Initial commit

To our colleagues at Penn State and beyond:

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Digital Culture and Media Initiative.

I hope to see you in the audience for our presentations with the theme Critical Media and Digital Studies, beginning on December 2, 2014 with Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker, musician, activist, and author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014; Picador, 2015). Other speakers scheduled for 2014–2015 include Brian Hochman, author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Andrew L. Russell, author of Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Adrienne Shaw, author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and María Fernández, author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (University of Texas Press, 2014).

On February 12, 2015, David Golumbia, author of The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard University Press, 2009), will join us for the first of a series of workshops with the theme Disambiguating Digital Studies.

If you are affiliated with the Department of English, I hope you will also consider joining the departmental graduate student and faculty reading group, the first meeting of which (September 25, 2014) will be devoted to discussion of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform. Subsequent meetings will be devoted to discussion of Andrew Russell’s Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks as well as Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015) and Shoshana Zuboff, The Summons: Our Fight for the Soul of an Information Civilization (Public Affairs, 2015).

I encourage you to subscribe to the DCMI Web site RSS news feed and to follow the DCMI Twitter account and the DCMI Facebook page, which will keep you up to date. Of course, we will also distribute event notices via our department and other email listservs, as well.

Brian Lennon
Director, Digital Culture and Media Initiative