The Digital Humanities: Culture Machine Call for Papers

Image from The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996)

Every so often, Film Studies For Free chooses to circulate important calls for papers for kindred-spirited projects. The CFP for the longstanding advocate of Open Access scholarship Culture Machine below falls absolutely into that category. The CFP says it welcomes "papers that ... suggest a new, somewhat different take on the relationship between the humanities and the digital". It seems to FSFF that some Audiovisual/Moving Image Studies material would be essential to that take, especially when it comes to thinking about  scholarship beyond the written text....

CALL FOR PAPERS: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES: BEYOND COMPUTING

Special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 12; http://www.culturemachine.net
edited by Federica Frabetti (Oxford Brookes University)

The emerging field of the Digital Humanities can broadly be understood as embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in processes of digital media production and practice (e.g. developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic literature, building online databases and wikis). Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methodologies drawn from Computer Science – image processing, data visualisation, network analysis – being used increasingly to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts.

Yet just as interesting as what Computer Science has to offer the humanities, surely, is the question of what the humanities have to offer Computer Science; and, beyond that, what the humanities themselves can bring to the understanding of the digital. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on Computer Science to develop their sense of what the Digital Humanities might be? Already in 1990 Mark Poster was arguing that ‘the relation to the computer remains one of misrecognition’ in the field of Computer Science, with the computer occupying ‘the position of the imaginary’ and being ‘inscribed with transcendent status’. If so, this has significant implications for any so-called ‘computational turn’ in the humanities. For on this basis Computer Science does not seem all that well-equipped to understand even itself and its own founding object, concepts and concerns, let alone help with those of the humanities.

In this special issue of Culture Machine we are therefore interested in investigating something that may initially appear to be a paradox: to what extent is it possible to envisage Digital Humanities that go beyond the disciplinary objects, affiliations, assumptions and methodological practices of computing and Computer Science?

At the same time the humanities are not without blindspots and elements of misrecognition of their own. Take the idea of the human. For all the radical interrogation of this concept over the last 100 years or so, not least in relation to technology, doesn’t the mode of research production in the humanities remain very much tied to that of the individualized, human author? (Isn’t this evident in different ways even in the work of such technology-conscious anti-humanist thinkers as Deleuze, Guattari, Kittler, Latour, Negri, Ranciere and Stiegler?)

So what are the implications and possibilities of ‘the digital beyond computing’ for the humanities and for some of the humanities’ own central or founding concepts, too? The human, and with it the human-ities; but also the subject, the author, the scholar, writing, the text, the book, the discipline, the university...

What would THAT kind of (reconfigured) Digital Humanities look like?

We welcome papers that address the above questions and that suggest a new, somewhat different take on the relationship between the humanities and the digital.

Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2010

Please submit your contributions by email to Federica Frabetti:
<kikka66it@yahoo.it>

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

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Established in 1999, CULTURE MACHINE http://www.culturemachine.net is a fully refereed, open-access journal of cultural studies and cultural theory. It has published work by established figures such as Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Henry Giroux, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber, but it is also open to publications by up-and-coming writers, from a variety of geopolitical locations.
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Gary Hall
Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
My website http://www.garyhall.info

Latest: 'Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control"', Culture Machine 11, 2010 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/384/407

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom - Transformative Works and Cultures' Call For Papers

FSFF ♥ Nyota Uhura, (Nyota meaning 'Star' & Uhura meaning 'Freedom') originally played by Nichelle Nichols, is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, and the 2009 film Star Trek.

Film Studies For Free likes to circulate calls for papers for online, Open Access, film and media studies related journals. So, here's a very worthwhile CFP for the very wonderful e-journal Transformative Works and Cultures. All relevant details are given below.

By the way, while putting together this post, FSFF came across another great, related, website: Fandom Research - very much worth exploring.

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom

Transformative Works and Cultures, an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011. Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

The deadline for completed submissions is October 1, 2010.

The editors would like to encourage pre-proposal abstracts and drafts for early feedback by March 1, 2010.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea).

Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

Complete information available in PDF form here:

US letter paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-us.p
df

A4 paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-a4.p
df

The announcement on TWC's site is here:

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/9

Wide Screen Call For Papers on Contemporary European Film and Media Production

Still and Trailer for the latest film from the current master of European film production and multimedia marketing -Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Spain, 2009)

Film Studies For Free is always happy to post Open-Access related, Film and Media Studies calls for papers. Below is one such call for an OA journal that FSFF has profiled and linked to before: Wide Screen, a peer-reviewed open access academic journal of screen studies that encompasses a multi-disciplinary approach and is devoted to the critical study of cinema and television from historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives.

Call For Paper - Special Issue of Wide Screen

European Producers and Production: Contemporary practices in film, television and multimedia environments

Edited by Professor Graham Roberts (Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University) and Dr Dorota Ostrowska (School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London)

About the Special Issue

This issue of Wide Screen is interested in the ways in which the contemporary media environment has changed the role and function of a producer. We would like to understand new models of production emerging as a result of new media environments (multimedia, game industry, internet). Does the multimedia environment lead to a greater specialisation on the part of particular producers in relation to the content they deliver, or does it result in producers extending their activity into a wider range of media and content? How do the profession, work, role and function of a producer differ depending on the national context in which they function? What is the impact of EU-wide policies on production practices in Europe?

Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Wide Screen invites articles on individual producers focusing on one of the following themes: co-productions, festival circuits (film, television and computer games markets), EU funding programmes and policies, education and training, freelancers vs in-house producers, networking, contracts, creativity, risk-taking, types of producers (creative, executive, line-producers), contracts, relationship with talent (directors, writers, actors), DVD releases (in particular special collectors editions)/DVD companies; production companies; awards and prizes; relationship with distribution and exhibition sector; producers of shorts, documentaries, fiction; sourcing content (book fairs, theatre productions); content ownership; piracy; private funding, sponsorship, equity versus public funding;

Deadline

Deadline for submission of full papers: 10 November, 2009

Guidelines and submission information

Articles should be between 4000 and 6000 words can be submitted using the online submission system: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Wide Screen adheres to a strict double blind review, which is defined here: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Any questions/enquiries should be sent to Dorota Ostrowska (D.Ostrowska@bbk.ac.uk) and Graham Roberts (G.Roberts@ljmu.ac.uk)