Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

I continue to find it mind-boggling that people seem to think that a good use of AI tools like ChatGPT is to gather accurate information. Any cursory reading on the topic should explain that ChatGPT is designed to predict language in response to a prompt, not actually present information based on “knowledge” or “intelligence.” I […]


Like many academics, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns around how AI tools like ChatGPT might impact the work academics do as teachers and scholars. I don’t want to dive too much into those muddy waters, but I saw one post on Mastodon that piqued my interest and led me to do some experimenting. […]


I’m excited to announce the publication of my latest book, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image. [Update: as of 2019, the content is open access!] It’s a gratifying publication in many ways. It is the first project that I have co-authored with my good friend and colleague Christian Keathley, and as such, it was […]


This is the second excerpt from my essay draft on “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.” The first laid out my approach to deformative criticism via the format of PechaKuchas. This one moves toward another instance of deformation, inspired by the work of Nicholas Rombes. Videographic PechaKuchas take inspiration from another form, the oral […]


One of the outcomes for the Scholarship in Sound and Image workshop we hosted in June is a forthcoming book, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, that Christian Keathley and I are writing/editing. I’ve written a chapter focused on copyright and fair use issues, which I have posted below for open commentary and […]


Lately I’ve become more and more intrigued by Digital Humanities as a subfield/movement/trend/etc. within academia, in large part because the people who are actively driving much of DH are super engaging & welcoming via social networks like Twitter and various blogs. As I am committed to open access publishing, public-facing scholarship, and innovative modes of […]


I recently was contacted by Stephen Olsen from the MLA, who is coordinating a pre-conference workshop entitled “Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates” taking place on the 5th of January at this year’s convention. For the session, they are organizing a number of case studies of digital work […]


I’m writing from FROG 2011, the Vienna conference on videogames. This conference is unlike any other I’ve been to in a range of ways: it’s my first game studies conference, which means the range of presenters and disciplinary backgrounds is broader and more eclectic than at the typical television or media studies conference. It’s sponsored […]


One of my writing projects this summer was to write a book chapter for a forthcoming [now released!] anthology called The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (forthcoming in 20112012 from Routledge). The handbook is designed to offer accessible introductions to a wide array of facets of participatory culture, suitable for […]


It’s been a summer of minimal blogging, what with various family plans, media consumption, and household tasks. I do have a number of posts in the planning stage, and a longer essay drafted that will appear here soon. But yesterday a bit of news arrived that mandated a return to blogging. The Library of Congress […]


I received my iPad on April 8. Since then, many people have asked how I like it – my common response is that it’s too soon to tell what I’ll actually do with it. Unlike most technologies, the iPad doesn’t neatly fit into preexisting categories of practice and expectation, and like most technologies, there are […]


Why a book?

22Mar10

I’ve just finished the fifth and final day of the marathon Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in LA, and it was by far one of the best large-scale conferences I’ve ever been to. I attended no bad panels, and only a couple of weak papers – which is pretty rare! Either I got […]


Serial Boxes

20Jan10

Last summer, I was invited as a keynote presenter for a conference on serial form at the University of Zurich – I blogged previously about the conference and my presentation. Now the conference organizers are publishing the proceedings, translating all of the English papers into German. Since I spoke off an outline, I needed to […]


Just a quick pointer to my newest publication: in the new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, I’ve published “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.”Here’s the abstract: This essay explores the award-winning fan site Lostpedia to examine how the wiki platform enables fan engagement, structures participation, and distinguishes between various forms […]


I joined Twitter this past Spring, in large part because I saw the great usefulness of the platform at a conference – I was at MIT6 and surrounded by people having backchannel conversations via Twitter. So I joined on the spot, and spent a few months trying to figure out how it fits my own […]