Communication History

Members of the ICA Communication History Interest Group:

Hello!  I hope you are all looking forward to the ICA conference in Chicago this May.  It promises to be an outstanding conference, and our interest group will have a chance to shine.  Right now, I am contacting you simply to point out that the interest group is sponsoring one preconference, to be held all day on 21 May, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.  This preconference is entitled "The Future is Prologue: New Media, New Histories?".  Full information can be found below and on the ICA website.  Check it out, and please do contact me with any questions you might have.

This preconference would not have been put together without the tireless efforts of planners Nick Jankowski and Steve Jones.  They are owed many thanks.

I encourage all members of the interest group to register for the conference, and, if interested, also to register for "The Future is Prologue".

If you are already an ICA member, you can register for the conference & the preconference (I believe the precon is called "PC3") by going here:
http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/2009/

If you need to renew your membership, you would be best advised to start at the ICA main page:  http://www.icahdq.org

"The Future is Prologue: New Media, New Histories?"
An ICA Preconference 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 Hitoriography"
• 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:
Decentering 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 Multimethod 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.

Promising more updates on our conference offerings soon.

Thanks,

Dave Park, Chair
park@lakeforest.edu

Mass Communication

This month, our update comes from Dave Roskos-Ewoldsen, our vice-chair and programmer for the 2009 conference. As you can see, he was pretty impressed with the paper competition this year! As he says:

“I have programmed 2 previous ICA conferences for Information Systems and 2 NCA conferences (Mass Communication Division and the Communication & Social Cognition Division) and I have never seen anything like the quality of a papers that were submitted to our division this year.  A total of 230 papers were submitted.  Of these, 123 were programmed into 28 panels and one poster session (53% acceptance rate).  There were 25 panels submitted and 9 were accepted (36% acceptance rate)."

Thus, the Mass Communication Division continues to thrive, thanks to all of your support! Stay tuned for more details of the upcoming conference program and don’t forget that our Division space on the ICA webpage is a great place to check out the most recent calls for papers and announcements relevant to Division members.

Robin Nabi, Chair
nabi@comm.ucsb.edu