Very excited to be collaborating with Simon Natale of Loughborough University on this great Special Issue for Convergence! Here’s the full CFP:
“Rethinking the distinction between old and new media”
Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
Guest editors: Frederik Lesage (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Simone Natale (Loughborough University, UK)
Expected date of publication: August 2019
Since at least the early 1990s with the publication of groundbreaking works such as Manovich’s The Language of New Media, the rise of digital and online media into every facet of our lives has been conceptualized through distinctions between “new” and “old” media. Yet, scholars have recently started to criticize such concepts, arguing that they are inappropriate to describe media change and that they do not help improve our understanding of the relationship between different media in contemporary societies. Approaches to the biography and social life of media have examined how definitions of oldness and newness are attributed to technologies and artefacts throughout their lifetime, providing an interpretative model to rethink processes such as convergence, media encounters, and the transformations that media technologies and practices experience throughout time.
This special issue will further advance these reflections. It aims to illuminate places, cases, and contexts where distinctions between old and new media break down, and to propose alternative theoretical frameworks that redefine media change and the interaction between different media. Papers are invited that interrogate how changing definitions of old and new media inform the trajectory of specific media as well as their interrelations, moving away from rigid conceptions of oldness and newness to emphasise, instead, the persistent changes that characterise our relationship with media objects and technologies.
Potential topics
The editors welcome contributions that explore questions such as:
Deadline for abstracts: 31th May 2018
Please send a 500-word abstract and a 100-word bio to the guest editors: flesage@sfu.ca and s.natale@lboro.ac.uk
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to send full contributions by 31st October 2018
In a time when you can quickly generate massive lists of references on hundreds of platforms, you would think generating a bibliography of instruction manuals for Photoshop would be easy!
Not so…
A while back, I thought it might be useful to track down an authoritative list of all the third-party instruction manuals and tutorials for Photoshop published since its launch. The focus of this research was on Photoshop which meant we excluded similar application software like Corel DRAW as well as the other software of the Adobe Creative Suite like Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEfects and Premiere. The manuals containing both Photoshop and the other software mentioned above were excluded too. The only publications considered were those specifcally and solely on Photoshop. Some software was included in as much they are released as part of Photoshop itself or directly related to it: Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Image Ready and Camera Raw. This second group was classified in a separate catalogue titled “Related”. We mostly used WorldCat but to find the references with comparisons to other online databases such as Outlook Online (ELN).
Pretty simple, right?
One of the main difficulties we encountered was the sheer amount of slight variations on different titles (ex. re-editions like second, third, gold, pro, etc.) It was also surprising to see how often the same title appeared with different metadata. This might not come as a shock to researchers who have done extensive bibliographic investigations but it sure as hell came as a surprise to me. You would think such a resent topic would be so complicated.
We did find a few interesting things in the data that we collected which I will put up in future posts but I’d be interested to find out how others have dealt with this challenge.
A big thanks goes out to Artemisa Bega who was the RA on this bibliographic project!
I’ve been noticing a new genre of article about software popping up here and there over the past few years. I wouldn’t say it’s unavoidable or rampant but it does creep up once in a while when announcements come out about support for a particular piece of application software being discontinued or no longer being sold: the software eulogy.
Here are just three recent examples:
I initially hesitated to use the term ‘eulogy’ because, as in all the cases above, the software is still ‘alive’. But apparently it is still considered eulogizing if it involves praising the person or thing. I guess in some cases the articles aren’t quite ‘praising’ so… What is of interest to me here is rather the way in which biographical tropes around death are used to describe software. It raises an interesting question around what kinds of things can be referred to as dying or ‘killed’ as implying that they require ‘care’ prior to such an event taking place.