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 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/

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.

One year ago today we launched the April 16 Archive. Since then, the archive has expanded to include well over 1700 digital objects. To date we have recorded more than 23,000 visits to the site and over 170,000 page views. On the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, we recorded nearly a thousand visits to the site. In coming months, we will be adding many more objects related to the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, creating a new archive of thousands of newspaper front-pages related to the the events and aftermath of April 16, and upgrading to the newest version of the Omeka platform. In the meantime we hope you will visit the archive and share your files and stories. And if you would like assistance with archiving a large collection, please contact us at admin@april16archive.org.

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce the launch of Arts, Culture, and Civil Society (ACCS). This online archive of syllabi, e-prints, web links, and other digital resources is intended to serve as a starting point for students and scholars who are exploring the arts, culture, and civil society in their courses and/or research. These major topic areas are related to many important theoretical concerns for contemporary social criticism, political theory, and cultural policy-making. The collected materials span a wide range of disciplines, analytical frameworks, and locations. Topics range from the nature of current-day urban formations, nation-states, and local communities to the analysis of power, modernity, and discourse as related to the arts.

We are pleased to announce that our April 16 Archive now includes more than 1500 digital objects, moving us closer to our goal of 2000 objects by the summer of 2008. Recent additions include numerous materials related to the tragedy at NIU, including photos from from the February 18 candlelight vigil held here at Virginia Tech. We also continue to archive college media coverage of April 16, all of which is accessible via our Collections page. And for ongoing media coverage about the archive, visit our News page.

We are pleased to announce that the CDDC is providing web hosting and maintenance for Fifth-Estate-Online. This "International Journal of Radical Mass Media Criticism" publishes peer-reviewed academic articles, as well as commentaries, book reviews, and multimedia galleries. Since its launch in 2005, the journal and its contributors have been examining the role and power of mass media, both in historical and contemporary terms. Fifth-Estate-Online is a timely and welcome addition to our Center's holdings, and we invite everyone to visit - and perhaps even contribute to - this fine online journal.

The CDDC is pleased to serve as a consponsor for the second annual STS Frontiers Lecture. Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia will be speaking on "The Googlization of Everything: Life in an Algorithmic Age." The presentation is scheduled for 4 PM on Friday, February 1, 2008 in 3100 Torgersen Hall. The event is free and open to the public. For an abstract of the talk, see this news item from the university libraries or this poster from STS.