Bernard's blog

The Digital Lives of Art History

Great opportunity co-organized by my colleague Stuart Dunn: 

Institute in Ancient Itineraries: The Digital Lives of Art History

Call for members (deadline June 1st 2018)

 

This 18-month Institute in Digital Art History is led by King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) and Department of Classics, in collaboration with HumLab at the University of Umeå, with grant support provided by the Getty Foundation as part of its Digital Art History initiative.

 

Infrastructure as Experience

I'm giving a talk in Dublin next week. Announcement here: 

Infrastructure as Experience, or: Visualizing Networks After Snowden

18:30, February 2nd 2016, Neill lecture theatre (Trinity College Dublin)

Opportunities for refugees to study at HU-Berlin

I received this email from a colleague concerning opportunities for refugees in Germany to take classes at the Humboldt University of Berlin. There's an event to be held on the 22 Sept 2015 at the HU for interested person. Although I'm not directly involved, I post the information here to make it more widely available.  Please disseminate freely. For more information, contact the personnel listed at the bottom of this page. 

Times of the Technosphere: First and Second Session

 

For participants of the first and second session, please download the syllabus, essay by Peter Haff, and interview with Erich Hörl at the email link below. Thank you.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6ybgouefcbztnyi/AABm4eoiGvXR_3bL9ZVZDjBga?dl=0 

If you have problems accessing or reading these files, please contact me via my email on the main page of www.bernardg.com . Thanks!

 

Compra Zapatillas de running para hombre

Untimely Mediations: Siegert and Sprenger Review

I recently reviewed Bernhard Siegert's CULTURAL TECHNIQUES and Florian Sprenger's MEDIEN DES IMMEDIATEN for the literary journal PARAGRAPH. For those of you that don't have a subscription, find the PDF attached here and the full text below. If you have a subscription option through your university, please go that route. I assume it's good for the journal to have clicks generating in some record somewhere. If that's not an option then best to download the PDF I linked. PARAGRAPH has good formatting, much better than my quick and dirty reproduction below. 

 

Untimely Mediations: On Two Recent Contributions to ‘German Media Theory’

BERNARD DIONYSIUS GEOGHEGAN

Information in Formation

I'm writing a short text on "information" for the collection Digital Keywords edited by Ben Peters and to be published by Princeton University Press. Lots of great folks will be in there like Gabriella Coleman, Jonathan Sterne, Fred Turner and Sharrona Pearl. The rough draft of the introduction to my text is below. Eventually some this will show up in revised form in the book based on my dissertation. If you have any ideas, get in touch. And I welcome feedback from anyone who feels like looking at the full text!

Information in Formation

I think perhaps the word ‘information’ is causing more trouble in this connection than it is worth, except that it is difficult to find another that is anywhere near right. 

–Claude Shannon

Computing and Historiography, Part 2: Parasitology

[For part 1 of this post click here]

A modest amount of time spent in archive impresses upon most historians the symbiotic relations that prevail among history-makers and history-writers. I don’t mean this in the naïve sense that “winners write history,” though that may be true too. For one thing, “making history” depends on the ability to generate traces that become part of an archive or official record—even if that archive may be lost for decades and only rediscovered decades or centuries hence. For another thing, the capacity to innovate in the present is closely allied with the power to summon and exploit historical records.

Computing and Historiography, Part 1

How does the work of building computers relate to the writing of computing history? At first glance, this seems an easy enough thing to describe: Scientists, engineers, and industries invent or innovate while historians and other observers report on these events. This is a more or less linear model of cause and effect, where work with computers is an ostensible “cause” or “source” for writing computer history. But I think this model is so reductive as to be false. It seems to me that the reception or interpretation of computational history is itself a participant in the shaping and consolidation of computational innovation. Recognizing this relation has important consequences for a number of issues in ‘informatics proper’ (design and protection of intellectual property, raising capital, and workplace diversity are three areas I will touch on in coming posts) as well those societies that would like to identify social well being with technological innovation.

On Siegert's "Cultural Techniques" and Sprenger's "Medien des Immediaten"

I wrote book reviews of Bernhard Siegert's forthcoming "Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real" and of Florian Sprenger's "Medien des Immediaten. Elektrizität, Telegraphie, McLuhan" for the forthcoming issue of PARAGRAPH. It was a pleasure to be able to contribute something to this great journal, and also to comment on trends in germanophone media studies for Edinburgh University Press, which has done so much in recent years to put cutting edge conceptual work before anglophone readers. I'm also pleased to review something coming out from Fordham, another press championing pathbreaking publications and translations. The late Helen Tartar championed publication of this book by Siegert and perhaps this review can serve as a small tribute to her important and enduring legacies in critical thought.

Florian Sprenger on the Media of Immediacy

I recently wrote a book review of Bernhard Siegert's forthcoming book "Cultural Techniques" and Florian Sprenger's 2012 book "Medien des Immediaten" for the journal PARAGRAPH. Although Sprenger's book hasn't been translated, there are a few articles in English based on it. I've attached of these articles in draft form, here. If you like what you see, I encourage you to order copies of the English-language essay collections where they were published.

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