Centre for Media & Culture Research: Spring 2010 Events

Double Bill: Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles

Monday 8 March, 1pm, Lecture Theatre 4, K2 Building, Keyworth Street

This special event is open to all, but places are limited. To reserve a place please email Anna Reading, Head of the Centre for Media and Culture Research, at readinam@lsbu.ac.uk

How to study 1000000 Manga pages? Visualization methods for humanities and media studies

Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However, the use of visualization in humanities is still in its infancy. Based on the work in the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego over last two years, this paper presents a possible taxonomy of visualization techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research.

Software studies initiative: http://lab.softwarestudies.com / Examples of media visualizations: www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis

Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), hailed as ‘the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.’

Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Digital Media

Theorists of technology such as Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour and Adrian Mackenzie argue that the creation, transmission and use of technical objects emerge from a temporal ‘folding’ in which past, present and future intermingle. At stake is not only the nature of temporalities but also the complex ways in which humans and technical objects engage in technogenesis, that is, cycles of mutual co-evolution. These theories will be interrogated to propose a model whereby our contemporary technological landscapes interact with human cognition and biology on both conscious and unconscious levels. The model will then be explored through Steve Tomasula's electronic multi-modal novel, TOC, in which time, biology, and technology interpenetrate one another.

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Other recent books include My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently writing a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.

Wednesday 17 March, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Place and Space in Jazz

Elina Hytönen is a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and is spending this semester as a Visiting Research Fellow at LSBU. As a musicologist and a cultural researcher interested in jazz, she has paid special attention to the places in which jazz is being performed and what kinds of discussions are taking place around the issue. Through the use of observation and interviews her research also ponders how we could improve the musician’s work environment.

Wednesday 28 April, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Media, War and Terrorism Seminar Series

This seminar series addresses news and documentary representations of contemporary war and terrorism. Further seminars are planned for 2010—11.

Pockets of Resistance: British media, war, theory and the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Piers Robinson is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester and author of the influential book The CNN Effect (Routledge, 2002). He previously taught Political Communication in the School of Politics and Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool, and his publications include articles for the European Journal of Communication, Review of International Studies, and Media, War & Conflict. Piers is currently completing a two-year ESRC funded project on ‘News Media Performance and Media Management During the 2003 Iraq War’ – the topic of this paper.

Thursday 10 June, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Virginia Woolf: Walking the City

Margaret Kinsman is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Arts, Media & English at LSBU. Margaret’s main area of research interest is detective fiction: she is executive editor of CLUES: A Journal of Detection, a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and a member of the judges' panel for the Gold Dagger award for the best crime novel of the year. Taking Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’ as its point of departure, this session will incorporate a literary walk around Southwark.

Digital Gallery exhibition

MA student Wendy Couchman's exhibition, 'The dying body: kinetic art installations' is showing in the Digital Gallery, Borough Road building from 22--26 February.

Patrick Tarrant class recording

I have a recording from a talk Patrick gave about framing our projects (example was the elderly viewed by the young etc). I found it useful, if anyone wants a copy of the clips there are 4 short ones and I can email them to you. Just drop me an email.

Lorraine

lorraine@divine-creations.com

Blood Wedding

Drama & Performance and Theatre Practice students are staging a production of Blood Wedding in January, coinciding with the MA symposium.

MA students are offered a concessionary ticket price of £5.

The play is in Edric Hall Theatre, Borough Road, every evening from 19-22 January, at 7pm.

To get your ticket, phone 020 7815 5419 or email Gill Foster.

Centre for Media & Culture Research Autumn 2009 Events

Tuesday 27 October, 2pm, K806, Keyworth Street

Media, War and Terrorism Seminar Series

This seminar series addresses news and documentary representations of contemporary war and terrorism. Two further seminars are planned for the spring 2010 semester.

John Conroy is a BAFTA-nominated director and producer. He won the 2009 Broadcast Award for Best Multichannel Programme for Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, and was a 2009 BAFTA nominee for Best Factual Series. In 2008 John produced and directed the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, in a documentary for BBC2 on the dilemmas of war reporting, and directed ITV1’s Doctors and Nurses at War series. John’s presentation will focus on his current work preparing a new documentary series on the state of the war in Afghanistan.

Adania Shibli is a celebrated Palestinian novelist and short story writer, who has been described as ‘the most talked-about writer on the West Bank’. Adania has also recently completed a PhD at the University of East London. Her research focuses on Arab, Israeli, and European media discourses and visual representations of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the 9/11 attacks, and the ‘war on terror’. Her presentation, titled ‘Visual Terror’, will explore the issue of invisibility and its function within the visual representation of terror.

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Wednesday 4 November, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Berlin—Frankfurt—Istanbul: Turkish Hip-hop in Motion

Thomas Solomon is Associate Professor in the Grieg Academy – Department of Music, at the University of Bergen, Norway. His publications include articles in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and Yearbook for Traditional Music, as well numerous edited volumes. His current research focuses on popular musics in the Turkish diaspora in Europe, issues of gender in Turkish rap music, and musical imaginations of regional identity on the Turkish Black Sea coast. This paper explores the implications the experience of movement can have for feelings of belonging, arguing that multi-sited ethnography is an especially appropriate method for investigating these transnational communities of affect, following actors along the routes they take as they trace the itineraries of their identity.

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Wednesday 25 November, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Michigan’s Morphing Media: A US Test Case

Maria Marron is Professor and Chair of the Journalism Department at Central Michigan University, and is spending this semester as a Visiting Professor at LSBU where she is undertaking research on investigative journalism in the British Isles, examining attitudes toward investigative journalism, related levels of professionalism, and the effects of investigations on public policy.

Culture and the role of the state

The Media & Culture Research Group's next event is a talk by Munira Mirza, director of policy on Arts, Culture & the Creative Industries for the Mayor of London. Click here for futher details, or here if you're on Facebook. Details of all of this semester's events can be found here.

get your hands DIRT(Y)

here's a wiki with information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) - that means YOU! - conduct research more efficiently or creatively.

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki

In the citation and management tols section, http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/Citation+Management+Tools you'll find one of my favorite tools: zotero. It lives in your (firefox) browser and makes your reading and note-taking life so much fun!