CompSci595N/PolSci595N/Engl593: The Technology and Society Seminar Series

Fall 2006: New Media and the Reading Experience: New Approaches to Textual Forms, Interfaces, and Social Interactions
Seminar Overview

Winter 2005

Fall 2005

Spring 2006

Fall 2006

Spring 2007


New Media and the Reading Experience: New Approaches to Textual Forms, Interfaces, and Social Interactions

This instance of the seminar will focus loosely on the mutation of text and reading in digital, multimedia, and networked information environments. What is the current state of research and technological development in adapting the relationship between print, orality, and graphics commonly called "text" to new media? Issues of interest might include: hardware innovations (such as "e-ink" or flexible OLED displays); new text visualization and interface designs; adaptive text aggregation systems (such as Inform.com); tools for online reading and annotation; research in digital literacy and reading practices; text-archiving, -scanning, and -searching initiatives; blogs and social-networking systems; collective reading practices; wireless text-messaging; text-encoding; and the relation between the history and future of the book. The seminar will be loosely affiliated with the UC Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading (http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu).


Location

The seminar will be held in South Hall, Rm 2635 (NOTE THE LOCATION CHANGE) from 1:00pm to 2:30pm on Tuesdays. The first seminar will be October 3 and the last will be November 28th.


Course Signup Information

The course will be cross-listed in at least the above three departments. However, it may be offered in other departments as well. There are a few things to keep in mind when considering signing up for this course. First, this quarter, if you wish to attend you must sign up. Second, it does not really matter under which course number you register. The reason we are cross-listing it is to advertise and to make it more acccesible for those who do not normally look in other departments for interesting courses. And finally, seminars of this type often are added to the registration system late. If you are having problems finding the course in the registration system, come to class on the first day, and we will help.


Schedule

The format of the seminar is weekly presentations and free-form discussion. Assignments for those students who do not present are to gather, synthesize, and write an overview of work relevant to the seminar topic and related to their own discipline(s).