Center for Digital Discourse and Culture

The editorial staff of The New River, the first online journal devoted exclusively to digital writing and art, is pleased to announce the release of the Fall 2012 issue.

The New River was founded by Virginia Tech English professor Ed Falco in 1996. It has consistently tested the boundaries and rules of writing in a digital age. Since 2007, the journal has been managed and edited by the students of the Virginia Tech MFA Program in Creative Writing.

“Digital literature continues to evolve in surprising ways,” Managing Editor Andy Hobin said, “and we felt privileged to work with artists from this innovative genre. Few schools in the country offer their students such an opportunity.”

This issue includes works by Alan Bigelow, Serge Bouchardon, Loss Pequeño Glazier, and Matt Mullins.

With great sadness, we wish to share the news that an inaugural member of our advisory board, Mark Poster, Ph.D. (Emeritus, University of California, Irvine), has passed away.  

Mark was not only a member of our advisory board, but a friend and colleague that will be sorely missed.  His relationship with the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture began even before the Center began, with his keynote at the Learning On-Line Conference in 1998, the year the Center was founded.  He also keynoted Learning 2000.  He contributed to the Center in many ways throughout its existence, including contributing a chapter to our 10th anniversary book.

We will miss Professor Poster.

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is pleased to announce the launch of SPECTRA: The ASPECT Journal. This electronic, peer-reviewed journal is edited and published by the ASPECT (Alliance of Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) Program at Virginia Tech and hosted by the CDDC.

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture announces the publication of the e-book that commemorates our 10th anniversary in existence.

Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is a unique digital volume that is freely copyable, distributable, and downloadable. In it, leading authors confront questions surrounding major themes in digital academia and everyday lives.

This year, the CDDC along with several other groups at Virginia Tech sponsored Science and Technology Studies Doctoral Student Sumitra Nair at the OII SDP. Here is what she had to say about the experience:

Friday, 12 February, 2010
in
Torg 3100 at Virginia Tech

Prof. Zach Whalen will present:

game(text): videogames and textual aesthetics

Are videogames uniquely expressive artifacts, or are they simply new platforms for textual meaning? How do videogames mean, and in what ways are their meanings shaped by their affordances -- digital or otherwise? In this lecture, I investigate these questions by connecting one narrow vector for expression -- videogame typography -- with emerging critical conversations around the aesthetics of videogame hardware and software.

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is pleased to announce our Front Pages Collection, an archive of newspaper coverage of the April 16 tragedy. The hundreds of front pages posted on this site were given to the Center by a thoughtful individual in the aftermath of the shootings. Together, they capture a wide variety of responses to, and representations of, the events and aftermath of April 16 from around the world. The collection is organized by geographic location. It can be accessed at: http://april16archive.org/frontpages/

Torg 3100 @ 3pm Friday, February 20th.

Wendy Seltzer

will speak about:

The State of the Copyfight

If law's titles are to be believed, we're a decade into the "Digital
Millennium." That's meant 10 years in which weak encryption has barred
the hacking of copyright's "technical protection measures," in which
ISPs have responded to takedown notices claiming copyright infringement,
even where the use of copyrighted material was fair, but also a decade
of remixing and technologically fueled creativity. We'll examine the
state of the copyfight, through Chilling Effects, RIAA lawsuits, effects
on technical innovation, and prospects for copyright reform and
activism.

Sponsored by:
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
and
Learning Technologies

We are pleased to announce that our April 16 Archive has been successfully upgraded to the current version of the Omeka platform. Developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, Omeka is a next-generation online display platform for museums, historical societies, scholars, collectors, educators, and more. The April 16 Archive was running on a pre-release version of Omeka for more than a year, so we are pleased to be on the current version. In addition to improving the site layout and adding some new features, all of our nearly 1900 digital objects have been transferred to the new archive. We hope you will consider visiting the archive, and perhaps even contribute to it.

The spring 2008 issue of the New River Journal has recently been published. The Journal, the oldest literary journal devoted to digital writing, was last year selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its Internet Archive, a recognition both of the journal’s lasting value and a guarantee that all issues will be available for as long, at least, as the Library of Congress is in existence.

The New River Journal has for the last three semesters been student-edited under the guidance of Ed Falco, the journal’s founding editor (and recent NEA fellow). This semester marked the first time three students have been involved, with editing duties split between Carrie Meadows, Lauren Jensen, and Weston Cutter, each of whom are MFA students in the English Department at Virginia Tech.