DC-MRG THE DIGITAL CULTURES PROJECT:

A University of California Multi-Campus Research Group
Director: William Warner, UC Santa Barbara

 


The Digital Cultures Project (DCP) brings together faculty and graduate students from across the UC system who are actively engaged with the history and theory of new digital technologies and the ways in which they are changing humanistic studies and the arts. It also serves as an agency through which faculty and graduate students who have not been actively engaged in these matters can learn about them in order to incorporate them in their future work. The project is based at UC Santa Barbara, where the English Department is the home to Transcriptions, an NEH-supported project concerned with digital technology in research and teaching. The Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG) sponsors five interrelated activities.
Each year we sponsor at least three kinds of activities:
  1. Conferences:

    UC Digital Cultures Research

    Conference
    (2000)

    Archive Cultures
    ( 2001)

    Interfacing Knowledge
    , (2002)

    e(X)Literature
    ( 2003)

    Copyright and the Networked Computer: A Stakeholders' Congress (2003)

    Digital Retroaction (2004)

    Transliteracies (2005)

  2. The DCP fellows have been:

    Michael Heim
    (2001)

    Lev Manovich
    (2002)

    Geert Lovink
    (2003)

    Joana Drucker
    (2004)

  3. Graduate Conferences:

    Digital Utopia? Digital Dystopia, (2002)

    Thinking/Building/Living (2003)

    Life By Design ( 2003)

    Digital Storytelling (2004)
These activities have been administered by the Director, together with an advisory committee, consisting of representatives from all but one of the eight general campuses of the university. The Digital Cultures Project is made possible by the support of our sponsors.

A Digital Broadside


"After 9/11: Wiring Networks for Security and Liberty"

As part of the English Department's Transcriptions Project, directed by my colleague Alan Liu, I've joined with other faculty and grad students in teaching our students to use their core abilities to read and write so as to build web-pages that link their work to the resources and communities available through the World Wide Web. The events of 9/11 have dealt a powerful shock to this project. It is forcing us to ask difficult new questions about the utility and dangers of intelligent networks and the global communication of information. My talk this morning will seek to do three things: first, understand how the attacks on 9/11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, have succeeded in compromising our networks; second, I will end this talk by arguing that 9/11 should not mean that we reconfigure American networks by bartering away our liberty in the name of security. Instead, in the wake of 9/11, we should think through ways to make our networks more secure by making them more robust, more extensive, and more intelligent.

The first networks compromised by 9/11 were the television networks that brought us the event. The affective power of the WTC disaster arises from the particular kind of concentrated televisual spectacle it produced. The first strike against the WTC tower #1 brings the cameras of news media into play around both towers, so that live coverage can capture images of a Boeing 767 [check] striking WTC 2. The second strike changes the meaning of the event.

Follow this link to one third of the short talk, "After 9/11: Networking for Security and Liberty".

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