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Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
This chapter maps out the landscape of the current moment of anti-computing through an informal experiment in a form of distant reading drawing on digital humanities methods and approaches. Using a machine-recommendation system, it identifies over sixty publications linked to anti-computing themes which together point to the outlines of the contemporary anti-computing moment. This is explored for itself, but is also considered in relation to earlier forms, and specifically in relation to the earlier and more general taxonomy – enabling identification of new categories of dissent, new elisions and dominant forms, and the recurrence of older tropes. Identifying accelerating tendencies to respond to anxiety and hostility to computational saturation with personal ‘cures’ rather than with demands for political or public responses, it then returns to consideration of what might constitute a fully critical mode of anti-computing, this latter constituting the conclusion of the work.
Reorienting the narrative of digital media studies to incorporate the medieval, Participatory reading in late-medieval England traces affinities between digital and medieval media to explore how participation defined reading practices and shaped relations between writers and readers in England’s literary culture from the late-fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries. Traditionally, print operates as the comparative touchstone of both medieval and digital media, but Participatory reading argues that the latter share more in common with each other than either does with print. Working on the borders of digital humanities, medieval cultural studies, and the history of the book, Participatory reading draws on well-known and little-studied works ranging from Chaucer to banqueting poems and wall-texts to demonstrate how medieval writers and readers engaged with practices familiar in digital media today, from crowd-sourced editing to nonlinear apprehension to mobility, temporality, and forensic materiality illuminate. Writers turned to these practices in order to both elicit and control readers’ engagement with their works in ways that would benefit the writers’ reputations along with the transmission and interpretation of their texts, while readers pursued their own agendas—which could conflict with or set aside writers’ attempts to frame readers’ work. The interactions that gather around participatory reading practices reflect concerns about authority, literacy, and media formats, before and after the introduction of print. Participatory reading is of interest to students and scholars of medieval literature, book, and reading history, in addition to those interested in the long history of media studies.
engagements with revived forms of (new) materialism. The computational turn (see Wing, 2006 , Lanier, 2010 , Berry, 2011 ), traditional digital humanities, software, code, or protocol studies, objected-orientated philosophy (OOO), represent very different critical/post-critical orientations – but all resonate sympathetically with the media-archaeological suspicion of the utility of cultural studies approaches to the study of media (Bassett, 2020 ). Against this I make a case for (a form of) media archaeology as (a form of) cultural studies, seeing
reconstruction of the virtual library – the books we know Beckett had read, based on information in notebooks and letters, but which are no longer extant. The aim of such a digital CWE is to respect the complexity of Beckett's oeuvre, without abandoning readers in the chaos of manuscripts. Digital media provide us with the means to design the tools that enable readers to explore this complexity, characterised by its dialectic of completion and incompletion. Within digital humanities, both genetic criticism and textual scholarship are exceptional in that
and theoretical approaches to interface’. Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1 (2013), www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html, paragraph 23. 9 For discussion on how texts work in ways that seek to engage readers’ responses, emotional and intellectual, see Paul Alpers, ‘Mode in narrative poetry’, in To tell a story: narrative theory and practice, ed. Robert M. Adams (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library, 1973), 25–56. 10 See Clark and Sheingorn, ‘Performative reading’ and ‘Visible words’; for Brantley, see Reading in the wilderness. Brantley
that is significantly more valuable than the ground nuts that many of these workers’ families farm in Ghana’s northern region. For me, these e-waste worker images are not simply additives to the ethnographic method, but instead represent “an emerging platform for collecting, exploring, and expressing ethnographic materials” (Hsu 2014, 1). Many, if not most, ethnographies of pollution and environmental justice today involve a complex political ecology of data, what some in the digital humanities call our age of “augmented empiricism” (Hsu 2014) and what Trump critics
volume is dedicated to the discussion of these alternative forms of scholarly engagement, drawing on the experiences of two eminent practitioners. The first chapter reports on experimental performances understood as practice-as-research, while the second chapter explores and envisions new possibilities of investigating Beckett's work that have emerged in the framework of the digital humanities. Sketching the production history of Play , Nicholas Johnson (Chapter 11) shows that, first, Beckett himself was ‘immensely flexible in his approach to this
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.