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TEXT & IMAGE: FROM BOOK HISTORY TO "THE BOOK IS HISTORY"

Thursday , February 1, 2007 | 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM |135 Humanities Instructional Building
Friday, February 2, 2007 | 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM | Calit2, Room 1100 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology)

Co-sponsored by HumaniTech®, the PhD Program in Visual Studies, Network & Academic Computing Services (NACS), the Humanities Center, the International Center for Writing & Translation, the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, and the Departments of History and Comparative Literature.

This conference explores media history from movable type to the most recent debates about text and image, including the tensions between image and writing, from hieroglyphs to the web, from automatic type-setting to film title sequences, and from motion graphics in broadcast media to issues around images and writing in computer-mediated communication. It will include conversations on book history, library acquisition and archives, the Google library initiative, digital libraries, and copyright.

Reservations recommended, contact HumaniTech at (949) 824-3638 or epace@uci.edu

Download conference poster (PDF format).

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE Click on the "podcast" link to download and listen to these presentations (MP3 format)

Thursday, February 1 | 135 Humanities Instructional Building
9:00 Coffee

9:30 Welcome and Introductions podcast
Barbara Cohen, Director, HumaniTech®
Karen Lawrence, Dean, School of Humanities
Peter Krapp, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies

9:45 - 10:45 HISTORY
Introduction: Emily Rosenberg, UC Irvine podcast
Presenter: Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia, "Seeing History" podcast
Respondent: Sharon Block, UC Irvine podcast
Audience questions podcast

10:45 - 12:00 IMAGE AND TEXT
Introduction: Julia Lupton, UC Irvine podcast
Presenter: Robert Folkenflik, UC Irvine, "Anonymous Johnson" podcast
Presenter: Samuel Weber, Northwestern University, "Scripting the Image: Walter Benjamin's 'Seagulls'"" podcast
Audience questions podcast

12:00 - 1:30 Lunch Break

1:30 - 2:30 DESIGN
Introduction: Peter Krapp, UC Irvine podcast
Presenter: Peter Lunenfeld, Art Center College of Design, "The Mediawork Project: Visual Intellectuality for a Networked Age" podcast
Presenter: Anne Burdick, Art Center College of Design, "Composite Reading: Text and/as Image" podcast
Audience questions podcast

2:45 - 3:45 COLLECTIONS
Introduction: Lorelei Tanji, UC Irvine Libraries podcast
Presenter: Robin Chandler, California Digital Library, "University of California Libraries and the Implication of Mass Digitization" podcast
Presenter: Jackie Dooley, UC Irvine Libraries, "The Real Stuff: Why Original Artifacts Still Matter" podcast
Audience questions podcast

4:00 - 6:00 PUBLIC RECEPTION & EXHIBIT (Langson Library)
"Picture This: Five Centuries of Book Illustration" will be available to view during the reception. Light refreshments will be served.


Friday, February 2 | Calit2, Room 1100 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology)
9:00 Coffee

9:30 - 10:30 ARTIFACTS
Introduction : Barbara Cohen, HumaniTech® podcast
Presenter: Mark Dimunation, Library of Congress, "The Thingness of the Digital Object: A Curatorial Dilemma" podcast
Respondent: Jane O. Newman, UC Irvine, "Forged Under Fire: The Fate of Libraries in Times of War" podcast
Audience questions podcast

10:45 - 12:00 VISUAL WORLDS
Introduction : Peter Krapp, UC Irvine podcast
Presenter: Richard Burt, University of Florida, "Border Skirmishes: Weaving Around the Bayeux Tapestry and Cinema" podcast
Presenter: Donald Hoffman, UC Irvine, "The User-Interface Theory of Perception: Implications for the Evolution of Text and Image" podcast
Audience questions podcast

12:00 - 1:30 Lunch Break

1:30 - 2:45 SIGNATURES AND TYPOGRAPHY
Introduction: Julia Gelfand, UC Irvine Libraries podcast
Presenter: Jean-François Blanchette, UC Los Angeles, "Computer-aided hermeneutics: A proposal for preserving new media" podcast
Presenter: Peter Cho, UC Los Angeles, "Letter, Word, and Text: Explorations in Digital Typography" podcast
Audience questions podcast

3:00 - 5:00 FUTURE
Introduction: Stephen Franklin, UC Irvine podcast
Panel: Daniel J. Clancy, Google, "Indexing all the world's books: Future directions and challenges for Google Book Search" podcast
David S.H. Rosenthal, Stanford University Libraries, "If Books Are History, How Can the Future Have a Past?" podcast
Marc Davis, Yahoo! Inc., "From Text to Web: Mobile Social Media and the Reinvention of Writing" podcast
Ramesh Jain, UC Irvine, "Organic Books" podcast
Audience questions podcast

CLOSING REMARKS podcast
Barbara Cohen, Director, HumaniTech®
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DIRECTIONS AND PARKING

Download a PDF map of the UCI campus.
Humanities Instructional Building is building number 610 (orange area) on the campus map. Room 135 is located on the second floor. Parking is available in structure #4 on the corner of Campus Drive and West Peltason.

Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) is building number 325 (purple area) on the campus map. Room 1100 is located on the first floor, just off the lobby. Parking can be found in the Engineering/ICS Parking structure on East Peltason, or in lot 12B on the corner of East Peltason and S. Circle View.

Parking permits can be purchased at the entrance to the parking structures, or at the dispenser machines on East and West Peltason. Prices are $7/day for general and $9/day for reserved. Please note the dispenser machines require exact change and do not take $5 bills.
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PARTICIPANT ABSTRACTS AND BIOS

EDWARD L. AYERS, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, University of Virginia

"Seeing History"
The last few decades have presented us with new ways to make sense of our world. Novel technologies of data gathering and representation have suddenly augmented our ability to comprehend the world and our place in it, enabling us to see patterns locked away in numbers, texts, and landscapes. The news of the day increasingly comes to us in the form of graphics and maps. Geography has been revolutionized by satellites, global positioning systems, and geographic information systems; visualization has become a staple on computers, television screens, and the dashboards of cars.

This paper and presentation will show some efforts to take advantage of the possibilities held out by these new technologies of seeing to understand the complex social experiences of the past. It will use some established techniques, such as GIS, but also introduce some more unusual strategies as well, focusing on the years surrounding the most momentous event in American history: the emancipation of four million people in the American South during and after the Civil War. We will address what such strategies mean for books, both the atlas and the history written from dynamic images.

Edward Ayers has been involved in digital history since the early 1990s, when he conceived "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," which has won a number of prizes and become a staple in classrooms around the world. The book Ayers wrote from that digital archive in 2003, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, won the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize for distinguished writing in American history. In the summer of 2007 he will become president of the University of Richmond.


JEAN-FRANÇOIS BLANCHETTE, Assistant Professor of Information Studies, UC Los Angeles

"Computer-aided hermeneutics: A proposal for preserving new media"
Archivists and systems designers have made some significant progress over the past decade with regard to developing both the theories and the tools needed to ensure the preservation and evaluation of authentic electronic records. However, the problem of preserving complex digital objects (or “unstable” or “variable” media) increasingly confronts archivists, curators, artists, and multimedia producers as they face the inevitable impact of technological evolution on media art, databases, web sites, and other interactive digital works.

Computer-aided heremeutics (CAH) is a proposal to revisit the traditional archival distinction between preservation and access, whereby the former is understood as the business of protecting the physical integrity of an artifact, and the latter, as the business of making that artifact available (whether through reading rooms or information systems) to some audience. Rather, CAH proceeds from the understanding that preservation and access are the twin means by which artifacts are transmitted through time: preservation deals with the problem of transmitting physical objects through time, while access deals with the problem of transmitting the cultural competence necessary to “read” the physical objects so that they remain intelligible.

This paper outlines two project that have been developed for the PRESERVATION of complex media (electro-acoustic music from the IRCAM and videogames) in the framework of CAH. It contrasts those to some of the solutions that have been developed so far in the digital preservation community — migration, emulation, and scoring — and how each approach has attempted to re-conceptualize authenticity in the context of new media.

Jean-François Blanchette received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Université de Montréal in 1995 and 1997, and a Ph.D. in Social Studies of Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2002. Between 1999 and 2001, he was an invited researcher at the CNRS in Paris, where he investigated the definition of a new legal framework for recognizing the evidential value of electronic documents, Between 2002 and 2004, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the InterPARES project at SLAIS, University of British Columbia

Professor Blanchette's current research focuses on developing the theoretical and practical tools necessary for the long-term preservation of complex digital objects. He teaches and conducts professional training in the area of electronic records management, digital preservation, and social dimensions of computing.


SHARON BLOCK, Associate Professor of History, UC Irvine

My first book, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) focuses on forced heterosexual sex in British America from 1700 to 1820. Based on research in more than twenty-five archives, I combine social, cultural and legal histories to create a multi-dimensional picture of sexual violence. My qualitative and quantitative analyses of personal, institutional, and popular representations of coerced sex reveal how sexuality was crucial to the production of a New World.

My current project, "America the Beautiful: Consumption, Bodies, and the Transformation of National Desire," explores the history of physical beauty in the colonial eighteenth century. By combining histories of aesthetics, sexuality and material culture with cutting edge technological methodologies, "America the Beautiful" seeks to answer questions about the impact of attraction, sensation and desire before the nineteenth-century rise of sentimentality with its attendant emphasis on the connections between female morality and beauty.

I also have ongoing academic interests in technological applications for historical research and a commitment to diversity and equity issues in academia.

I teach courses on Colonial America, History of Sexuality, History of Crime, Race and Slavery, and Comparative Gender Frontiers. In all of my courses, students examine the relationships between institutional power structures and individual experiences to understand the multiple perspectives of various groups in a given time and place.


ANNE BURDICK, Chair, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design

"Composite Reading: Text and/as Image"
Exploring the role of materiality and typographic form in the construction of Literature and Knowledge, this presentation will look at three different projects in which images of texts serve as both writing strategy and historical record:

In the experimental text-dictionary, Wörterbuch der Fackel: Redensarten, the lexicographic functions of the dictionary are arranged around a "spine" of images from the pages of Karl Kraus's journal Die Fackel. In order to maintain the semantic integrity of Kraus's unique form of media critique, which relied on precise graphical arrangement, it was necessary to excerpt not only his words but their typographic form as well.

In the interface design for the Austrian Academy Corpus, an online database of 19th- and 20th-century German-language texts for the Austrian Academy of Sciences, images of pages appear side-by-side with their digital text counterparts. The project allows for a literal comparison of the differences between print and electronic textuality.

In the book design for Writing Machines, "visual-verbal quotations"—images of primary sources—are interwoven with author Katherine Hayles' critique of materiality and literature. The result is a book that can be "viewed and read by the skilled reader of a new, composite reading mode." (futureofthebook.com)

Anne Burdick collaborates with texts and writers to produce new modes of reading and writing. Despite winning the prestigious Leipzig Award for the “Most Beautiful Book in the World,” Anne does not call her practice book design. Rather, she designs spaces for writing in diverse media and environments, which sometimes includes books. Her projects are wide-ranging: poetry installations for the Getty Research Institute, unique approaches to lexicography with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, experimental fiction at the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9, and books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles. Anne is the Chair of the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, and Design Editor of Electronic Book Review.


RICHARD BURT, Professor of English, University of Florida

"Border Skirmishes: Weaving Around the Bayeux Tapestry and Cinema"
In a cartoon drawn by Richard Jolley, two American tourists are seen viewing the BayeuxTapestry in a museum, and the husband remarks to his wife “The storyboard was great . . .why did they never make the movie?” The punchline depends, of course, on our appreciating the differences between the Tapestry and film, high French fine arts culture and low American film culture, naive and knowing viewers, the past and the present. The tourists are far from being alone, however, in comparing the Tapestry to modern visual media. Scholars have frequently drawn analogies between the Bayeux Tapestry and animated cartoon, storyboard, screenplay, silent film, sound film, and digital hypertext and even hypertextile.” M. J. Verrier calls it a “propaganda film” (2). Marie-Therese Poncet includes a screenplay of the “film” and divides the Tapestry into seventy-three shots (65). Michel Parisse discusses the Tapestry in terms of montage sequences, mise-en-scene, flashbacks, and jump cuts, and he divides the Tapestry into sections that make up a screenplay (53). Similarly, Suzanne Lewis refers to sequences, scenes, cuts, fast cutaways, and fade shots in the Tapestry (11-12). More broadly, Francois Amy de la Breteque sees a kind of reciprocal equivalence between the Bayeux Tapestry and film: “One may consider that, in the minds of many of our contemporaries, the embroidery [Bayeux Tapestry] represents a kind of medieval equivalent of cinema . . . . The embroidery was a form of ‘precinema’” (144).

Perhaps coincidentally, not long after scholars began to draw an analogy between the Bayeux Tapestry and film, the Tapestry itself began to appear in film. It has been cited in at least nine widely varied films: The Vikings (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1958), El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, 1961), Is Paris Burning? (dir. Rene Clement, 1966), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1971), La Chanson de Roland (dir. Frank Cassenti, 1978), Hamlet (dir. Franco Zeffirelli, 1990), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (dir. Kevin Reynolds, 1991), and a made-for-television film, Blackadder: Back and Forth (dir. Paul Weiland,1999). The Bayeux Tapestry appears in cinema most frequently in the opening and end title sequences and takes a variety of forms, including animated cartoon (The Vikings), film stills (Chanson de Roland), and film montage (Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves). TheTapestry is not typically cited “faithfully,” as it were, but is often restitched and re-embroidered. The Bayeux Tapestry scenes shown in El Cid and Hamlet are hybrids of scenes in the Tapestry. In opening title sequences, the Tapestry is made into a film prologue, and the Tapestry also sometimes shows up in scenes of the film. In each case, the Tapestry is put into the service of another narrative, though El Cid and Le Chanson de Roland echo a generic link, noted by Bayeux Tapestry scholars, between the epic poems that the two films adapt and the Bayeux Tapestry. When adapted as a film prologue, the Tapestry frames the film and always tells another story, so it always serves as an analogue. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, for example, rehistoricizes and retells scenes of the invasion of England in the Bayeux Tapestry as the story of English soldiers leaving England for the Crusades. Cinematic citations put the medieval past and film into dialogue in ways that offers a more complex model for considering analogies between both the medieval past and film. The preservation and transmission of the genuine Bayeux Tapestry involves alterations, restorations, simulations, facsimiles, print reproductions, and a CD-ROM edition that are analogous to its adaptation and transmission on film. The transmission and storage of both the Bayeux Tapestry and films that cite it involve a particular kind of “transmissive interaction,” in Jerome McGann’s terms, namely, an unrolling that is also an unraveling. This unrolling/unraveling is both damaging and reparative to the Tapestry or film’s visibility, both iconoclastic and iconic: on the one hand, unraveling involves illegibility, obscurity, and invisibility, vulnerability, danger, injury, tearing, grease staining, tear drops, scratches, breaks, split ends, lost panels or frames, and frayed edges; and, on the other, unraveling involves legibility and visibility, cleaning, sewing, patches, splices, and in the case of DVDs, restoration.


ROBIN CHANDLER, Director of Data Acquisitions, California Digital Library

"University of California Libraries and the Implications of Mass Digitization"
During 2006, the University of California Libraries became contributors and partners in two significant mass digitization projects: the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and Google Book Search. Supporting the University's educational mission, these digitization projects will greatly expand our ability to give scholars and the public access to the kinds of information and ideas that drive scholarly innovation, public knowledge and discourse. This paper will investigate the potential impact of mass digitization projects on users and the concrete realities facing libraries managing these efforts. The academic enterprise is primarily about discovery, and mass digitization is one of many catalysts fundamentally changing in how information is discovered and delivered to users. It is the dawn of the embedded library.


PETER CHO, Design | Media Arts, UC Los Angeles and Partner, Agency: Collective

"Letter, Word, and Text: Explorations in Digital Typography"
This series of computationally-based experiments deals with issues surrounding how we see and read typography in an increasingly digitally-mediated world. Among these are: the secret lives of letterforms, the relationship between spoken and written language, and the visual representations of text in the virtual 3D space of the computer display.

Peter Cho is a Los Angeles-based media artist and designer, and a co-founder and partner of Agency:Collective, a collaborative design studio. Cho holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the UCLA Design | Media Arts department, where his work dealt with issues of language, writing, and meaning and a Master of Science degree from the MIT Media Lab, where his design research explored custom models for typography in time-based and reactive media. He has received honors for his work from Ars Electronica, Tokyo Type Directors Club, and ID Magazine. His interests include issues of electronic textuality, narrative, and mapping.


DANIEL J. CLANCY, Engineering Director, Google Book Search Project

"Indexing all the world's books: Future directions and challenges for Google Book Search"
Google Book Search is an ambitious project started by Google to realize a dream that the founders of Google have had since they were students at Stanford. This dream is to make all the worlds information fully searchable to create a universal digital library. There are of course numerous technical challenges that must be addressed to accomplish this goal. The first one is the ability to scan the books in a scalable manner. Once the books have become available, however, there is a rich set of research challenges that must be addressed to organize this information. In this talk, I will talk about some of the challenges already addressed and will discuss future directions for Google Book search and the research challenges that exist for the field of Digital Libraries.

Dr. Daniel J. Clancy, PhD, is the Engineering Director for Google Book Search. The goal of the Google Book Search project is to digitize the world’s books and make them searchable online. Google is working with both publishers and libraries as part of this project. Prior to coming to Google in January 2005, Dr. Clancy was the Director of the Exploration Technologies Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. The Directorate supports over 700 people performing both basic and applied research in a diverse range of technology areas intended to enable both robotic and human exploration missions. Technology areas include Intelligent Systems, High-end Computing, Human-Centered Systems, Bio/Nanotechnology, Entry Systems and others. In this role, Dr. Clancy played numerous roles at the agency level including participating in the team that developed the agency’s plan to return men to the Moon and eventually Mars. Dr. Clancy received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in artificial intelligence. While in school, Dr. Clancy also worked at Trilogy Corporation, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Xerox Webster Research center. Dr. Clancy received a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University in 1985 in computer science and theatre.


BARBARA COHEN, Director HumaniTech®, UC Irvine

Barbara Cohen is Director of HumaniTech® in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine. Her most recent publications include Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), which she co-edited. She has also written a variety of articles on the interface between Humanities and technology. Her educational background is in French literature, with technology an interest that grew out of her work at UCI as editor for J. Hillis Miller.


MARC DAVIS, Social Media Guru, Yahoo! Inc.

“From Text to Web: Mobile Social Media and the Reinvention of Writing”
The emerging sociotechnical ecosystem of billons of cameraphones around the world is enabling new forms of “writing” which embody and extend poststructuralist conceptions of “text”. By recording and correlating a variety of explicit and implicit human behaviors that were heretofore invisible and impermanent, networked mobile media computing will redefine what we think of as language, writing, the book, text, and the historical record. In a world where explicit and implicit human activity on the scale of billions of people (their presence, attention, and relationships, and their media production, reception, description, and sharing) can be computationally represented, processed, and visualized, we are creating a new collectively authored and read “book of life”—a text which in the words of Roland Barthes is a “social space which coincides only with a practice of writing.”

Marc Davis' work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of digital media systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people to produce, share, and remix media. From 2002 to 2005, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research and co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. At Garage Cinema Research, Marc Davis and his students developed and deployed Mobile Media Metadata (MMM) prototypes for context-aware mobile media tagging and sharing and technologies for video capture, tagging, sharing, and remixing. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to found Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and in 2006, joined Yahoo! as Social Media Guru to formulate strategy and take action to invent and realize the future of social media and mobile media. Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.


MARK DIMUNATION, Chief, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

"The Thingness of the Digital Object: A Curatorial Dilemma"
Mark Dimunation was appointed Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress in March 1998. As Chief, Mr. Dimunation is responsible for the development and management of the Rare Book Collection, the largest collection of rare books in North America. He acquires materials, develops programs of lectures and presentations, and oversees the operations of the Division. He came to the Library of Congress from Cornell University, where he had served since 1991 as Curator of Rare Books and Associate Director for Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and taught in the English Department. He has lectured extensively about book collections and has authored a number of exhibition catalogs, including a recent study of Andrew Dickson White as a nineteenth-century book collector. Mr. Dimunation is a member of the Grolier Club, IFLA, and the ESTC Board and is currently Chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL/ALA.


JACKIE DOOLEY, Head of Special Collections/Archives, UC Irvine Libraries

"The Real Stuff: Why Original Artifacts Still Matter
Despite the importance of widespread digitization of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and other primary source materials found in libraries and archives in order to vastly improve ease of access to these materials, public collections of the "real stuff" remain critical for study and research in the Humanities. The arguments include the unfeasibility of digitizing all such materials; the significance of originals as objects of research in and of themselves; the power they hold to inspire students toward their own research, and the importance of attracting donors of privately-held materials in order to include them in the cadre of individuals who are committed to preserving our cultural
heritage and making it publicly available.

Jackie Dooley has been Head of Special Collections and Archives at the UC Irvine Libraries since 1995, managing UCI's collections of distinction, including the Critical Theory Archive, the Southeast Asian Archive, the Regional History Collection, Dance and Performing Arts Collection, the University Archives, papers of distinguished UCI faculty, and the general rare book collections. She also oversees the Libraries' program of exhibitions.

Her previous positions were at the Getty Research Institute, UC San Diego, and the Library of Congress, where she was a cataloger of historical prints and photographs. She also worked for the Library of Congress in Venice, California, to prepare a catalog of the works of Charles and Ray Eames in preparation for transfer of their archives to the Library.

Her distinctions include election as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, a member of the Grolier Club, and the rank of Distinguished Librarian in the University of California. She has held numerous leadership positions within the Society of American Archivists and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and
Research Libraries. She was one of the founders of the pioneering project that developed into the Online Archive of California, which has become an indispenable resource for access to archival collections throughout California. She is recognized internationally for her expertise in developing standards for cataloging rare books, archives, and visual
materials.

ROBERT FOLKENFLIK, Professor Emeritus of English, UC Irvine

"Anonymous Johnson"
This paper examines the case of Samuel Johnson as a way of showing the status and implications of anonymous and pseudonymous authorship in the early modern period and how they differ from our own.

Robert Folkenflik has published several books on narrative: Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Cornell University Press) and The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford University Press). He has also published The English Hero, 1660-1800 (University of Delaware Press) and editions of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (Joseph Simon), Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves (University of Georgia Press), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Modern Library), as well as over forty essays, mostly on the eighteenth century. He joined the UCI faculty in 1975 and served as General Editor of Irvine Studies in the Humanities for many years. He has held fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, Yale Center for British Art, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio), and an Exchange Fellowship from the British Academy. His essay “Wolfgang Iser’s Eighteenth Century,” appears in the latest issue of Poetics Today, 27 (2006), 675-91. He served as Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz in Professor Iser’s place in 1990.


STEPHEN D. FRANKLIN, Director for Academic Outreach, Network and Academic Computing Services, UC Irvine

Stephen D. Franklin <franklin@uci.edu> is Director for Academic Outreach in UC Irvine's Network & Academic Computing Services and a Lecturer in Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science. A career-long UCI employee, he has served in many different capacities: teaching, research and research support, developing
software, and managing various groups. An early (1993) advocate of the Web, in 1995 he coordinated the campus collaboration which established Irvine's Electronic Educational Environment. He serves on various system-wide coordinating groups and is UC Irvine's "Designated Agent" for handling copyright infringement allegations under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. His doctorate is in Mathematics, and he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Association for Computing Machinery. Steve shares his expertise in math and somputer science with his passion for the humanities.


JULIA GELFAND, Applied Sciences and Engineering Librarian, UC Irvine Libraries

My extracurricular interests are centered around collection development and scholarly publishing activities. The changes in scholarly publishing due to technology and electronic publishing have redefined ways that libraries acquire and license information. I am interested in a variety of permutations about this for scholarly communications, and byproducts such as the redefinition of grey literature. I am also interested in issues related to higher education and the formation and role of academic consortia in growing library shared resources and eScholarship programs.


DONALD D. HOFFMAN, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine

"The User-Interface Theory of Perception: Implications for the Evolution of Text and Image"
This talk is a highly illustrated and accessible introduction to human visual intelligence, informed by the latest breakthroughs in vision research. Perhaps the most surprising insight that has emerged from vision research is this: Vision is not merely a matter of passive perception, it is an intelligent process of active construction. What you see is, invariably, what your visual intelligence constructs. Just as scientists intelligently construct useful theories based on experimental evidence, so your visual system intelligently constructs useful visual worlds based on images at the eyes. The main difference is that the constructions of scientists are done consciously, but those of your visual intelligence are done, for the most part, unconsciously.

The principles by which your visual intelligence constructs visual worlds were shaped by evolution, not to give truth but to allow members of homo sapiens to survive long enough to reproduce. Our perceptual worlds, like the perceptual worlds of, say, the cockroach, serve as a species-specific user interface that effectively guide our behavior in our particular niche. Information that is formatted to properly engage our species-specific user interface will be more readily accepted and understood. This places a strong constraint on the future evolution of both text and image in human culture.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 70 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, in 1983, where he is now a professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, and logic and philosophy of science. He received the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career contributions to the study of visual perception, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.


RAMESH JAIN, Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine

"Organic Books"
Books have played a very significant role in advancement of civilization for a long time. The current form of book has been evolving for more than 2000 years. Wikipedia says “A book is a collection of paper, parchment or other material with text, pictures, or both written on them, bound together along one edge, usually within covers.” Advances in technology are resulting in disruptive changes to the form of book that we all have so dearly loved, admired, and worshipped. From a physical, well defined, solid form, it seems to be evolving into an organic, live, and amorphous form in which depending on the context and person it may adopt different forms. This change is already here and we have already started using it. This new form of book offers exciting possibilities – interactivity, multimodal, and evolving books that will cover a topic of interest in richer and more complete way. We are definitely at an inflexion point in our efforts to grasp knowledge. Technology drew us to objectification of knowledge in the past; now it is encouraging us to eventification of knowledge. And this is exciting.


PETER KRAPP, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine

Peter Krapp is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. His research interests include media history, critical theory, and cultural memory. He offers classes on digital culture, film title sequences, machinima and motion graphics, media theory, archives, secrecy, computer games, and vampires. He also contributes to UCI graduate programs in Visual Studies and in Art-Computing-Engineering (ACE), and is affiliated with the Department of Comparative Literature. He is the author of Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (University of Minnesota Press 2004) and editor of Medium Cool (Duke University Press 2002: special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly).

PETER LUNENFELD, Professor, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design

"The Mediawork Project: Visual Intellectuality for a Networked Age"
We are witnessing the wide-scale emergence of visual intellectuals - people simultaneously making, pondering, and commenting on culture, but in a way that doesn't always begin with words. We all understand that digital tools and information technology networks contribute to this trend, but the big question is how to develop media design strategies to make the dissemination of critical thinking and informed opinion both more seductive and more rigorous.

The MIT Press’s Mediawork Pamphlets offer one model in answer to this big question. They explore art, literature, design, music, and architecture in the context of emergent technologies and rapid economic and social change and can be described as being somewhere in-between 'zines for grown-ups and transmedia theoretical fetish objects. The pamphlets meld writing and design, text and image.

The Mediawork WebTakes at http://www.mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork embed these books in a rich hypercontexual and interactive environments, modeling meaningful responses to meaningful content. The first Mediawork Book, USER: InfoTechnoDemo (2005) by Editorial Director of the Mediawork project Peter Lunenfeld, visuals by Mieke Gerritzen pushes many of the issues raised by the project to a new level. USER offers a reading experience that is more vivid than most: Gerritzen's bold visuals create a book that is also a designed object -- a compact matrix of words and image as potent as a smart bomb. The Mediawork project aims to transform private theory into public discourse, visual experimentation into cultural intervention.

Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. He writes about art, design, film, and the broader culture in an era of computational ubiquity, studies that fall under the emerging rubric of Digital Humanities. His books include The Digital Dialectic, Snap to Grid, and USER: InfoTechnoDemo. His forthcoming book will be titled The War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine. He is the editorial director of the award-winning Mediawork series for the MIT Press.


JULIA LUPTON, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with a joint appointment in Education. Her most recent book, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. She is also author of Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996) and co-author with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell, 1992).

Lupton is the founding director of Humanities Out There, an educational partnership between UCI’s School of Humanities and the Santa Ana Unified School District. By involving scholars, teachers, and students from several institutions in collaborative teaching and research, HOT aims to transform educational practices and intellectual horizons for all participants. In 2006, she received the Ernest A. Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach, awarded annually by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE).

At UCI, Lupton is a frequent contributor to the Humanities Core Course, which serves 1200 freshmen each year.


JANE O. NEWMAN, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

"Forged Under Fire: The Fate of Libraries in Times of War"
Jane Newman's interests are in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, German, Italian and neo-Latin literature; history of the discipline of Comparative Literature; theories and methods of Comparative Literature; new historicism and cultural materialism; Cold War Renaissance and Baroque Studies. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1998-99, and a Humboldt Fellow, 1991-92 and 2004. She is the author of Pastoral Conventions (1990) and The Intervention of Philology (2000), and is currently completing Benjamin's Library: The Afterlives of the Baroque. She is the author of essays on Theocritus, Virgil, Luther, Shakespeare, Opitz, and Lohenstein; the history of printing; race in/and the Renaissance; race and Renaissance legal theory; drama and the history of the stage; early modern science; Simone de Beauvoir and Descartes; Cold War Renaissance Studies; and Erich Auerbach and Edward Said. Newman's additional interests include: Gender, Politics, and Performance in Classical Greek Tragedy; The Latent Pasts of Antiquity in the Early Modern and Post-Modern; From Manuscript to Hyper-Text: A Comparative History of Text Production; Historiography of Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.

EMILY ROSENBERG, Professor of History, UC Irvine

My research and teaching interests focus on the history of U.S. economic and cultural expansion from the late nineteenth century to the present. I am also interested in U.S. foreign policy, especially as it assisted the remarkable expansionism that turned the United States into a global superpower. Two of my books, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 and Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 deal with this concern.

Within the broad area that includes the history of U.S. international policies and Americans’ various relationships to people and countries in the rest of the world, my research is especially attentive to issues of cultural construction and contestation. Many of my articles, for example, explore how discourses of gender operate in international relations. Moreover, my most recent book examined various constructions of the most prominent foreign policy symbol in our history: the attack on Pearl Harbor. In A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor and American Memory, (which has been translated into Japanese), I examine Pearl Harbor as historical memory and the way in which it anchors diverse narratives and “lessons” about the past.

Among other professional activities, I have served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR); been a Board member of the Organization of American Historians; and co-edit, with Gilbert Joseph, the “American Encounters, Global Interactions” book series for Duke University Press.

DAVID S.H. ROSENTHAL, Chief Scientist, LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries

"If Books Are History, How Can The Future Have A Past?"
In one sense books are history because as a medium for expressing ideas and adding to our culture's heritage the Web offers far more to both creators and readers. And in another sense, books are history because for a long time they have been the most survivable form in which today's knowledge can be transmitted to future readers. Books are a robust and easy-to-store package filled with a remarkably durable and somewhat tamper-proof storage medium that is easy to replicate and distribute. Bits are alarmingly vulnerable to a far wider range of threats than books. What are these threats and vulnerabilities, what is being done to defend against them, and how well are the defenses likely to work?

Dr. David Rosenthal is investigating peer-to-peer techniques for fault and attack tolerance in the LOCKSS program, and is also responsible for the OpenBSD-based network appliance technology that most LOCKSS peers use. The LOCKSS program is aimed at long-term preservation of the web editions of academic journals, such as those published by Stanford's Highwire Press.

David joined Sun Microsystems in 1985 from the Andrew project at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he had worked on window systems with James Gosling. He worked on window systems with James at Sun, and was part of the teams which developed both NeWS and the X Window System, now the open-source standard. He also worked on graphics hardware, the operating system kernel, and on system and network administration.

David left Sun in 1993 to be Chief Scientist and employee #4 at Nvidia, now the leading supplier of high-performance graphics chips for the PC industry. He worked on I/O architecture. In 1996 he joined Vitria Technology, now a leading supplier of e-business infrastructure technology. He worked on reliable multicast protocols and on testing industrial-strength software. After starting the LOCKSS program at Stanford with NSF funding, from 1999 - 2002 he worked on it at Sun Labs. From 2002 he has been working on it at Stanford Library.

David received an MA degree from Trinity College, Cambridge and a Ph. D. from Imperial College, London. He is the author of several technical publications and holds 23 patents.


LORELEI TANJI, Fine Arts Librarian, UC Irvine Libraries


SAMUEL WEBER, Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Northwestern University

"Scripting the Image: Walter Benjamin's 'Seagulls'"
The Image in Walter Benjamin's writings takes on a role that is somewhat unusual in critical prose, but very familiar in poetry: instead of illustrating or elucidating, in the manner of a perception, it interrupts, confounds and complicates the discursive flow. After a brief discussion of the relation of image to concept and constellation in Benjamin's work, one very striking verbal image will be explored: that of sea-gulls; their circular, recurrent flight sets the scene--or scenario--in which the observer plays an enigmatic but perhaps decisive part.

Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern and co-director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory.

Professor Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of, and introduction to Theodor Adorno's most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a “dramaturge” in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium, to be published in 2005 by Fordham University Press. He is also completing work on two other books: Targets of Opportunity and Benjamin’s-abilities.

Professor Weber began teaching at the Free University of Berlin and subsequently taught at the Johns Hopkins University and UCLA before coming to Northwestern in 2001.