FlowTV is a great resource for scholarly-but-accessible thinking about all manner of media. I've professed my love for the site in the past and it has delivered once again by publishing a concise and lucid text by David Parry that debunks the "newness" of new media.

[ARPANET Interface Message Processor / photo: carrierdetect]

Parry's post bounces between our relationship with a range of media artifacts that include the card catalog, the Google search box and social networks to parse how "novelty" relates to technology. The text includes a nice swipe at the digital native model that postulates that youth intuit prowess with recent technology through immersion and instead suggests it is a lack of critical engagement that inspires proficiency with (and complacency towards) firmly established protocols/networks. Parry on his classroom strategy:

I have been teaching “digital stuff” for about eight years now and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — “What is this strange object before us?” Now they simply take it in stride. There is nothing particularly strange/odd or even noteworthy to many of them about the practice of having a Facebook page. (Indeed this is the second semester in a row where nearly all of my students have a Facebook page.) I used to approach teaching these matters as the question of looking at the strange and contextualizing it in terms of the familiar. I now find that my job is to take the familiar and make it strange, or as Siva Vaidhyanathan observed during an online discussion about this issue, “I use the ‘I’m teaching fish about the ocean’ perspective. I try to make it weird again.”

Making strange, defamiliarization – these sound like good tactics for any educator to employ. Parry's short essay concludes by comparing the spread of the printing press and network culture while carefully considering the utility of "novelty" for framing media. For those looking to dig deeper into this topic, I highly recommend the excellent New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2006), edited by Wendy Chun & Thomas Keenan.

[Ben Fry / The Preservation of Favoured Traces / 2009]

Madeleine Clare Elish at the MIT Hyperstudio (a digital humanities lab) recently pinged me with details regarding an interesting symposium on information visualization that will be taking place this coming spring. Visual Interpretations is scheduled for May 20-22 and will consider the "aesthetics, methods, and critiques of information visualization" in the humanities and social sciences. The call frames the event as follows:

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research? HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

This all sounds quite promising and I appreciate the way that the event is contextualized – especially the desire to focus on the "past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities." The word past suggests this will be much more than a visualization trade show. Some highlights from the suggested topics posed by the organizers:

• Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
• Cultural history of visual epistemology
• 2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
• Visualization across media and the archive
• Relationships between database and interface
• Alternative modes of data representation.
• Digital visual literacy* & accessibility

You can get more information on the symposium CFP here – the organizers can accommodate a range of presentation formats (papers, workshops, and something called a 6/4 which is either an odd time signature or a PechaKucha-style speed talk).

I'm leaning towards submitting a proposal – perhaps I'll see some of you folks in Cambridge this May.

*An issue that I prattled about during my tenure at ScienceBlogs last fall.