William Warner, Professor of English, UCSB
Discussion of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
History of Reading Group Event
Thursday, April 23, 3:30 PM
UCSB, South Hall 2635

The Transliteracies History of Reading Group is pleased to announce a discussion of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, led by Bill Warner. Latour’s recent book both introduces Actor-Network-Theory and challenges contemporary assumptions about what we call the “social.” Professor Warner will lead a discussion of the following sections of Latour’s book:

Reassembling the Social

• “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency” (63-86)
• “First Move: Localizing the Global” (173-190)
• and for the highly motivated, the “Introduction” (1-17).

Refreshments will be served.

Following is a summary of Reassembling the Social from the Oxford University Press website: (more…)

Wednesday March 18, 4:00pm, UCSB McCune Conference Room HSSB 6020

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he was Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies from 2004 to 2008. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), which was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2003.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Renaissance Studies program and the IHC’s History of Material Texts RFG.

The History of Reading Group (a Transliteracies research working group) is hosting a one-day, interdisciplinary conference that will provide a forum for sharing recent research findings in the history of reading, with an eye toward investigating the technologies that shape reading as a social experience. The keynote speakers will be Adrian Johns (University of Chicago) and Elaine Treharne (Florida State University).

Sponsored by the University of California’s Transliteracies Project and the IHC’s History of Material Texts RFG.

Conference Schedule (more…)

Friday, February 20th, 2009: 12:00pm, South Hall 2635

Ramesh Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. He earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from  Stanford University.

(more…)

Thursday, February 19th, 2009: 3:30pm, South Hall 2635

Johanna Drucker, the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, is currently the Digital Humanities Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center for 2008-09 where she is working on a project titled, “Diagramming Interpretation.”

The UCSB Social Computing Group held a workshop on Friday May 30th on the present and future of social computing with guests Joan DiMicco (IBM Collaborative User Experience Group), Tad Hirsch (MIT Media Lab), Peter Kollock (Sociology Dept., UCLA), Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia, Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium), and Nancy van House (School of Information, UC Berkeley). The workshop is a small-scale, by-invitation-only event designed to facilitate brainstorming.

Workshop Schedule:

• 8:00—Breakfast


• 8:30 – 9:15—Introductions (led by: Alan Liu)


• 9:30 – 10:45—Conversation Roundtable 1 (co-leads: Joan DiMicco, Alan Liu)


• 11:00 – 12:00—Bluesky Group Presentation & Discussion (co-leads: Pablo Colapinto, Darren Hardy, Rama Hoetzlein)


• 12:00 – 1:00—Lunch


• 1:00 – 2:15—Conversation Roundtable 2 (co-leads: Peter Kollock, Tad
  Hirsch)


• 2:30 – 3:45—Conversation Roundtable 3 (co-leads: Nancy Van House, Larry Sanger)


• 4:00 – 5:00—Critique Session (led by Kevin Almeroth)

For more information, visit the UCSB Social Computing Workshop Wiki.

About the UCSB Social Computing Group:
The UCSB Social Computing Group includes faculty and graduate students from several UCSB centers, programs, and initiatives—including the Center for Information Technology & Society, the Transliteracies Project, the Credibility & Digital Media@UCSB Project, the Bren School, Computer Science, Media Arts & Technology, Education, and Sociology.

9 am – Welcome and Opening Remarks

• Rita Raley (.mov | .wmv)

  9:15 am – “On Reading Software”

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)

  9:45 am – Gaming

• Ayhan Aytes, “agoraXchange: Writing the next Constitution” (.mov | .wmv)
• Michael Treanor, “The Rhetoric of Newsgaming” (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)
• Irene Chien, “Reading Katamari Damacy.”
• William Huber, “Interface, Play and Performance in the Virtual Spaces of Final Fantasy XI” (.mov | .wmv)

• Discussion (.mov | .wmv)

  12:00 – 1:00 pm – Lunch

  1:00 – Text, Type, Interfaces

• Kim Knight, “Cognition and the Eclecticism of Interfaces” (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)
• Lisa Swanstrom, “Reading as Gathering” (.ppt | research report | .mov | .wmv)
• Kate Marshall, “New Reading Topographies” (.mov | .wmv)
• Brooke Belisle, “Reading Interfaces: NewsReader and Valence” (Valence research report | News Reader research report | .mov | .wmv)

• Discussion (.mov | .wmv)

  3:30 – 4:00 pm – Break

  4:00 pm – Review of Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface” (HASTAC report)

• Nicole Starosielski and Irene Chien (research paper | .mov | .wmv)

  4:30 pm – Presentation of Vectors Proposal “Unbound: An Alternative Genealogy of the Reading Interface”

• Ayhan Aytes, Brooke Belisle, Nicole Starosielski, Lisa Swanstrom (.pdf | .mov | .wmv)

  5:00 pm – “Transliteracies and Social Computing”

• Alan Liu (.mov | .wmv)

  5:30 pm – Vectors for Past, Present, and Future Research

• Group discussion led by Rita Raley and Nicole Starosielski (.mov | .wmv)

  7:00 pm – Dinner (off site)

1:00 PM — Greetings and brief self-introductions
2635 South Hall, UCSB
Bill Warner (English Department, UCSB).ppt

1:30 PM — 1st Session: Old Media/ New Media
Alison Walker (English Department, UCLA)(.ppt)
Joshua Neves (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)(.doc) (.pdf)
“History of Reading, a Media Studies Perspective” (.ppt) byLisa Gitelman (Program in Media Studies, Catholic University)

3:00 PM — 3:30 Break

3:30-4:20 PM — 2nd Session: Reading and Modernism and S/F
Robin Chin (English Department, UCSB) (.ppt)
Mark Goble (English Department, UC Irvine)
Lisa Swanstrom (Comparative Literature, UCSB) (.ppt) (.doc) (html)

4:20-5:30 PM — Tech Show-and-Tell on an “open laptop”
(Giles Bergel, Bill Warner, Lisa Swanstrom ….)

8:00 PM — Dinner at Opal Restaurant and Bar, 1325 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101; 805-966-9676

9:00-10:00 AM — Overview of Transliteracies (.ppt) by Alan Liu (English, UCSB)
30 minutes; discussion 30 minutes

10:00-11:20 AM — 3rd Session: Interfaces and the Augmentation of Reading
Bill Warner (English Department, UCSB)
Clifford Siskin (.jpg 1) & (.jpg 2) (English Department, New York University)

11:30-12:30 AM — Discussion of terminology: let’s define our terms (please); discussion led by Paula McDowell (.doc) (English Department, New York University)
Reading, interface, literacy, print culture, accommodation, augmentation, reading machine, interactivity, multi-media reading, etc.

12:30 — 2:00 Lunch break and brisk walk
Lunch at 1PM at Café Buenos Aires, 1316 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA; 805-963-0242

2:00-4:00 — 4th Session: History of the Book: Directions for Research
Carol Braun Pasternack (English Department, UCSB) (.ppt)
Giles Bergel (English Department, UCSB)
Jim Kearney (English Department, UCSB)
Paula McDowell (English Department, New York University)

4:00-4:15 — Coffee break

4:15-5:15 — Discussion, or where do we go from here?

5:15 — Pre-dinner walk about the town
7:30 PM — Dinner at Fresco at the Beach, 901 East Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara, CA 93103; 805.963.0111

*Important Note: Do not go to the Fresco’s on State Street! Our dinner reservations are for Fresco at the Beach!