE GRIGAR AND STUART MOULTHROP

37. New Media Arts: Creativity on the Way to the Archive

362

TIMOTHY MURRAY

38. Apprehending the Past: Augmented Reality, Archives, and Cultural Memory

372

VICTORIA SZABO

39. Experiencing Digital Africana Studies: Bringing the Classroom to Life

384

BRYAN CARTER

40. Engagements with Race, Memory, and the Built Environment in South Africa: A Case Study in Digital Humanities

391

ANGEL DAVID NIEVES

41. Relationships, Not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online

403

KIMBERLY CHRISTEN

42. Searching, Mining, and Interpreting Media History’s Big Data

413

ERIC HOYT, TONY TRAN, DEREK LONG, KIT HUGHES, AND KEVIN PONTO

43. The Intimate Lives of Cultural Objects

423

JEFFREY SCHNAPP

44. Timescape and Memory: Visualizing Big Data at the 9/11 Memorial Museum

433

LAUREN F. KLEIN PART V

Making, Programming, Hacking

443

45. Programming as Literacy

445

ANNETTE VEE

46. Expressive Processing: Interpretation and Creation NOAH WARDRIP-FRUIN x

453

CONTENTS

462

47. Building Interactive Stories ANASTASIA SALTER

472

48. Reading Culture through Code MARK C. MARINO

49. Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation

483

JACOB GABOURY

50. Making Things to Make Sense of Things: DIY as Research and Practice

492

KAT JUNGNICKEL

51. Environmental Sensing and “Media” as Practice in the Making

503

JENNIFER GABRYS

52. Approaching Design as Inquiry: Magic, Myth, and Metaphor in Digital Fabrication

511

DANIELA K. ROSNER

Glossary of Acronyms and Initialisms Glossary of Projects Index

521 526 551

xi

CONTRIBUTORS

Isabel Cristina Restrepo Acevedo is an Associate Professor and Director of the research group Hipertrópico, Arts and Technology from Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. Her research and artistic practice explore relationships between new media art and society. Alyssa Arbuckle is Assistant Director, Research Partnerships & Development, in the Electronics Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria (UVic), where she also works with the INKE group. Alyssa holds an M.A. in English from UVic. Moya Bailey studies marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She also co-curates the #transformDH initiative. Anne Balsamo is the Dean of the School of Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. Jon Bath is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History and Director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. He is co-leader of the Modelling and Prototyping team of Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE). Erika M. Behrmann is an activist-scholar focusing on feminist theory, postfeminism, pedagogy, postcolonialism, and their various intersections and materializations within media and gaming spaces. Her publications can be found in Teaching Media Quarterly (2015) and Films for the Feminist Classroom (2016). Nina Belojevic completed her M.A. in English at the University of Victoria. Her work combines media studies and cultural studies with media art and physical computing practice. Paul Benzon teaches in the Department of English and the Media and Film Studies Program at Skidmore College. His work has appeared in PMLA, Narrative, electronic book review, and Media-N, the journal of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association. Bryan Carter received his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Columbia and is currently an Associate Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Arizona, specializing in African American literature of the twentieth century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance. His research also focuses on Digital Humanities/Africana Studies. Kimberly Christen is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, Director of Digital Projects for Native American Programs, and the co-Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University. xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Alex Christie is an Assistant Professor in Digital Prototyping at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. He completed his doctorate at the University of Victoria, where he worked as a research assistant with the INKE group and the Modernist Versions Project in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the Maker Lab in the Humanities. Beth Coleman directs the City as Platform Lab at the University of Waterloo, where she is an Associate Professor of Experimental Digital Media. Her research spans artistic and academic practices, addressing networked media technology and new data publics. She is the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an internationally acclaimed multimedia art and sound platform. Her book Hello Avatar is with MIT Press. Constance Crompton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. She is a researcher with the INKE project and co-Director of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project. Monica De La Torre is an Assistant Professor in Media and Expressive Culture at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. In her research, teaching, and media production, she bridges Chicana feminist theory, Latina/o media studies, radio and sound studies, and feminist media praxis. Jeanette M. Dillon is a 25-year media veteran pursuing her doctorate in communication at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include health and organizational communication, particularly within nonprofit organizations and social enterprises. Elizabeth Ellcessor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation (NYU Press 2016). Maureen Engel is Assistant Professor and Director of Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Formally trained as a textual scholar, her work focuses on the intricate relationships that inhere in and develop from the concepts of space, place, history, and narrative. Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy and The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Mary Flanagan is an artist, designer, and media theorist. She founded and leads the game design research laboratory, Tiltfactor, at Dartmouth College, where she is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities. She also runs the game publishing company Resonym. Matthew Fuller is a member of the editorial group of the journal Computational Culture. He works at the Digital Culture Unit and Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Jacob Gaboury is Assistant Professor of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. His work engages the history and theory of digital media with a focus on digital imaging, media archaeology, and queer theory. Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, “Citizen Sense.” Her publications include xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Radhika Gajjala is Professor of Media and Communication (joint appointed faculty in American Culture Studies) at Bowling Green State University. She has published books on Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press 2012) and Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women (AltaMira 2004). Reina Gossett is an activist, writer, and filmmaker. Along with Sasha Wortzel, Reina wrote, directed, and produced Happy Birthday, Marsha! (a short film about legendary trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, starring Independent Spirit Award winner Mya Taylor). Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. Michelle Habell-Pallán, a Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, co-directs the UW Women Who Rock Archive. Author of Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (2005), she curated American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music (hosted by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service) and jams with Seattle Fandango Project. Eric Hoyt is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video, co-Director of the Media History Digital Library, and lead developer of Lantern and Arclight. Kit Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Media and Visual Culture at Colorado State University. Her manuscript project, Television at Work, details how American business developed television as a technology of industrial efficiency, ideological orientation, and corporate expansion. Patrick Jagoda is Associate Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is the author of Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press 2016) and co-author with Michael Maizels of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press 2016). Steven E. Jones is DeBartolo Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities in the Department of English, the University of South Florida. He is author of a number of books and articles, including Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards (Routledge 2016). Alexandra Juhasz is Chair of the Film Department at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. Her current work is on and about feminist internet culture, including YouTube and feminist pedagogy and community. With Anne Balsamo, she was co-facilitator of the network, FemTechNet. Kat Jungnickel is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research explores mobilities, digital technology cultures, DIY/DIT practices, and making methods. Lauren F. Klein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. With xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Kim Brillante Knight is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas, where her research and teaching focus on the interplay of power structures and identity in digital culture, with particular emphasis on the role of gender and intersectional feminism in networked environments. Kari Kraus is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Virginia Kuhn is Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Associate Professor in the division of Media Arts + Practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Elizabeth LaPensée Ph.D. expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games. She is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish, living near the Great Lakes. She is an Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University. She designed and programmed Invaders (2015), a remix of the arcade classic Space Invaders. Her latest game, Honour Water (2016), shares Anishinaabe songs for healing the water. Derek Long is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is currently working on a book manuscript on distribution in the early Hollywood studio system. Elizabeth Losh is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Govern ment Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press 2014). Angelica Macklin is a filmmaker and doctoral candidate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She has been with the Women Who Rock Collective since 2011, organizing the unConferences and Film Festivals, building the Archive, and teaching media production. Angelica is co-Director of “Masizakhe: Building Each Other” and “De Baixo Para Cima.” Shaun Macpherson is a musician and media artist whose work combines sound design and video with analog or otherwise obsolete technology. He recently received an M.A. in English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of electronic literature living in Los Angeles. He teaches writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. She writes about archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; and mediated sensation. Peter McDonald is a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago and a fellow at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. His work deals with the hermeneutics of play. xv

CONTRIBUTORS

Tara McPherson teaches in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She is co-editor of Vectors, a lead P.I. on the platform Scalar, and author or editor of several books, including Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Harvard University Press 2018). Shintaro Miyazaki is currently a senior researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Academy of Art and Design, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, working at the intersection of media, design, and history. He has a Ph.D. in media theory from Humboldt University, Berlin (2012). Aimée Morrison is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, where she teaches new media studies. She has published on internet manifestos, mommy blogs, Facebook status updates, and videogame movies of the 1980s. Stuart Moulthrop is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and coordinator of the program in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. Anna Munster is a writer, artist, and educator. She is the author of An Aesthesia of Networks (2013) and Materializing New Media (2006). She is a Professor in Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Timothy Murray is Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts at Cornell University. Co-moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv, his books include Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (University of Minnesota Press 2008). Angel David Nieves is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. He is also co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2010–16). Amanda Phillips is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. She writes about race, gender, and social justice in videogames and the digital humanities. You can find her work in Queer Game Studies, Games and Culture, Digital Creativity, and Debates in the Digital Humanities. Kevin Ponto is an Assistant Professor in the Design Studies Department and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on the experience of visualizing data, including the development of the ScripThreads visualization application. Jessica Rajko is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (ASU). Her work investigates the ethical and corporeal implications of wearable technology, big data, and the quantified self. She is a founding co-Director of the ASU Human Security Collaboratory and is an affiliated artist/researcher with the Arts, Media and Engineering Synthesis Center. Howard Rambsy II teaches African American literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Sonnet Retman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, where she co-directs the UW Women Who Rock Archive. She is the author of numerous essays on race, gender, genre, and performance and of Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (Duke University Press 2011). xvi

CONTRIBUTORS

Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University. Her research focuses on digital approaches to postcolonial and African diaspora studies. Risam’s work has recently appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, South Asian Review, and Debates in the Digital Humanities. Tara Rodgers is a composer, historian, and critic of electronic music and sound. She is the author of numerous essays on music, technology, and culture, and of Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press 2010). Daniela K. Rosner is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, co-directing the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT lab). Through fieldwork and design, her research examines emerging sites of creativity around digital production—from hobbyist fixer groups to feminist hacker collectives. Anastasia Salter is an Assistant Professor of digital media at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press 2014) and co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press 2014). Jeffrey Schnapp led the Stanford Humanities Lab between 1999 and 2009. After joining the Harvard University faculty in 2011, he founded metaLAB, where he serves as Faculty Director and co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Among his recent books are Digital_Humanities (2012) and The Library Beyond the Book (2014). Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English with cross appointment in Computer Science. He directs the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the INKE group, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Patrik Svensson is a Professor of Humanities and Information Technology at Umeå University, and the former Director of HUMLab (2000–14). His current work can be loosely organized under two themes: digital humanities and conditions for knowledge production. Victoria Szabo is an Associate Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke University. She is a member of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture and works on augmented reality and virtual worlds for critical and creative expression. Tony Tran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His research interests include exploring digital diasporas and the relationships between on and offline spaces. Annette Vee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work on literacy, computer programming, intellectual property, and pedagogy has been published in journals such as Computational Culture and Literacy in Composition Studies. Her book, Coding Literacy, was published by MIT Press in 2017. Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he co-directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS), a technical/cultural research group. His media projects have been presented by venues such as the Whitney Museum and IndieCade. Jacqueline Wernimont is an Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. As founding co-Director of the Human Security Collaboratory, she works on new civil rights xvii

CONTRIBUTORS

in digital cultures with emphases on the long histories of quantification and technologies of commemoration. Mark J. Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College, co-editor of the Interfaces book series at Dartmouth College Press, founding editor of The Journal of e-Media Studies, and Director of The Media Ecology Project. Gregory Zinman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Film History, MIRAJ, and Millennium Film Journal. He is completing a book, Handmade: The Moving Image without Photography, and is co-editing, with John Hanhardt, Nam June Paik: Selected Writings (forthcoming from The MIT Press).

xviii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As editor of this Companion, I acknowledge with respect the Lkwungen-speaking peoples on whose traditional territory I live and work, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples, whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. Many thanks and much love to Brooken, Beckett, and Willem for all the hugs, support, patience, and humor along the way. I am beyond fortunate that you are in my life. Thanks as well to each of the Companion’s contributors, who engaged in dialogue with me for the last four years and were (and remain) a positive force for change. Danielle Morgan (research assistant with the MLab at UVic) produced the cover image for this Companion. Nadia Timperio (research assistant with the MLab at UVic) worked with me to prepare the Companion for publication, and Allison Murphy (research assistant with the Department of English at UVic) indexed it with me. Students in English 508 at UVic provided valuable feedback on several chapters, and Steven E. Jones, Willard McCarty, Stuart Moulthrop, and Melissa Terras offered insightful responses to the Companion during the proposal stage. Initial research for this Companion was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) as well as the Departments of English and Visual Arts at UVic. Endless thanks to Cathy Davidson, Julie Klein, Tara McPherson, and Kathy Woodward for their advice and perspective early on, and to Nina Belejovic, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Shaun Macpherson, and Danielle Morgan for their support during the MLab days. Of course, The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities would not have been possible without the teams at Routledge and Florence Production, including Mia Moran, Erica Wetter, Emma Sudderick, and especially Jessica Bithrey, who worked with me throughout the proofreading process.

xix

INTRODUCTION Studying Media through New Media Jentery Sayers

This Companion is about studying media through new media: for instance, making games to better understand their mechanics and politics, writing code and developing interfaces to explore their roles in reading and literacy, stewarding texts for online annotation and public discussion, participating in social networks to locate their biases and occlusions, assembling hardware to expose norms and change default settings, or composing audio, moving images, databases, and augmented reality applications as forms of scholarship at once similar to and different from academic essays. That is quite a list. And it is not exhaustive. Yet it speaks to the Companion’s principal impulse, which is to combine media studies with digital humanities to share with readers (especially those who are new to both fields) the various types of research that emerge. Even though they share interests in technologies, media studies and digital humanities do not always converse. Perhaps this lack of dialogue is explained by divergent histories of theory and practice, with researchers in each field drawing from distinct canons and methodologies. In digital humanities, studies of texts from the 1800s or earlier are quite common; for numerous reasons, these texts are readily available in electronic form and thus conducive to computational analysis. In media studies, research tends to move from the 1800s forward and also focus on nontextual forms, such as sound, images, video, and games. Aside from these differences in substance and period, popular definitions of each field suggest a difference in technique, too: whereas media studies treats media and technologies as objects of inquiry, digital humanities integrates them into its methods. Or, if media studies is about media and technologies, then digital humanities works with them. Allow me to elaborate on this assumption for a moment. Many media studies practitioners avoid the reduction of research to instrumentalism, where technologies are “neutral tools” that simply turn input into output. Against instrumentalism, practitioners should be cognizant of not only the values and histories embedded in technologies, but also how those values and histories shape interpretation. Related concerns in media studies include the risks of researchers colluding with the tech industry or adopting technologies too quickly. Early or enthusiastic adoption may be a knee-jerk endorsement of whiz-bang gadgets and alluring trends—a way to make your project appealing or relevant to the market without necessarily addressing the research questions, social issues, conceptual frameworks, matters of representation, and contexts of use at hand. Meanwhile, digital 1

JENTERY SAYERS

humanities practitioners experiment with and even build the infrastructures of new media, reminding us that technology is not just a metaphor or an object “over there,” to be philosophized at a remove. Technologies are constructed, maintained, preserved, and consumed, and they are intricately interlaced with labor and knowledge production in and beyond the academy. In short, digital projects demand a lot of work. Where there’s a technology, there’s also a team, some stories, millions of files, thousands of bugs and fixes, and plenty of politics. The result is significant attention to laboratory practices and technical competencies in digital humanities. Inspired by Tara McPherson’s seminal Cinema Journal essay, “Media Studies and the Digital Humanities” (2009), this Companion demonstrates how such assumptions about media studies and digital humanities are in reality hyperbolic, if not mythological. Many researchers, including contributors to this Companion, move routinely across the two fields, which may mutually inform and enrich each other instead of fostering opposition. In fact, when they are combined in theory as well as practice, we could say that media studies and digital humanities work through new media as means and modes of inquiry. We can research media without resorting to naive enthusiasm for technologies or assuming scholarly positions from on high, somehow above or outside the very conditions we study. More specifically, we may borrow language from scholars such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2005) and Karen Barad (2007) to argue that we are entangled with the media we produce and research, not separate from them. This position need not imply a lack of researcher awareness or a disinterest in social change. Rather, the point is to stress how all research is mediated; it is media all the way down. We influence and are influenced by our inquiries and materials, and—as exhibited by each chapter in this Companion—historicizing, assessing, and revising the roles media play in that influence renders our work more compelling and persuasive. We might start by noting that “media” in this Companion is not synonymous with “the media,” or with communication outlets and conglomerates. As an alternative, we may begin with Lev Manovich’s five-part definition of new media, even if his definition privileges formal aspects over the contexts of functions and processes: • • • • •

New media are numerical representations (composed of digital code), They are modular (several distinct parts constitute an object), They are automated (their creation and maintenance involve a combination of people and machines), They are variable (versions eclipse originals and copies), and They are transcoded (a combination of computation and culture) (Manovich 2001: 27–48).

This last aspect, transcoding, is most central to this Companion, which foregrounds the cultural dimensions of studying media through new media: how new media are about power and control, for example. In doing so, the Companion also echoes W.J.T. Mitchell: “There are no ‘pure’ media” (2008: 13). Even with established categories such as sound, image, video, text, code, software, hardware, platform, interface, story, game, network, and even electricity, light, or water, it is impossible to isolate one medium from the next. Their affordances are fleeting and incredibly difficult to measure. And if no pure media exist, then it is also impossible to extract new media from the contingencies of their histories or settings, even as they transform, rot, disappear, and reappear over time, often without provenance or reference to the motivations for their composition. While anyone may unconsciously or wilfully ignore these histories and settings—these values and configurations—they are active ingredients of 2

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new media’s composition; they are the stuff of making and remaking. Once they enter our frame of analysis, new media’s formal or technical aspects morph from the common sense of patents, diagrams, and instruction manuals into a hairball of human and nonhuman activities or a matrix of technology and culture. We could therefore propose that the study of media is the study of entanglements. How and under what assumptions is sound entwined with image? Data with design? Network with node? Old with new? Subject with object? Aesthetics with politics? This approach to combining media studies with digital humanities does not bypass specificity (as if entanglements are antithetical to granularity and difference), and it does not endorse relativism (as if entanglements either absolve us from responsibility or claim equal positioning for everyone and everything) (Haraway 1988: 584). It instead underscores how new media are simultaneously abstract and particular, inhabiting seemingly contradictory positions within systems that invite and track action. It then asks us to account for where we are and how we participate in those systems—in the complex mesh of apparatus with process. This is no simple task, especially when we face the litany of things media may be: both social and material, carrier and content, form and substance, portal and edge, ephemeral and permanent, you and other. Of course, practitioners usually select their preferred terms for research, and these terms unavoidably shape how people draw boundaries and assume responsibility for their demarcations. Media. A fascinating mess. In the following pages, four palpable issues repeatedly surface from it all. These issues are not just concerns shared by some or even all the authors; they are also indicators of what makes the intersection of media studies with digital humanities unique and necessary right now. •

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Beyond Text: With its prevalence in English departments and studies of literature and language, digital humanities frequently deems text its primary medium for both composition and analysis. Against this grain, the following chapters give us a very concrete sense of digital humanities and media studies beyond text for inquiry. By extension, they prompt practitioners to consider an array of media in tandem with a constellation of modalities, including listening, seeing, scanning, touching, skimming, hearing, watching, smelling, feeling, toggling, wearing, processing, and inhabiting. These modalities remind us how the study of media through new media is an embodied or material activity, which may be both situated in and distributed across space and time as well as people and machines. Embodiment (including questions of affect and labor) and materiality (including questions of inscription, plasticity, and erasure) are fundamental to research as an entanglement. Labs and Collaboration: The laboratory, broadly defined, is a core component of many chapters in this Companion. A majority, if not all, of the methods are experimental. They combine disciplines, privilege trial and error, underscore action in context, or develop custom technologies. Rarely is this work done alone, and even when the chapters are written by individuals they draw upon and acknowledge efforts by teams and collectives. Although they are now ubiquitous features of digital work, labs and collaboration remain understudied in the humanities. This Companion contributes additional research to address that gap. Social Justice: The content of this Companion resists formal or technical treatments of media as if technologies are outside of time, history, culture, society, and material conditions. Many of the chapters focus on the entanglements of technologies with justice, oppression, and power. Rather than asking what media are, they ask what media do. 3

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How do new media unfold in context? How are they made, by whom, and for whom? According to what norms or standards, and with what influence on social relations? With what acknowledgments and exclusions? How do they circulate, regulate, and discipline? How are they modified or repurposed, and with what changes over time? These questions encourage a media studies and digital humanities of the present moment, when technologies may be modes of activism and decolonization instead of instruments or gadgets. Expanding Participation: Instead of reducing media studies or digital humanities to practices such as programming—or to the technical particulars of code and platforms— the chapters included here underscore a range of scholarly participation in new media from across disciplines and experiences. Through their methodologies, the authors may intervene in a given research area by prototyping media through new media, but they may also conduct archival research, write monographs, pursue ethnographic methods, or manage scholarly resources, for instance. One by-product of this range is a thorough account of what “making,” “doing,” or “building” really mean in our current moment. These forms of “active” participation need not be restricted to the creation of shiny, tangible, and measurable things. They need not rehearse the myth of lone white male inventors, either. Scholarship in this Companion involves (among other things) performing, writing, thinking, speaking, listening, resisting, revising, editing, curating, maintaining, fixing, and tinkering, the particulars of which often escape us. Through this expansive approach to participation in new media, the chapters more accurately reflect the actualities of research practice and move beyond the superficial hype of making and building stuff.

To give these four issues some structure, especially for readers who are new to media studies and digital humanities, I organized this Companion into five sections, followed by a Glossary of Acronyms and Initialisms as well as a Glossary of Projects mentioned in the chapters: Part I. Access, Praxis, Justice: This section highlights social justice issues that permeate the entirety of the Companion. It also demonstrates how social justice work is enacted through new media as a form of praxis, in part by expanding the definition of “access” through an emphasis on participation, but also by sharing various modes of activism involving new media. This part features Tara McPherson on feminist film studies; Alexandra Juhasz on “ev-entanglement”; Moya Bailey and Reina Gossett on social media; Radhika Gajjala, Erika M. Behrmann, and Jeanette M. Dillon on cyberethnography; Aimée Morrison on public scholarship; Michelle Habell-Pallán, Sonnet Retman, Angelica Macklin, and Monica De La Torre on convivencia and archivista praxis; Roopika Risam on decolonization; Isabel Cristina Restrepo Acevedo on interactive narratives; Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh on a “long maker table”; Elizabeth Ellcessor on glitch and disability; Amanda Phillips on videogames and social justice; and Elizabeth LaPensée on Indigenous game design. Part II. Design, Interface, Interaction: Design, interfaces, and interaction are too often considered additive, as if they are features layered over code just before release. Against such tendencies, this section exhibits the centrality of design to critical and creative inquiry with media. This part features Anne Balsamo on the cultural implications of design; Patrik Svensson on the design of space; Kari Kraus on speculative design; Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald on experience design and affective play; Mary Flanagan on critical play; Jessica Rajko on embodied thinking and wearables design; Kim Brillante Knight on wearable interfaces; Maureen Engel on deep mapping; and Beth Coleman on smart subjects in the Internet of Things. 4

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Part III. Mediation, Method, Materiality: Instead of treating media as containers that transmit content, this section of the Companion attends to various forms of mediation, affect, and materiality important to humanities research. Many of the authors also translate mediation into a method for inquiry. Here, mediation is not something delegated to instruments or overwritten by research techniques; it is what prompts interesting questions. This part features Tara Rodgers on sound; Shintaro Miyazaki on algorhythmics; Matthew Fuller on software studies; Nina Belojevic and Shaun Macpherson on physical computing; Steven E. Jones on the eversion; Anna Munster on networks; Mark Williams on television; Gregory Zinman on moving images; Virginia Kuhn on analytics; Paul Benzon on media archaeology; and Shannon Mattern on infrastructures. Part IV. Remediation, Data, Memory: In the humanities, how is media preserved? What role does it play in memory? When does it become “data”? And how does it change across formats over time? Moving between old and new media, the past and present, this section of the Companion addresses these questions and more. In the process, it builds on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s foundational text, Remediation (1998). This part features Kathleen Fitzpatrick on obsolescence and innovation; Jon Bath, Alyssa Arbuckle, Constance Crompton, Alex Christie, Ray Siemens, and the INKE Research Group on futures of the book; Howard Rambsy II on collaborative annotation; Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop on preserving born-digital texts; Timothy Murray on curating and preserving new media art; Victoria Szabo on apprehension through augmented reality; Bryan Carter on teaching Digital Africana Studies; Angel David Nieves on 3-D histories of South Africa; Kimberly Christen on Indigenous systems of knowledge and archival practices; Eric Hoyt, Tony Tran, Derek Long, Kit Hughes, and Kevin Ponto on applying scaled entity search to media history; Jeffrey Schnapp on the art of description; and Lauren F. Klein on data visualization and memory. Part V. Making, Programming, Hacking: Practices such as making, programming, and hacking intertwine in many ways with writing, ethnography, and even archival work. Underscoring the critical and creative dimensions of these practices, this section surveys noninstrumentalist approaches to code, platforms, and machines that privilege inquiry over proof. This part features Annette Vee on programming and literacy; Noah Wardrip-Fruin on expressive processing; Anastasia Salter on building intera