TOUCH-SCREAN MSS

This is a poetry manuscript that examines the epic form, concrete poetic techniques, and science fiction concepts so as to posit a created world of surfaces

Telos Haunts Billboards

This piece is an excerpt from an ongoing hypertext poem, akhilleus, which chronicles the activities of a network of characters interacting with the built world via text. This particular piece follows Telos, a seer of ends, as they appear before a billboard. Telos contemplates billboards as a kind of document, a succession of information planes along the roadway, echoing into and past each other, and also shares a premonition of the end of billboards

Partisanship within the American Civil Libterties Union: the Board of Directors, the struggle with anti-communism, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

The American Civil Liberties Union and an overwhelming majority of its historians have maintained that the organization has devoted its efforts solely to the protection of the Bill of Rights. This thesis examines that claim, focusing on the events that culminated in the expulsion of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the Union\u27s Board of Directors. Relying primarily on the organization\u27s own publications and archives, as well as several insiders\u27 accounts, the analysis concludes that the issue of communism increasingly polarized the Board and, in a gross violation of its nonpartisan commitment to the defense of civil liberties, led ultimately to the Communist Flynn\u27s removal

The Pandemic at Home: Learning from Community-engaged Covid-19 Documentation Efforts in the Southeastern US

Cultural heritage institutions of all kinds around the world responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by launching community-engaged collecting efforts that solicited the submission of documents capturing the daily experience of an historically significant phenomenon. While the pandemic is global in scale, these collecting efforts document the impact of Covid-19 at local or regional levels. This article reports on research to better understand how cultural heritage institutions in the Southeastern United States have developed community-engaged collecting projects. Analyzing data collected from the public websites of 30 institutions, as well as semi-structured interviews with 10 cultural heritage professionals active in the Covid-19 documentation projects at these institutions, this research broadly characterizes the nature of these collecting efforts and surfaces key issues and challenges that have impacted the launch, development, and ongoing management of these collections. These collecting efforts have required the adaptation of existing workflows along with the acquisition of new skills and archival practices, particularly in the area of digital curation. As part of planning and managing these projects, practitioners have grappled with complex ethical questions about how to responsibly and equitably engage communities in the midst of a traumatic event. In both acquiring new skills and reframing an ethics of collecting, practitioners have turned to many sources for learning and growth; notably, communities of fellow practitioners involved in Covid-19 documentation projects have proven instrumental in sharing resources and discussing emergent issues and challenges

Dark arts: Artists' information practices in the care of digital artworks and archives

Artists increasingly use digital technologies to make art, with implications not only for how art is created and experienced, but also for the long-term preservation of a digital visual arts heritage. Due to the rapid pace of technological development, digital artworks require preservation attention before they would typically enter into cultural heritage organizations, potentially altering these institutions’ collection and conservation practices. Often, artists and small galleries act as the first stewards of these works, gaining new skills and finding information resources to address digital preservation issues shortly after the point of creation. For both the present and long-term care of digital artworks, existing conservation and preservation approaches are ill-equipped to attend to the particularities of digital technologies and the shifting ways in which digital art is being created, shared, and experienced by artists and audiences. To guide these new approaches, this research seeks to better understand the social, cultural, and technological factors impacting artists as they care for their artworks and archival materials early on. The research employs a case study design of Paper-Thin, a dynamic artist-run platform that includes an online virtual reality gallery and site-specific installations. The case comprises semi-structured interviews with the artists and curators, a collection of information resources used by the artists in the creation and care of their artworks, and the artworks themselves. Situational analysis methods are applied to position artists’ information practices within the context of broader information worlds, examining how arts communities, socioeconomic factors, and various technologies all shape the ongoing care of digital artworks. The information worlds of these artists encompass traditional art world stakeholders, as well as many new kinds of communities like technology developers and social media users. While collectors, commercial galleries, and museums still play prominent roles, artist-run networked repositories like Paper-Thin have staked out alternative spaces for exhibiting artworks and experimenting with digital technologies. Although these artworks circulate outside of traditional cultural heritage institutions, this research highlights the viability of post-custodial strategies for information professionals in these artists’ information worlds, such as helping artists to gain skills or to access resources crucial for digital preservation tasks

Networked Alternatives: Digital Curation and Artistic Production on Artist-run Platforms

This dissertation explores how artists creatively engaged with digital and networked technologies care for their artworks and related studio or personal archival materials. As digital and new media artworks frequently face preservation concerns and require regular maintenance shortly after the point of creation, artists often become the first stewards of their own work. Central to these artistic engagements, artists leverage digital and networked technologies to circulate artworks in exhibition and display contexts outside of museums and commercial galleries, including online platforms and hybrid gallery spaces that I refer to as ‘networked alternatives.’ I position these networked alternatives in longer histories of artists’ experiments with digital and networked technologies as well as artists’ efforts to effect their own exhibition contexts alternative to arts institutions and markets. Along with the artists, the curators of these spaces play crucial roles in the digital curation of these artworks and archival materials. The curators not only work with artists to mitigate technical issues in the process of staging networked exhibitions but also undertake largely volunteer labor to ensure the long-term viability of artworks featured in these exhibitions. As artists and curators care for these artworks and archives throughout the lifecycle of these materials, they seek out information and learn new skills contributing to situated knowledges needed to perform digital curation labor. From the creation of new artworks to the ongoing care of older works, these artists develop digital curation repertoires that become fundamental to their broader artistic efforts. Processes and practices for managing data across complex information systems are integral to activities involved in creating, exhibiting, and experiencing digital and new media artworks. I analyze these digital curation information needs and practices through the theoretical framework of information worlds, examining the various other individuals, organizations, technologies, communities, and sociopolitical factors that impact these information needs and practices. These artists and curators in turn shape the art worlds and various other social worlds constituting their information worlds; the digital curation repertoires of these individuals both drive and reflect broader changes in how art is created, disseminated, and experienced across these social worlds.Doctor of Philosoph

Talking/Speaking/Stalking/Streaming: Artist’s Browsers and Tactical Engagements with the Early Web

The thesis discusses three artist-made browsers from the late 1990s. As the Web transitioned from a niche information system to global telecommunications infrastructure, these artists created functional software that explored the socioeconomic, political, and cultural ramifications of these rapidly changing networked technologies. The thesis argues that these artworks seized upon the browser—an interface between users and information—as a tactical point of intervention. These artist’s browsers presented alternative interfaces to the Web, visualizing how commercial browsers shape access to networked information while also making available new modalities of interaction. These artworks encouraged users to develop a critical awareness of how the Web functioned, and built on that awareness by offering tactics for interaction. Framing browsing as a union of reading and writing practices, these artists envisioned how the Web might be reshaped if users could fully leverage the browser as a means of both information production and consumption.Master of Art

The unending lives of net-based artworks: web archives, browser emulations, and new conceptual frameworks

Research into net-based artworks is an undertaking divergent from much prior art historical scholarship. While most objects of art history are stable analog works, largely in museum collections, net-based artworks are vital and complex entities, existing on artists’ websites alongside older versions captured in web archives. Scholars can profitably use web archives, browser emulators, and other digital methods to study the history of these works, but these new methods raise critical methodological issues. Art historians must contend with how the artwork changes over time, as well as the ever-evolving environment of the web itself. Probing the piece Homework by Alexei Shulgin as a test case, I investigate the methodological issues that arise when conducting art history research using web archives. In applying these methods, scholars must also attend to the evolving and multiple nature of these artworks. Drawing on the archival theory of Wolfgang Ernst and the records continuum model developed by Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish, I present a framework for conceptualising net-based artworks as plural and heterogeneous archives. This framework is generative of new readings of net-based artworks, accommodates new methods, and can also usefully equip scholars approaching dynamic cultural heritage objects in web archives more broadly

Convergence of spectra of graph-like thin manifolds

We consider a family of compact manifolds which shrinks with respect to an appropriate parameter to a graph. The main result is that the spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator converges to the spectrum of the (differential) Laplacian on the graph with Kirchhoff boundary conditions at the vertices. On the other hand, if the the shrinking at the vertex parts of the manifold is sufficiently slower comparing to that of the edge parts, the limiting spectrum corresponds to decoupled edges with Dirichlet boundary conditions at the endpoints. At the borderline between the two regimes we have a third possibility when the limiting spectrum can be described by a nontrivial coupling at the vertices.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures (small changes, Sec 9 extended

Building a Living, Breathing Archive: A Review of Appraisal Theories and Approaches for Web Archives

The paper provides a review of published literature on the collection and development of Web archives, focusing specifically on the theories, techniques, tools, and approaches used to appraise Web-based materials for inclusion in collections. Facing an enormous amount of Web-based materials, archival institutions and other cultural heritage institutions need to devise methods to actively select Webpages for preservation, creating Web archives that constitute a cultural record of the Web for the benefit of users. This review outlines the challenges of collecting and appraising Web-based materials, places the theories and activities of collecting Web-based materials within the broader discourse of archival appraisal, and points out directions for future research and critical discourse for Web archives