Technologies of History

My book Technologies of History: Visual Media, and the Eccentricity of the Past has just been published by Dartmouth Press and is due for release in March 2011. The book examines alternative forms of visual history as constructed through film, television and digital media over the past 30 years. Integrating theory, historical research and textual criticism, I explore issues of cultural memory, textuality and the impact of digital technologies on our understanding of the past, focusing on works that challenge the conventions and forms of traditional historiography. My goal is to broadly reconsider the range of practices that should be regarded as visual history, drawing special attention to voices and forms of practice that have been left out of mainstream historical discourse. Overall, I argue that the primary aspirations of visual history need not be limited to the production of illusionist narratives but may include the creation of new critical contexts in which viewers simultaneously interrogate the past and rethink the entangled relations of history, memory and media. As an intervention in prevailing discourses of media and history, my aim is to rethink our fundamental relationship to history in response to a diverse and rapidly evolving media landscape that includes online video, science fiction, games and digital networks.

In conjunction with the book, I have also created a rich-media interactive history project of the same title that expands upon a single case study drawn from the book. This project allows for an in-depth exploration of the extraordinary diverse ways the John F. Kennedy assassination has been mediated and reinterpreted, ranging from the Zapruder footage to machinima videos captured from the game JFK Reloaded. For me, these two projects represents an ideal conjunction of scholarly modes, with the book allowing for the in-depth development of a more or less conventional academic argument in linear form. However, the project examines a genuinely diverse range of media texts, so that no reader could reasonably be expected to be familiar with all of the objects under examination. By creating a digital companion to the written text, I was able to perform a different kind of textual analysis, not simply through illustration of examples but by juxtaposing different threads of the argument with related media clips. The experience of navigating this database of critical and mediated works allows the user to experience the argument from multiple perspectives and in varying degrees of specificity.

Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History

This chapter examines the impact of digital technologies on the writing of history, arguing that the narrative logics of the database and search engine have resulted in two divergent movements – one that seeks to articulate a “total” history that is encyclopedic in scope and rooted in relatively stable conceptions of historical epistemology; another that exploits digital technology’s potential for randomization and recombination in order to accommodate increasingly volatile visions of the past. At the opposing ends of this spectrum are the Shoah Foundation’s Survivors Project, a randomly accessible archive of over 100,000 hours of video testimonies by Holocaust survivors, and the Recombinant History Project’s Terminal Time, an artificial intelligence apparatus that constructs infinitely variable historical documentaries based on audience biases and beliefs. Although these two projects represent competing conceptions of historiography, both are enabled by the proliferation of digital information systems.

This book chapter is forthcoming in Interactive Frictions, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson (University of California Press).

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Regeneration: Multimedia Genres and Emerging Scholarship

This article presents an initial taxonomy of generic strategies and conventions that have emerged from the past ten years of practice-based research in multimedia pedagogy at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. These genres emerged organically across a wide variety of courses and disciplines at IML and have subsequently been incorporated into the curriculum of the undergraduate Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program. The taxonomy begins with a more detailed description of the five genres that have been deployed most frequently in the IML’s programs, followed by brief outlines of additional genres and their potential for deployment across a range of disciplinary contexts.

This article appeared in Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory Vol. 20, Fall 2010.

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Aporias of the Digital Avant-Garde

Abstract:
This article maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based digital media created between 1995 and 2005. These works are considered in relation to the historical avant-garde – particularly the Structural film movement of the 1960s and 70s – and analyzed as responses to a range of cultural concerns specific to the digital age. The analysis identifies movement toward two terminal points: first, a mode of remix-based montage inspired by open source programming communities and peer-to-peer networks; and second, the emergence of a mode of imaging termed the “digital analogue”, which foregrounds the material basis of digital production.

Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly vol 1, no 2 Summer 2007
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A Pedagogy for Original Synners

What will the class of 2020 expect when we (the teachers) meet them for the first time? What should we expect of them? This chapter uses the science fictional device of a time-traveling machine to frame these questions. The aim is to provide a context for examining currently under-recognized styles of learning emerging from contemporary game and remix cultures. We will examine a range of educational practices and suggest three key elements that support learning as a process of critical and creative synthesis: 1) open source scholarship, 2) social networking and 3) youth as cultural mediators.

Written with Anne Balsamo.

Published in Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected edited by Tara McPherson for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Learning (MIT Press 2007)

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The Past in Ruins: Postmodern Politics and the Fake History Film

It is a truism of postmodern culture that the difference between truth and fiction is not what it used to be. But in Jesse Lerner’s Ruins, this is more than an empty slogan, it’s a point of departure. Ruins is a self-proclaimed “fake documentary” that exposes the persistence of colonialist ideology in pre-hispanic histories of Mexico and calls into question the processes by which the disciplines of archaeology and art history are constituted. In Ruins, Lerner is as much concerned with historiography – the processes of writing history – as with history itself. The film mobilizes a multiplicity of historiographical and documentary strategies, ranging from archival footage compilation and hidden camera interviews to cutout animation and fictional recreation. Ruins puts forward a scathing revelation of the racist and colonialist underpinnings of ancient Mesoamerican history and offers in its place an enlightened critique and alternate vision of the region’s past.

Published in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alex Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (University of Minnesota Press 2006)

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History TV and Popular Memory

“A remarkable and misguided consensus exists among both historians and media critics regarding television’s unsuitability for the construction of history. Notwithstanding The History Channel’s promise to provide access to “All of History – All in One Place,” television viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers’ ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past.”

This essay examines an array of television shows, ranging from Star Trek and Quantum Leap to Meeting of Minds and You Are There, to argue against prevailing assumptions about TV and history and the culture of amnesia that television is supposed to produce.

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The Pleasure of the Index II

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s thoughtful post How To Index Your Own Book and Why I’ll Never Do It Again on ProfHacker sparked a very interesting debate over the merits of self-indexing vs. professional indexing of academic books. Coincidentally, her post appeared less than 24 hours after I had completed my own index and enthusiastically blogged about the pleasures I found in indexing. I responded to Kathleen’s post with a brief comment and link on ProfHacker, which prompted several responses by professional indexers that ranged from bemused condescension to reassertions of the value of proper indexing.

I realize now that I should have done a bit more to inoculate my characterization of indexing as a creative reinterpretation of a text against being perceived as naive or irresponsible. For me, indexing is clearly an extension of the fundamental information architecture of a book, similar to chapter breaks, sub-heads, tables of contents, image captioning and the ordering of a book’s contents, none of which is routinely turned over to professionals or software programs to be completed objectively. I would make a similar argument for the importance of typography and page design in a printed text, but that’s another discussion, and indeed we do routinely (and with mixed results) turn this part of the publishing process over to professionals. The index, however, is arguably the heart of a book’s information architecture and we know that the categories and presuppositions of knowledge systems are at least coextensive with, if not co-constitutive of, any scholarly endeavor. If an author is inclined to do so, thinking seriously about the index as a creative interface offers an important way of directly addressing the fantasy that readers (particularly in a digital age) follow a linear trajectory through a text from start to finish. I am not against professional indexing, which doubtless results in a more faithful rendering of a work’s contents and is probably appropriate for most books, it’s just that for me, this would constitute a lost opportunity to reinforce certain paths and associations in the text that I hope will be productive for readers.

I should say that much of my work for the past decade has been devoted to thinking about the potentials of scholarly interface, information design and what good can come of encouraging humanities scholars to explore the creative (not just practical) potentials of electronic publication. The Vectors Journal that I co-edit with Tara McPherson has been doing this with some success through collaboration between scholars and designers for the past few years and we have now moved on to developing a platform called Scalar that encourages an even deeper reconsideration of scholarly publication and electronic argumentation. Both of these projects invite scholars to rethink their work in terms of database structures and the combinatoric possibilities they enable. The relational and/or semantic structures of databases open extremely productive avenues of possibility for some scholars and some works of scholarship, though clearly not all. Given my immersion in database-driven scholarship, interface design and cultures of remix, it was impossible for me to approach indexing as anything other than a welcome bridge between traditional text publication and the electronic publishing platforms that now I largely prefer.

On alternative licensing and academic publication

I almost didn’t ask my editor if it would be possible to have Technologies of History published under a Creative Commons license. With many academic presses struggling economically and so much disinformation equating open publishing with communism or piracy (or both), such a request seemed ridiculously unlikely to be granted. To my surprise, the response of my editor at UPNE was curious and welcoming; he had heard of Creative Commons and knew that, although this book is about media and history, I am also deeply invested in issues of copyright and fair use. I wrote up an informal proposal, explaining that Creative Commons licensing did not mean giving the book away for free to everyone with an internet connection and why I believed it would ultimately help us to craft a more effective online marketing strategy. With the help of a former student who now works at Creative Commons, I also compiled a list of other academic presses and publications that have used CC licenses recently. He promised to run it by the suits and the law-talking guys at the press and, to my surprise, with just a few additional clarifications and reassurances (e.g., that the press could still collect royalties for parts of the book that might be republished in course readers, etc.), everyone was on board. Interestingly, initiating this conversation with my editor also sparked a discussion of ways to use CC licensing to reactivate older titles in their list that have stopped selling and, perhaps most importantly, it has made me feel even more invested as a partner in the marketing of the book, since I don’t need to feel like a total sellout for allowing a standard copyright notice to go in the front.

The Pleasure of the Index Part I

I have just completed the page proofs and indexing of my book Technologies of History, the final stages in a long and not entirely unpleasant process. Against the advice of my publisher, I created the index myself rather than hire a professional who is experienced and competent in such matters. Although this decision was initially driven by simple aversion to paying money for the service, I quickly recognized the process of indexing as coextensive with the creative and scholarly work in the digital realm that I have been focused on for most of the past decade. Specifically (obviously, now that I think about it), the process of indexing combines two of my core pleasures: interface design and remix. The index itself is, of course, an alternative interface, offering multiple points of entry and the possibility of non-linear navigation of the book’s contents. At the same time, it is a creative reinterpretation and visualization of the themes, people and works under discussion. Whereas pouring the book’s complete contents into the Wordle visualization engine brings mostly painful revelations (Am I really that obsessed with the JFK assassination? Should I try to find another word for “although”?), the distillation of the text according to concepts, sub-heads and page ranges suggests insights into my own writing patterns: seemingly fewer sustained discussions of complex ideas and primary texts than I would like; less precise parsing of terms such as “memory” than intended, etc.

On the other hand, I feel encouraged that the project has somehow never seemed boring or tedious, even as its arguments have grown overly familiar. Ironically, now that the book has finally been committed to its ultimate, linear form, I want nothing more than to subject it to the kind of dissection and recombination that is only possible via a fully digital, interactive database-driven platform (the kind of transformation to which Vectors has been devoted for the past six years). Is it any accident that the index, which is arguably the most “writerly” and hence most threatening aspect of text-based scholarship, should be politely relegated by academic convention to both the final stages of composition and the most extreme margins of the published book? For my next book, I will generate the index first and compel the written words and everything else to fall in line behind it.

Digital scholarship production: Vectors

My long-term commitment to creating and facilitating work that takes advantage of new venues for scholarly practice may be seen in my work on Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Along with Tara McPherson, I helped to conceive and found the journal, which launched its inaugural issue on the theme of Evidence in spring 2004. Vectors has published five subsequent issues devoted to themes of Mobility, Ephemera, Perception, Difference and Memory, which have received wide acclaim from an international, interdisciplinary readership. In addition to producing innovative scholarship that is designed to cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, Vectors is explicitly devoted to helping establish the viability of emerging forms of electronic publication. In my position as Co-Editor, I work as a Producer of individual works of digital scholarship, while also overseeing production of the journal as a whole. This experience has been enormously instructive and has convinced me of the importance of promoting and challenging the paradigm shifts currently under way in electronic publication.

On a personal level, Vectors has also provided me a remarkable opportunity to collaborate with international scholars, artists and designers from very diverse backgrounds and disciplines. Among the projects I have produced are Jennifer Terry’s Killer Entertainments (Fall 2007), Minoo Moallem’s Nation on the Move (Fall 2007), Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window Interactive (Spring 2007), Perry Hoberman and Donald Hoffman’s Malperception (Spring 2007), Trevor Paglen’s Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies (Spring 2007), Melanie Swalwell’s Cast-Offs From the Golden Age (Spring 2006), Julian Bleecker’s Wifi.Bedouin (Fall 2005) and Rebecca Emigh’s The Unmaking of Markets (Spring 2004). These works range from a study of economic development in 15th century Tuscany to a history of the video game industry in New Zealand. The scholars I have worked with come from fields as diverse as Sociology, Cognitive Psychology, Media Studies, Fine Arts, Engineering and Cultural Geography. As I was completing my own project for the Memory issue, I was struck by the extent to which my own thinking about scholarly practice has been transformed by the collision of research, design, art and communication that Vectors represents.

Introduction to Memory issue of Vectors

We stand, as always, on the brink of history: an African-American president-elect, an economy suffering the most precipitous free-fall since the Great Depression, a war in Iraq that shows no signs of abating – all historic events, to be sure. The question is not whether they will they be remembered, but how and by whom. Too often memory is conceived in binary terms that obscure its entangled relationship to social and cultural practices. In truth, memory is in a constant state of flux and contestation, continually being rescripted and regenerated to conform to the needs of any given present. Indeed, it would not be too much to argue that memory is what is at stake in the writing of history. As Michael Frisch claimed, “What matters is not so much the history that is placed before us, but rather what we are able to remember and what role that knowledge plays in our lives.” Yet memory continues to occupy a marginal space, somewhere between an evil twin and a neglected stepchild, in relation to History proper.

It has been nearly twenty years since Ronald Reagan delivered his farewell address to the nation after two terms in office. In his speech, Reagan warned against losing our collective memory, and with it, our sense of national identity. “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.” Reagan’s call for national pride and unity seemed anachronistic even 20 years ago but he pulled it off with an avuncular wink that would have been unimaginable from any of his successors. The world seemed closer to apocalypse in those days but it’s hard not to look around and feel that things are so very much worse now.

Like our own century’s George Bush, Reagan’s immediate successor had been in office only a short time when the bombardment of Iraq began. The elder Bush characterized the war in terms of healing the national psyche, “By God, we are going to kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” By “Vietnam Syndrome,” he meant the nation’s aversion to wars in far-off lands with dubious goals and no viable exit strategy, not the human toll of post-traumatic stress taken on a generation of this nation’s youth. Of course, the first Gulf War resulted in its own syndrome, a combination of chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, headaches, dizziness, and yes, memory loss. As the death toll continues to rise in Iraq, the illusion that we are simply watching a more expensive but less competently produced sequel have given way to painful reminders of Vietnam. The mendacious revenge narrative of 9/11, it seems, has finally worn thin. The war in Iraq has brought the Vietnam syndrome full-circle as those memories “lost” in the first Gulf War come back to the surface with a vengeance. A lesson, perhaps, that is worth remembering.

This issue of Vectors spins uneasily around the conjoined axis of memory and history without attempting the impossible – and arguably undesirable – task of reconciling the two. What draws the projects in this issue together is the interplay between objects of study that are both concrete and ephemeral and investigations that bleed across disciplinary bounds to explore the relevance of memory to questions of time, media, narrative, politics and space. More so than for many Vectors themes, Memory seems to have inspired a range of formal and methodological experiments that stretch our comfortable definitions of scholarly practice. This issue of the journal also includes a final project designed by Vectors‘ longtime Creative Director, Raegan Kelly, who worked with Mark Hansen on shi jian: time. Her very first project for Vectors was Alice Gambrell’s Stolen Time Archive, a prototype that that sought to prove the concept behind Vectors, and which has rarely been surpassed as an exemplar of what we hope to achieve in terms of depth, nuance and genuine collaboration between designer and scholar. Throughout her five-year association with Vectors, Raegan brought passion, intellect and rigor to every aspect of the design process. Her influence on Vectors has been incalculable and we will miss her in ways we do not yet even realize.

In a few weeks, another transition will happen in this country and with it, a new set of historical narratives will be written; memories will be conjured, contested, scripted and contained. Personal memories will grow entangled with cultural ones and the past will increasingly seem to explain the inevitability of the present. We will remind our now three-year-old daughter that the first time she watched television was the live broadcast of Obama’s acceptance speech. No matter how clearly etched this moment may be in her mind, it is not the event itself she will remember, but our retelling of it, inextricably woven with her own imagination and the narratives of anticipation – dare I say hope? – that we invest in a future that has the decency, at least for the moment, to be not yet written.

Launch Memory issue of Vectors