CFP: Invisible Culture

From H-Material Culture:

DEADLINE EXTENDED!!!

Call for Papers: Invisible Culture
Invisible Culture, Issue 12, The Archive of the Future/The Future of the
Archive: Spring 2008

Guest Editors: Aubrey Anable, Aviva Dove-Viebahn and April Miller

Deadline for completed papers and manuscripts: December 20, 2007

Submissions and inquiries should be sent, via email, to ivcarchiveissue@gmail.com.

The archive as a place, a collection, a history, a concept, and a practice has always been unstable and replete with cultural meaning. In his essay "Valery Proust Museum," Theodor Adorno associates museums with death rationalized, pointing to how the modern form-the physical space, technology, and ideology-forces a chronological order onto its objects.

In the digital age, however, archives no longer need necessarily be housed physically, nor must they abide by chronological schema. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich describes the database-a sort of digital archive-as too much information with "too few narratives that
can tie it all together." Do future manifestations of the archive inevitably negate those traits we have come to associate with archives in the past or present? Does the digitization of the archive give us an opportunity to rethink the archival project in terms of how the archive, its access and selection, affects knowledge, authority, and subjectivities? What might the archive of the future look like or accomplish? What does it mean to question the future of the archive?

Coming out of an interdisciplinary graduate conference on the same topic held at the University of Rochester in the Spring of 2007, the peer-reviewed, electronic journal Invisible Culture invites papers and projects that explore the shifting space, practice, and cultural meaning of the archive. Submissions in the form of 2,500-6,000 word papers from all disciplines, as well as digital projects (i.e. virtual archives or explorations of the same) are welcome.

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:
. What are the effects of the digital/technological broadening of access on the research of primary materials in literature, film, and art history?
. How might access to a wide range of historically related-but physically separated-texts change the parameters of analysis and methodologies?
. Legality, authority, or dissemination of archives
. Digitization and the dynamics of globalization, imperialism, colonial and post-colonial discourse(s)
. Distinctions between public and private spaces
. Anonymity, erotics of encounter, role playing, and new or temporary subjectivities formed in contributing to or observing digital archives
. Archived memory in life-writing (autobiography, letters, journals, blogs, etc.)
. Archival access, relevance and organization
. Digitization and the "aura" of a work
. Audience, authorship, the researcher, and community involvement
. The role of manuscripts, illuminated or otherwise
. Preservation and transmission of oral or written histories and memory
. Literary variorum
. Questions of old canons, new canons, and the end of the canon


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Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute.

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/

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