Episodes

  • Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

    Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
    Nov 23 2024
    Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Dr. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    52 mins
  • The World According to Sound

    The World According to Sound
    Nov 18 2024
    The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime soundtrips direct to your home headphones via the internet in their winter listening series. We are sure that Phantom Power listeners will love this experience. And right now, you can buy tickets for 25% off with the promo code phantompower25. (As a public university employee, I should probably note that I am not receiving financial compensation through this promo code. –Mack) In this episode, host Mack Hagood talks to Harnett and Hoff about why they grew frustrated with working in public radio and how they now assemble sonic experiences that don’t impose a fixed narrative on their listeners. We also listen to some fantastic excerpts from their upcoming listening series. We also briefly discuss a sound art classic, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier. You can hear Lucier perform the piece in this video from an MIT symposium in 2014. Shortly after our interview, Lucier passed away at the age of 90. May he Rest In Peace. Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Music by Graeme Gibson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    48 mins
  • Tyler W. Williams, "If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Tyler W. Williams, "If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Nov 14 2024
    In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    45 mins
  • Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)

    Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)
    Oct 31 2024
    From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented. Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dariusz Wójcik is the first visually based book dedicated to finance and uses graphics and maps to bring the complex and abstract world of finance down to earth, showing how geography is fundamental for understanding finance, and vice versa. It illuminates the people—including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—who have shaped our thinking about global finance; brings to life the ways that place-specific histories, laws, regulations, and institutions influence finance; shows how finance relates to innovation, globalization, and environmental change; and details how finance plays a key part in drawing the landscape of uneven development, inequality, and instability. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)

    Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)
    Oct 29 2024
    Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms. Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    57 mins
  • Kathleen McGoey and Lindsey Pointer, "Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning: Games and Activities for Restorative Justice Practitioners" (Good Books, 2024)

    Kathleen McGoey and Lindsey Pointer, "Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning: Games and Activities for Restorative Justice Practitioners" (Good Books, 2024)
    Oct 26 2024
    Teaching, training, and gathering online has become a global norm since 2020. Restorative practitioners have risen to the challenge to shift restorative justice processes, trainings, and classes to virtual platforms, a change that many worried would dilute the restorative experience. How can people build relationships with genuine empathy and trust when they are not in a shared physical space? How can an online platform become an environment for people to take risks and practice new skills without the interpersonal support available when meeting face to face? Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning: Games and Activities for Restorative Justice Practitioners (Good Books, 2024) is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to build community and foster development of restorative justice knowledge and skills via online platforms. The games and activities included support building relationships, introducing the restorative justice philosophy, practicing key skills, and understanding and addressing structural and racial injustices. More resources are available at this website. Kathleen McGoey is a trainer and facilitator of restorative justice practices and conflict transformation. With a background leading restorative justice implementation in communities and schools, she currently supports cities, workplaces, and families to utilize restorative approaches to address incidents of harm. This is Kathleen's third publication since completing an MA in International Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She lives in Colorado. Lindsey Pointer is an assistant professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School and principal investigator for the National Center on Restorative Justice. In addition to The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools, Lindsey is the author of The Restorative Justice Ritual (2021) and Wally and Freya (2022), a children's picture book about restorative justice. Lindsey has a PhD in Restorative Justice from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and is a former Fulbright and Rotary Global Grant recipient. She lives in Colorado. Stephen Pimpare is Professor of Public Policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    39 mins
  • Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

    Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
    Oct 26 2024
    In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today. By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage. Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts. Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    49 mins
  • Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

    Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)
    Oct 6 2024
    Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation. The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities
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    53 mins