The 2009 ICA conference in Chicago will feature a preconference entitled “The Future is Prologue: New Media, New Histories?”  This preconference will showcase new scholarly work that addresses the intersection of history and new media, and it gives participants a chance to reflect on ways to analyze, preserve, and understand new media in a manner that is both sensitive to the past and to future needs of historical research. The history of new media is a burgeoning new subfield, but one aspect that often goes overlooked is how new media involve new ways of doing history. The purpose of this preconference is to focus attention on the shifting needs of historical scholarship about new media.

Though the preconference will provide a home for a wide range of scholarly work that fits this description, there will be particular focus on these themes:
• The idea of “storage” as it relates to new media and historiography.
• The contextualization of historical problems in a new media milieu.
• The changing meanings and implications of inscription as the Internet more fully embraces a range of audio-visual forms of communication.
• Ideological implications of speculations regarding the future.
• The changing place of “the virtual” in new media studies.
• Digital history.
• The reputed move away from print media to new media.
• Changing meanings of the “global” in relation to new media.
• Ubiquity, indexing, correlation, and access.
• New media and transformations in the scholarly enterprise.
In addition to these scholarly foci, the preconference will also include a demonstration of new technologies for collaboration and visualization under development at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, U of Illinois at Chicago.

Title: The Future is Prologue: New Media, New Histories?

* NOTE:  This preconference is not held at the Marriott

Sponsored by the Communication History Interest Group of the ICA, New Media & Society, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Date: May 21, 2008; 9:30 – 17:00

Location: The University of Illinois at Chicago

Limit:  70 persons

Cost:   Regular: $50.00USD
            Student: $40.00USD

Transportation:  Transportation will be available for participants and attendees from the conference hotel to the UIC campus.

The Future is Prologue:
New Media, New Histories?

An ICA Pre-Conference Organized by:
New Media & Society,
The University of Illinois at Chicago,
And The Communication History Interest Group of the ICA

Chicago, 21 May 2009

University of Illinois at Chicago
Lecture Center C1

Schedule

8:00:  Bus pickup at Marriott Hotel.  Buses depart at 8:10 a.m. for UIC

8:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m.:  Opening remarks

9:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m.:  Roundtable 1: Storage and New Media: Beyond the Container Metaphor
 The idea of storage operates as one of a number of helpful—though also constraining—visions of how information operates.  New media connect the controversies connected to this idea of storage to long-standing disputes concerning the social role of information.  How do media connect with different modes of storage?  And how do issues relating to storage in turn connect with historiographical concerns?  These will be the animating ideas of this roundtable.
Devon Powers, “What Was Popular? New Media, History, and the Problem of
the Music Charts”
Sabryna Cornish, Correcting History: The Perils of New Media Correction in a
Digital Age
Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko, “Mobile Locative Interfaces as
Potentiality: Actualizing Information in Space and Space as Information”
Megan Sapnar, “From Old to New and Back Again: Broadcast Histories,
Software Studies, and the Work of Web Historiography”
Deborah Leiter, “Hidden in Plain Sight?: The Exigence of (Electronic) Visibility
for Print Materials”
Erik Glyttov, “Mediated Realities: Virtual Worlds as New Media and the
Preservation of Digital Ancestry”

10:15 a.m.-10:45 a.m.: Coffee Break

10:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Roundtable 2:  The Theoretical in the Historical: De-Centering New Media History
 Media historians are often trained to avoid tendencies like technological determinism and Whig history.  Related to these tendencies is the practice of reifying technologies and media, setting them aside as if they were naturally separate ‘things’.  This roundtable pulls together papers that exemplify the practice of de-centering new and old media through grounded understandings of social praxis, understood through varying theoretical lenses.
D. Travers Scott, “The Utility of Sound Studies’ Theory and Method for Histories
of New Media and Communication Technologies”
Peter D. Schaefer, “Reflections on the Sliding Signification of ‘Interface’”
Klaus Bruhn Jensen & Rasmus Helles, “The Internet as a Cultural Forum:
Implications for Research”
Josh Lauer, “Surveillance History and the History of New Media”
Benjamin Peters, “Media We Do Not Yet Know How to Talk About: History as
New Media”
Lance Porter, “A Multi-Method Examination of the Move from Print to New
Media of Online Sports Reporters and Fans”
Dawn Shepard, “The Closet and the House-Tops:  Communication
Technologies and the Paradox of Privacy”

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.:  Lunch

1:00 p.m.-2:15 p.m.: Roundtable 3: Doing History: New Media Historiography, and the History of History
 Historiography—understood as the methods of history and as the history of history—is of particular importance to those who take an historical approach to new media.  How do new media—as storage tools and as analytic devices—intersect with the methods we use to do media history?  And what methodological adjustments can we see in new media research?
Jaako Suominen, “Gaming Legacy?: Four Approaches to the Relation Between
Cultural Heritage and Digital Technology”
Mark Brewin, “A History of the History of Objectivity”
Simon Popple & David E. Morrison, “Opening the Archive: The BBC, New Media,
and Media History”
Meghan Dougherty, Jamaica Jones, and Steven M. Schneider, “911@10:
Collaboration across Fields to Challenge Formats for New Media History”
Michael Dick, “Writing a Prologue for ‘Web Science’: Situating an Evolving
Discipline—and the New Media at its Core—Within Determinist-Constructivist Discourse and Medium Theory”
Jan Fernback, “Knowledge Capital, ICTs, and the Academic Community”

2:15 p.m.-2:30 p.m.:  Break.

2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.: Keynote address by speaker TBA

3:30 p.m.-3:45 p.m.:  Break.

3:45 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Roundtable 4: Historicizing New Media:  Applying Historical Approaches to New Media Practice
 The future assumes numerous forms in media practice. The idea of the future—and the sense of possibility and flexibility that often comes with it—is of particular importance to new media practice. The papers collected here address the ideas of emergence and flexibility as they relate to new media.

Holly Kruse, “Internet Gambling and the Changing Meanings of Domestic Space”
Charles van den Heuvel, “Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a
Historical Perspective: The Designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for Telecommunication and Machine Readable Documentation to Organize Research and Society”
Stephanie Schulte, “Blogging into the Future: The Internet as Unmediated Proxy
of the Self”
Deb Aikat, “Digitally Inspired: Classic Concepts, Texts and the Pioneers Who
Shaped the Evolution of Computing in 1833-1945”
Carolyn Kane, “Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories,
1965-1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations and Color Systems to Media History”
Patricia T. Whalen, “The Tipping Point for Newspapers: A Snapshot of an Industry
in Denial”

5:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m.:  Closing Reception, featuring guided visit to the Electronic Visualization Laboratory.
 Though space for the EVL tours may be limited, there will be a chance for groups of approximately 25 attendees to take this tour sequentially.