Keyword: Culture – Now Available Open Access

Yes, indeed, the crickets have taken over here at The Late Age of Print. I’m pretty active these days over on Twitter and Facebook, but longer-form, blogging—well, who can find enough time?

Anyway, here I am, happy to share some of the work that’s distracted me from blogging. Princeton University Press recently released Digital Keywords, edited by Ben Peters. The collection pays homage to Raymond Williams’ landmark volume Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976/1983), but asks: which terms would be most useful for understanding digital or computational cultures of the 21st century? I wrote the chapter on culture, which, following in the footsteps of Williams, one of my intellectual heroes, was one of the most challenging and rewarding pieces of scholarly writing I’ve ever taken on.

The good news is that a PDF of the chapter is now freely available over on Culture Digitally. Download and enjoy! You’ll find a bunch of other chapters from Digital Keywords there, too, all of which Princeton U. P. was kind enough to release Open Access. If you like what you see and decide you want to purchase the book (please do!), the Press is offering a discount of 25%. The coupon code, P06197, is good until December 31, 2016.

And since I seem to be in the business of just giving away research, check out my other two recent publications, both of which are freely available Open Access:

• “Algorithmic Culture,” published summer 2015 in European Journal of Cultural Studies
• “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture,” co-authored with Blake Hallinan, published January 2016 in New Media and Society

Both are companion pieces, of sorts, to the “Culture” chapter appearing in Digital Keywords. Enjoy.

Call for Papers – Machine Communication

communication +1 invites submissions for its upcoming issue, “Machine Communication.”
Edited by David Gunkel and Zachary McDowell

With this special issue we hope to explore the boundaries of communication beyond the human subject and the restrictions of humanism by considering that which is radically other – the machine. We seek articles that interrogate the opportunities and challenges that emerge around, within, and from interactions and engagements with machines of all types and varieties. By examining the full range of human-machine interactions, machine-machine interactions, or other hitherto unanticipated configurations, we hope to assemble a collection of ground-breaking essays that push the boundaries of our discipline and probe the new social configurations of the 21st century. Topics may include but are not limited to:

1. Algorithmic Culture – Influence of machines on human or other non-machine culture
2. Automation – Drones, Robots, or other automated systems that exist in the world and take part in a variety of tasks
3. Artificial Intelligence – Either the possibilities of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or more specific smart systems
4. Big Data, Deep Learning, Neural Networks and other recent innovations in computer science
5. The Internet of Things
6. Cybernetics, Bioinformatics, Knowledge Representation, or various applications of Software Theory.

Please submit short proposals of no more than 500 words by December 13th, 2015 to communicationplusone@gmail.com.

Upon invitation, full text submissions will be due April 5th, 2013, with expected publication in September, 2016.

About the Journal

The aim of communication +1 is to promote new approaches to and open new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship, communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to create is a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these experiments.

communication +1 is an open access journal supported by University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries and the Department of Communication

Editor in Chief: Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Managing Editor: Zachary J. McDowell, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Advisory Board:
Kuan-Hsing Chen, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Bernard Geoghegan, Humboldt-Universität, Germany
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Johnathan Sterne, McGill University
Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder
Greg Wise, Arizona State University

For more information or to participate in the communicationplusone.org project, please email communicationplusone@gmail.com