digital media, cyberfeminism, digital narrative, hypertext, new media arts, digital design, information aesthetics, participatory cultures, Web 2.0 technologies, women's writing, cyberculture, media literacy, science fiction
Guertin, Carolyn. Rev. of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, by Henry Jenkins. Explorations in Media Ecology. (in process, forthcoming Fall 2009).
Book Review
Refereed/Juried
Accepted
Forthcoming
Guertin, C. . Title TBA. Society for Digital Humanities, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Science Congress, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. (May 28-June 04, 2010). http://www.congress2010.ca/
Conference Proceeding
Refereed/Juried
Accepted
Forthcoming
Guertin, C. Title TBA. In (proposed) In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a Gathering. Banff, Canada: The Banff Centre. (Feb18-21, 2010). http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=925&p
Conference Proceeding
Refereed/Juried
Accepted
Forthcoming
Guertin, C. (proposed) Haptic Space: Mapping the Interplay of Gesture, Gender and Embodied Interfaces. In Gender, Bodies and Technology Conference. Virginia Tech:. (22-24 Apr 10). http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/
Conference Proceeding
Refereed/Juried
Accepted
Forthcoming
Guertin, C. Media Tactics: Public Disturbance After the Decline and Fall of Activism. In Digital Humanities 2009. College Park: University of Maryland. (22 to 25 June 09).
Conference Proceeding
Refereed/Juried
Accepted
Affiliations
Elected Member
Modern Language Association
Committee on Information Technology:
Ronnie Apter, 2007-10
Robert J. Blake, 2006-09
Carolyn Guertin 2008-11
Geoffrey Rockwell, 2005-08
Jeffrey Schneider, 2007-10
Susan Schreibman, 2006-09
Raymond G. Siemens, 2005-08; 2007-08 (Ch.)
Thomas C. Spear, 2005-08
International Journal of New Media Technologies
Convergence
Editors: Julia Knight University of Sunderland, UK, Alexis Weedon University of Bedfordshire, UK
Editorial Board: Editorial Assistant, Jason Wilson University of Bedfordshire, UK
Associate Editors: Amy Bruckman Georgia Tech University,
Rebecca Coyle Southern Cross University, Australia,
Jane Singer University of Iowa, USA
Jeanette Steemers University of Westminster, UK
Editorial Board: Indrajit Banerjee Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,
Jay David Bolter Georgia Institute of Technology, USA,
Pat Brereton Dublin City University, UK,
André Caron University of Montreal, Canada,
Chris Chesher University of Sydney, Australia,
Patrick Crogan University of Adelaide,
Mark Deuze Indiana University, Bloomington, USA,
Mary Flanagan Hunter College,
Matthew Fuller Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
David Gauntlett University of Westminster, UK,
Carolyn Guertin University of Texas at Arlington, USA,
Donna Haraway University of California, Santa Cruz, USA,
Luke Hockley University of Sunderland, UK,
Erkki Huhtamo University of California, Los Angeles, USA,
Karol Jakubowicz University of Warsaw, Poland,
Henry Jenkins Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA,
Samantha Krukowski University of Texas at Austin, USA,
Greg Lowe Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE)/Tampere University, Finland,
Margaret Morse University of California, Santa Cruz, USA,
Anna Munster University of New South Wales, Australia,
John Pavlik Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
Kurt Squire University of Wisconsin - Madison,
Bruce Sterling Serbia/USA,
Will Straw McGill University, Canada,
Melanie Swalwell Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Trine Syvertsen University of Oslo, Norway,
Sue Thomas De Montfort University, UK,
Jeremy Welsh Kunsthogskolen i Bergen, Norway,
Runar Woldt Media Perspektiven, Germany.
Literary Advisory Board
Electronic Literature Organization
Espen Aarseth, Mark Amerika, Kurt Andersen, Robert Arellano, Richard Bangs, John Barth, Michael Bérubé, Jay David Bolter, T.C. Boyle, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Morgan Entrekin, Edward Falco, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Carolyn Guertin, Carolyn Guyer, N. Katherine Hayles, Raine Koskimaa, George Landow, Tom Leclair, Jennifer Ley, Nancy Lin, Judy Malloy, Harry Mathews, Larry McCaffery, Jerome McGann, Heather McHugh, Adrian Miles, Robert Polito, Jim Rosenberg, Barney Rosset, Joanna Scott, Nan A. Talese, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sue Thomas, Susana Pajares Tosca, Rob Wittig
Postgraduate Research Unit
McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto
Derrick de Kerckhove, Michael Edwards, Jesus Octavio Elizondo Martinez and many others
By Susan Braley The study 'New Media in the Humanities: from metaphors of inevitability to metaphors of possibility,' argues that using digital technologies in humanities classrooms (at the post-secondary level) is transformative for both students and professors. It begins by identifying and then allaying the fears that scholars in the humanities harbour: the computer reduces literacy, diminishes knowledge to mere information, annihilates the metaphysical in the academy, and disconnects the student from his/her humanity. The second section of the article outlines in detail the exciting possibilities of engaging electronic media in the classroom, which include moving beyond a single literacy to multiple ones (post-/polyliteracy), recognizing digital technologies as potential cognitive systems parallel to our own (post-humanity), evolving from notions of a single subjectivity to global interconnectedness (post-identity/ post-nation), transcending one's chosen discipline in order to discover new interdisciplines via the Web (post-/transdiscipline), and exploding the confines of print in order to discover new e-discourses (post-symbolic). The study also provides case studies of Canadian and international scholars in the humanities who are putting these novel ideas into practice in the classroom.
An English assistant professor worked to bring “sexing” back in a new
course aimed at both science-fiction enthusiasts and students.
Carolyn Guertin teaches the new class “Sexing the Machine” this
semester where students will study cyborgs, scientific monsters, robots
and the gender issues surrounding each.
“It is a wonderful class for a broad range of undergraduates,” she said
in an e-mail. “There are mostly science students in the class, but it
should appeal to anyone who is interested in science, technology or
gender issues.”
Class topics are divided into three different periods and how they
relate to gender: the wetware period focuses on biological life, the
hardware period refers to machine life and the software period
indicates intelligent life.
The course was added when Guertin’s originally scheduled class didn’t
have sufficient enrollment, she said. She said the new class has nine
students so far, but more are welcome.
“They have already seen a lot of the films and as I said many of them
are science students or are people with a particular interest in
science and technology,” Guertin said. “They also get the chance to
read great novels … which they may find more accessible than some
material in other English courses.”
Some of the literature studied in the course will include Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Neuromancer
by William Gibson.
“A lot of cultural studies courses use materials like this one does, but probably not just as a major focus,” she said.
Some of the films and television that will be looked at for the course
are Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner and Terminator. Guertin’s
friend, Brock University assistant professor Sherryl Vint, who is a
leading North American science-fiction scholar and has taught a similar
course called “Future of the Body,” said the course reflects the
importance of technology and daily experience in the 21st century.
“This course allows students to understand the relationships among the
technologies of a particular culture moment, the contemporary cultural
imagination of subjectivity and the popular culture texts that both
reflect anxiety and challenge dominant ideologies,” Vint said.
Guertin said her students like the material.
Biology freshman Julian Pacheco, said he signed up for the course because it seemed more interesting.
“I feel like I will learn more out of this class than regular English
classes, mainly because the materials covered in regular English
courses are materials that I’ve always been learning,” Pacheco said. “I
was craving for something that seemed a little different and
interesting, and this English class was what I found.”
We live in a visual culture, which means that our media are migrating across previously fixed boundaries. Part of this trend is the commingling of low-brow culture (like comics and television) and high-brow forms (fine art, architecture, music, etc). Through an exploration of different forms of visual narrative (including the graphic novel, multimedia adventure games, curiosity cabinets, cutups, film-based montage, music videos, the remix) you will learn how to create your own digital stories.
We will experiment with different ways of speaking the literacy of the new media with HTML, Comic Life, Photoshop and Dreamweaver in order to start writing fiction visually and spatially for an electronic environment. Workshopping ideas based in associational storytelling and the conjunction of image and text in class, we will examine the graphic novel and exemplary literary digital narratives as models for building our own. This course is as an introduction to computer proficiency, typography, web-native design principles, graphic fiction, electronic literature, and the complexities of born-digital texts. For those who are a bit more advanced, it may be taken as an Honors credit.
'Convergence Culture', as Henry Jenkins defines it, is that overlapping membrane where modalities meet, where old and new media absorb or reject each other, and where local and global interfaces collide. Convergence creates a social intersection or a networked public where media producer and consumer morph, fuse or splinter as they interact via increasingly collaborative practices.
We will explore this notion of convergence across a broad spectrum of theories about culture, technologies and media ecologies. Criticism grounded in ideas about subjectivity, interaction, authorship and/or spectatorship, activism and community will form the foundation for our discussions. Using historical antecedents in user-centered events like Situationism and Happenings as a starting point, we will interrogate the artificial separation of politics and aesthetics implicit in high-brow cultural forms. We will explore how contemporary participatory culture collapses binaries such as active and passive, author and reader, performer and spectator, public and private, and artifice and the real. Examining works and forms as diverse as Harry Potter, Lost, Star Wars, American Idol, The Matrix, blogs, webcams, podcasting, 3D recording, Keitai (cellphone) culture, net.art, rhizomes, (media) ecologies, surveillance, game mods, and fan culture, we will discover how they reflect the re-making of the art of storytelling for the digital age.
Download Syllabus (252.29KB. This syllabus was uploaded Friday 12th, September 2008 01:32:53 AM and is subject to change.) Course URL
Course Texts: ° Bishop, Claire. Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT. 2006. 0-262-52464-3. pb [P] ° Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 0-8166-4954-5 hc [OS] ° Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 0-8147-4281-5 hc [CC] ° Jason Reitman, Thank You For Smoking. 20th Century Fox, 2005. Rent DVD or VHS. ° Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix. Warner Brothers, 1999. Rent 'DVD or VHS.
Recommended advance readings: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Parts I & II, pp. 11-34 Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra" from Simulacra and Simulations, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulations.html Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "4.3: The Multitude Against Empire" from Empire, pp. 393-413
This course will examine the effect that photography, film and digital media have had and continue to have on our conception of time. Imaging technologies have transformed how we see the world, and in turn have altered the kinds of stories that we tell. Exploring the historical evolution of the image, we will look at in particular how the ability to stop time and view the individual frame has changed modes of looking. We will focus on stillness in motion pictures (as they used to be called), and will pay particular attention to slow-motion, the instant replay, repetition, the freeze-frame and the hyperlink as techniques of contemporary storytelling. Laura Mulvey's theorizing on gender and the image will form the foundation for the course, especially since the literature about the manipulation of time has traditionally been a predominantly male genre. The scarcity of women film directors and the prevalence of female new media writers and artists seems to lend credence to N. Katherine Hayles' theory that cyberspace functions as a material metaphor for time travel as we hop from screen to screen. The new media just might therefore have created a new space for new kinds of feminist engagements with the temporal dimension. Theories around the concept of mastery and the gendering of temporal manipulation will be explored.
This course will critically examine the intersections of the information arts and information technologies in our rapidly changing times, and explore how cross-pollination between these fields alters not only art and culture but the world we live in. Through examining the differences between how contextualized information, data, and knowledge are written in and by a diversity of media, this course will map the unique shapes that information assumes in digital culture. We will seek new approaches to understand the transformation that information is enacting on our temporal, spatial, and visual perceptions. Exploring a range of artistic and literary techniques (including but not limited to collage, montage, pastiche, representation, simulation, perspective, hyperreality, and interactivity) that have historically altered how we read information will form a basis for comparison with how digital culture is altering how we now read the world.
The increasing fragmentation of cultural structures and the emergence of connectivity as a new paradigm are in evidence all around us, from the world of medicine to multinational capital to the World Wide Web. The ascendance of the database as a new pre-eminent cultural form begins to blur the boundaries between art and reality, and representation and simulation, and creates new social networks necessary for interactive engagement. Course readings in theory, fiction, and multimedia will provide examples of the newest cultural forms, exploring the reality that how we read and how we see is in the midst of a change of an enormity that compares with the introduction of writing into oral cultures.
The archive may well be the guiding metaphor of the information age. It is a multimodal repository that we dip into to retrieve data and images; it is a measure of our biological origins written in DNA; it is a language of classification; it is a storehouse of trauma; it is an ongoing source of artistic inspiration and technological innovation. The history of how we write, store and create memories is integrally intertwined with what it means to be human. Memory is messy, built of associations, fragments, snapshots and whiffs of the past, derived from the senses and the body rather than from logic or knowledge. It is only through technology and art -- the interfaces of memory -- that we make sense of the past. Students will apply their theoretical explorations to exploring in-depth 'forgotten' local narratives, cultural events or artifacts in the face of the prevailing Texan aversion to remembering its history.
Taking a historical overview of archival systems and making direct use of UT Arlington's Special Collections, we will look for the places at which inscription, data and aesthetics meet. We will ground our discussion in several specific topics: the history of memory, the architecture of memory, the concept of inscription and the body as a writing surface, information aesthetics and conceptual modeling, and the affect of the database as a storehouse and source for documentary and digital art. We will look at critical theory, historical writings, technologies, interfaces, and analog and digital art, to get a sense of the role of the archive, and its descendant the database, in the 21st century. The course involves the use of applied theory: firstly, theories of the archive along with real use of Special Collections; secondly, an investigation of the database and how it informs digital repositories, and finally, an interrogation of the nature of the interface and the use of iMovie to create a digital video (in iMovie 06) from filmed documents, artifacts, postcards, photographs or other evidence (such as architectural information or first person interviews) on a narrative topic of local historical interest.
Every time period has its own art form that speaks its nature most
effectively. In 1980, Teresa de Lauretis prophetically stated that, if
we compare modern and postmodern fiction with their times, science
fiction will most likely be that form for us. In such a way, science
fiction has come to encode our hopes, fears and dreams as they relate
to the meetings of technologies, genders and bodies. This course will
explore three different periods in science fiction as they relate to
gender, the other great anxiety of our time: Wetware (biological life),
Hardware (machine-life) and Software (intelligent-life). Sci-fi starts
from the premise of ‘what if’ and explores our ambiguous feelings
around gender, race, and technology—and the gendering or racializing of
technology—in startling ways. Film, fictions and comics we will study
include Frankenstein, The Handmaid’s Tale, Terminator, Bladerunner, Max Headroom, Metropolis, Brazil, Neuromancer, Star Trek’s borg, and Battlestar Galactica’s cylons.
Serving as an introduction to the theory and practice of visual rhetoric and multimedia authoring, this course will explore the logic native to digital spaces. Focusing on the special significance of how the 'visual' produces a rhetoric, we will apply those theories to create our own born-digital works in the iLife suite of software. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of visual texts (ebooks, websites, hypertexts, DVDs, computer games) as well as more traditional approaches to visual culture (photography, film, television, comics). We will take stock of a wide range of approaches to the creation and interpretation of visual experience—how we picture text and read images. We will examine the way that visual culture has been historically, culturally, and technologically constructed, and consider how images have changed how we see and relate to each other and the world.
In this course you will be both reading about and authoring new media and multimedia texts. Products for this class will not be the traditional, academic-oriented products, but will instead be texts reliant on several media, various modes and perhaps even competing logics. We will work with all kinds of texts and you will produce a variety of works that incorporate varied media, as well as explore some of the most recent theories regarding the challenges to authorship these types of products invoke. We will also be looking at and composing short texts with rhetoric in mind, culminating in presentations of student works at the end of the course.This course can also be taken as English 4330: Creative Multimedia.
The eCreate Lab seeks to undermine the expected and traditional nature of a humanities computer lab as a place solely for technology and its access. Instead we are implementing programs in the eCreate that privilege people and collaboratory practices. We find ways to encourage active learning, participatory cultural projects and the creation of personal media. Toward this end, TheLab supports digital research, advises in the creation of technological resources and provides innovative solutions to technological issues as a part of the digital research efforts of UTA's English Department graduate students and faculty. It provides education, training and ideas (including a mandatory Technological Proficiency Accreditation for all graduate students in English), as well as access to cutting-edge systems and software and the potential for a transcultural exchange with scholars in and from Mexico City. The eCreate Lab continually upgrades and expands its equipment in order to meet teaching and research in the department.
The ongoing mission of eCreate is to foster innovative work across a broad spectrum of media, areas, and departments – drawing on the fields of humanities computing, the new media arts, and interdisciplinary and transcultural explorations of all kinds – to support and enhance the teaching of literary concerns through the integration of technology in the classroom, the study of born-digital forms, the creation of learning objects and other resources, and to assist in finding technological solutions. We offer workshops, one-on-one training, and a space for interdisciplinary work.
Important Disclaimer: The responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained on these pages lies with the authors and user providing such information.
Faculty Profile
Mail Box: 19035, Carlisle Hall/eCreate Lab-Preston Hall, Room No.: PH311 
817-272-2692 
817-272-2718 
