DMI mini-conference & workshop, 20-22 January 2010

New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Rooms 0.12 & 0.13
Wednesday, 20 January, starting time: 1:30pm (after lunch)
Thursday, 21 January, starting time: 10am
Friday, 22 January, starting time: 10am

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its second annual Winter mini-conference and workshop. For a report on the first conference, please see http://easst.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/review_2009_06.pdf.

The mini-conference, on 20-21 January, is an opportunity for digital methods and allied researchers to present short papers (approximately 5000-8000 words), and receive feedback from respondents. All participants who give papers also will serve as a respondent to at least one paper, if not two. Those giving papers should prepare a short oral presentation (a 5-10 minute rehearsal of the argument), and the respondents have up to 15 minutes to respond. Each paper is expected to take 35-40 minutes.

The deadline for confirmation of attendance, with title and abstract, is 4 January 2009. (See sample title and abstract below.) The firm deadline for receipt of papers is 12 January 2010. The schedule, the papers and the names of the respondents per paper will be circulated to all participants on 13 January 2010.

The mini-conference is followed by the full-day workshop, on 22 January. It provides space for working on digital methods projects, including those that may arise in discussions at the mini-conference.

The Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, is a collaboration of the New Media program, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation. Its director is Richard Rogers, Chair, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Its coordinators and project facilitators are the New Media PhD candidates, Anne Helmond, Sabine Niederer, Michael Stevenson and Esther Weltevrede. Anat Ben-David, the PhD candidate with dual affiliation, also facilitates. Staff include Erik Borra, Marieke van Dijk, Andrea Fiore, Koen Martens and Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff. The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is dedicated to reworking method for Internet research, and in particular to learning and developing technique for studying societal conditions and cultural change with the Web. DMI is online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

The DMI mini-conference is pleased to have the lecture by Richard Grusin as part of the program. On Thursday, 21 January, we shall depart from Turfdraagsterpad 9 at 4pm, in order to be on time for the lecture.

Professor Richard Grusin
Wayne State University

Premediation, Affect, and the Anticipation of Security

Thursday January 21
16.30 – 18.00

PC Hoofthuis, Spuistraat 134, room 104

Chair: Dr. Joyce Goggin

This talk explores how in our current biopolitical regime of securitization, socially networked media transactions are fostered and encouraged by mobilizing or intensifying pleasurable affects in the production of multiple, overlapping feedback loops among people (individually and collectively) and their media. If mediality today employs the strategies of premediation to mobilize individual and collective affect in a society of security and control, then we need to look at the ways in which premediation deploys an affectivity of anticipation that functions to vitalize the regime of securitization that has replaced surveillance as the predominant disciplinary formation of our control society. Our everyday transactions of mediation, transportation, and communication are encouraged for security purposes not only by making them easy and readily available but also by making them affectively pleasurable—or as I discuss later in the talk, at least not unpleasurable, by maintaining low levels of affective intensity that provide a kind of buffer or safe space, a form of security, in relation to an increasingly threatening global media environment.

Richard Grusin is Professor of English at Wayne State University. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999). His forthcoming book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Workshop projects

Censorship Kills Content

Other Winter Workshops

Winter Workshop 2011
Winter Workshop 2009