SpecLab
Subtitle: digital aesthetics and projects in speculative computing
By: Johanna Drucker.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
ISBN-13: 9780226165073; 9780226165080
Subjects: Humanities -- Research -- Data processing; Humanities -- Digital libraries; Image processing -- Digital techniques; Information storage and retrieval systems -- Humanities; Metadata
Description: "Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized 'Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker's contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age--models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the background to SpecLab IX; title: Speculative computing; title: From digital humanities to speculative computing; title: Speculative computing: basic principles and essential distinctions; title: Projects at SpecLab; title: Temporal modeling; title: Gallery 2.1: temporal modeling; title: Ivanhoe; title: Gallery 2.2: designing Ivanhoe; title: Subjective meteorology: a system of mapping personal weather; title: Gallery 2.3: subjective meteorology; title: Modeling a critical approach: metadata in Absonline; title: Gallery 2.4: artists' books online; title: The patacritical demon; title: Gallery 2.5: sketches for the patacritical demon; title: From aesthetics to aesthesis; title: Graphesis and code; title: Intimations of (im)materialty: text as code; title: Modeling functionality: from codex to e-book; title: Aesthetics and new media; title: Digital aesthetics and critical opposition; title: Lessons of SpecLab.