November 22, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Call for 1980s Furniture: The Console Living Room Exhibit

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Image Credit: “Home Gaming Archive Puts Classics at Your Fingertips”

After Spring Break, the Digital Studies program will be creating an interactive installation on the 4th Floor of the Information Technology & Convergence Center. The installation will feature a replica of a living room circa 1985. We would like to ask if anyone would be willing to loan or donate furniture, art, accessories, etc., from that era. For example, if you have any books, magazines, catalogs, posters, audio visual equipment (including personal computers), and furniture (lazy boys, couches, tables, etc.) they would be very useful. In particular, if anyone has a working, oversized TV set with a cathode ray tube—that would be greatly appreciated. Any and all contributions would be welcome. If you can help, please contact Jim Groom (jgroom@umw.edu) or Zach Whalen (zwhalen@umw.edu).

Wired Article Highlights DTLT’s Known Pilot

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WiredLogoAn article in yesterday’s Wired about the open source blogging application Known mentioned the pilot work being done in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. Known provides a space where students can manage and publish their posts for various social media sites through their own application, controlling the archival copy of their work. It rethinks the users relationship to ownership of their data across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc. Right now, Jim Groom’s Digital Storytelling course and Zach Whalen’s Introduction to Digital Studies are exploring this application.

One of the points made in the Wired article, that reinforces some of the possibilities of the Domain of One’s Own project, is that the campus can quickly and easily pilot new, cutting edge applications that are defining what many refer to as the Indie Web Movement.

Whalen Presents at MLA Conference

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Zach WhalenZach Whalen, Assistant Professor of English, participated in three events at the recent Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. On Friday, Jan. 10, he was part of a reading of electronic literature, where he and colleagues read from twitter bots in a “Bot Choral.” On Saturday, Jan. 11, he was a panelist on the roundtable discussion “Electronic Literature after Flash.” His remarks were titled “Lexia to Perplexia (2000-2013)” and addressed the obsolescence of a key piece of second-generation electronic literature. Finally, on Sunday, Jan. 12, he presented the paper “Ebooks, Typography, and Twitter Art” in the session “Lit Misbehavin.” This paper addressed the poetics of twitter bots.

English Faculty Present at MLA Conference

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Gary Richards

Gary Richards

Two professors and one recent alumnus of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication presented at the Modern Language Association Conference that met Jan. 3 through 6 in Boston, Mass. Assistant Professor Zach Whalen presented the paper “OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the Vestigial Aesthetics of Machine Vision” on the panel Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media. Associate Professor Gary Richards presented the paper “Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies” on the panel The South and Sexuality. Alumnus Tyler Babbie, ’08, presented the paper “Another Term: Richard Aldington and Imagism(e)” on the panel From Imagism to “Amygism” to Vorticism.

Zach Whalen

Zach Whalen

Zach Whalen Presents Paper at Society for Literature, Science and the Arts

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Zach Whalen, assistant professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Communication, presented a paper at the recent Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference, held this year in Milwaukee, Wis. The presentation, “A Counterfactual Historiography of Three Game Platforms,” challenged the received metanarrative of game console generations. By way of a close reading of three less well-known consoles — Channel F, Vectrex and Virtual Boy — the paper explores the implications of an alternate history for video game devices.