Download or read book Bot mimicry in Digital Literary Culture written by Malthe Stavning Erslev and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element traverses the concept and practice of bot mimicry, defined as the imitation of imitative software, specifically the practice of writing in the style of social bots. Working as both an inquiry into and an extended definition of the concept, the Element argues that bot mimicry engenders a new mode of knowing about and relating to imitative software – as well as a distinctly literary approach to rendering and negotiating artificial intelligence imaginaries. The Element presents a software-oriented mode of understanding Internet culture, a novel reading of Alan Turing's imitation game, and the first substantial integration of Walter Benjamin's theory of the mimetic faculty into the study of digital culture, thus offering multiple unique lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the Element illuminates the value of mimicry – to the understanding of an emerging practice of digital literary culture, to practices of research, and to our very conceptions of artificial intelligence.
Download or read book Space Place and Bestsellers written by Lisa Fletcher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. This Element examines the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this Element offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literary Media written by Astrid Ensslin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-30 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Literary Media examines the fast-moving present and future of a media ecosystem in which the literary continues to play a vital role. The term ‘literary media’ challenges the tendency to hold the two terms distinct and broadens accepted usage of the literary to include popular cultural forms, emerging technologies and taste cultures, genres, and platforms, as well as traditions and audiences all too often excluded from literary histories and canons. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and practitioners, the Companion provides a comprehensive guide to existing terms and theories that address the alignment of literature and a variety of media forms. It situates the concept in relation to existing theories and histographies; considers emerging genres and forms such as locative narratives and autofiction; and expands discussion beyond the boundaries by which literary authorship is conventionally defined. Contributors also examine specific production and publishing contexts to provide in-depth analysis of the promotion of literary media materials. The volume further considers reading and other aspects of situated audience engagement, such as Indigenous and oral storytelling, prize and review cultures, book clubs, children, and young adults. This authoritative collection is an invaluable resource for scholars and students working at the intersection of literary and media studies.
Download or read book The World Made Meme written by Ryan M. Milner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How memetic media—aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed—become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture written by Grace A Musila and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.
Download or read book If Then written by Taina Bucher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world in which Google's search algorithms determine how we access information, Facebook's News Feed algorithms shape how we socialize, and Netflix collaborative filtering algorithms choose the media products we consume. As such, we live algorithmic lives. Life, however, is not blindly controlled or determined by algorithms. Nor are we simply victims of an ever-expanding artificial intelligence. Rather than looking at how technologies shape or are shaped by political institutions, this book is concerned with the ways in which informational infrastructure may be considered political in its capacity to shape social and cultural life. It looks specifically at the conditions of algorithmic life -- how algorithms work, both materially and discursively, to create the conditions for sociality and connectivity. The book argues that the most important aspect of algorithms is not what they are in terms of their specific technical details but rather how they become part of social practices and how different people enlist them as powerful brokers of information, communication and society. If we truly want to engage with the promises of automation and predictive analytics entailed by the promises of "big data", we also need to understand the contours of algorithmic life that condition such practices. Setting out to explore both the specific uses of algorithms and the cultural forms they generate, this book offers a novel understanding of the power and politics of algorithmic life as grounded in case studies that explore the material-discursive dimensions of software.
Download or read book The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies written by Martin Paul Eve and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview into digital literary studies that equips readers to navigate the difficult contentions in this space. The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. You may have heard of the digital humanities--and what you may have heard may not have been good. Yet like an oncoming storm, the relentless growth of the use of digital methods for the study of literature seems inevitable. This book gives an insight into the ways in which digital approaches can be used to study literature and the ways in which humanistic study can be used to explore digital literature. Examining its subject across the axes of authorship, space, and visualization, maps and place, distance and history, and ethical approaches to the digital humanities, this book introduces newcomers to the topic while also offering plenty for seasoned digital humanities pros. Combining original research with third-party case studies and examples, this book will appeal both to students and researchers across all levels who wish to learn about digital literary studies.
Download or read book Democracy and Education written by John Dewey and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1916 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Download or read book The Silence written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly). “In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” —Rachel Kushner
Download or read book Critical Theory Today written by Lois Tyson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.
Download or read book Dreaming in Code written by Scott Rosenberg and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.
Download or read book Contemporary Art and Digital Culture written by Melissa Gronlund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet’s promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art – especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory – as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007–2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.
Download or read book Virago Reprints and Modern Classics written by D-M Withers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprinting, republishing and re-covering old books in new clothes is an established publishing practice. How are books that have fallen out of taste and favour resituated by publishers, and recognised by readers, as relevant and timely? This Element outlines three historical textures within British culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s – History, Remembrance and Heritage – that enabled Virago's reprint publishing to become a commercial and cultural success. With detailed archival case studies of the Virago Reprint Library, Testament of Youth and the Virago Modern Classics, it elaborates how reprints were profitable for the publisher and moved Virago's books - and the Virago brand name - from the periphery of culture to the centre. Throughout Virago's reprint publishing - and especially with the Modern Classics - the epistemic revelation that women writers were forgotten and could, therefore, be rediscovered, was repeated, again and again, and made culturally productive through the marketplace.
Download or read book The Spread of Print in Colonial India written by Abhijit Gupta and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the spread of print in colonial India towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century. Till the first half of the century, much of the print production in the subcontinent emanated from presidency cities such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, along with centres of missionary production such as Serampore. But with the growing socialization of print and the entry of local entrepreneurs into the field, print began to spread from the metropole to the provinces, from large cities to mofussil towns. This Element will look at this phenomenon in eastern India, and survey how printing spread from Calcutta to centres such as Hooghly-Chinsurah, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Rangpur etc. The study will particularly consider the rise of periodicals and newspapers in the mofussil, and asses their contribution to a nascent public sphere.
Download or read book Globalizing Race written by Dorian Bell and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself. Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism. As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.
Download or read book 10 PRINT CHR 205 5 RND 1 GOTO 10 written by Nick Montfort and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-11-23 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.
Download or read book Entrepreneurial Identity in US Book Publishing in the Twenty First Century written by Rachel Noorda and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entrepreneurship underpins many roles within the publishing industry, from freelancing to bookselling. Entrepreneurs are shaped by the contexts in which their entrepreneurship is situated (social, political, economic, and national). Additionally, entrepreneurship is integral to occupational identity for book publishing entrepreneurs. This Element examines entrepreneurship through the lens of identity and narrative based on interview data with book publishing entrepreneurs in the US Book publishing entrepreneurship narratives of independence, culture over commerce, accidental profession, place, risk, (in)stability, busyness, and freedom are examined in this Element.
