SHIFTING SPACES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC: EPHEMERA IN THE AGE OF INFINITE MEMORY

ABSTRACT SHIFTING SPACES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC: EPHEMERA IN THE AGE OF INFINITE MEMORY By Geoffrey Gimse The storage capacity of digital systems has expanded at an incredible rate over the past decade. This new and growing space and the rapidly evolving technologies that surround it have become an intrinsic component of the digital creative process, and yet they remain relatively unexamined. The methods by which creative works are offloaded from the human mind, abstracted into data objects, and ultimately placed into an external storage medium are an excellent starting point for this type of critical analysis. This paper seeks to set the groundwork for such an examination by outlining the relationship between storage, memory, and the data algorithms that shape today’s digital systems. By examining digital memory and the storage of text and image from both a software and hardware perspective, it becomes apparent that as storage capacity increases, the relative impermanence and malleability of the objects created within that system also increases. Thus arises an interesting paradox: our ever-growing capacity to store and recall texts ultimately results in the works themselves becoming more ephemeral in nature

Culture and Code: The Evolution of Digital Architecture and the Formation of Networked Publics

Culture and Code traces the construction of the modern idea of the Internet and offers a potential glimpse of how that idea may change in the near future. Developed through a theoretical framework that links Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s theory of the sociotechnical imaginary to broader theories on publics and counterpublics, Culture and Code offers a way to reframe the evolution of Internet technology and its culture as an enmeshed part of larger socio-political shifts within society. In traveling the history of the modern Internet as detailed in its technical documentation, legal documents, user created content, and popular media this dissertation positions the construction of the idea of the Internet and its technology as the result of an ongoing series of intersections and collisions between the sociotechnical imaginaries of three different publics: Implementors, Vendors, and Users. These publics were identified as the primary audiences of the 1989 Internet Engineering Task Force specification of the four-layer TCP/IP model that became a core part of our modern infrastructure. Using that model as a continued metaphor throughout the work, Culture and Code shows how each public’s sociotechnical imaginary developed, how they influenced and shaped one another, and the inevitable conflicts that arose leading to a coalescing sociotechnical imaginary that is centered around vendor control while continuing to project the ideal of the empowered user

Soapbox Session B

Values Beyond Cost: Open Educational Resources in the Humanities Classroom (Deanna Sessions) Towards a Digital Humanities Design Pedagogy (Pouya Jahanshahi) Bridging the Gaps: Digital Humanities Labs as Spaces of Access and Engagement in the University (Geoffrey Gimse) From Fake Participation to Embedded Selves: Four Dimensions of Participation in Open, Online Learning (Kira Baker-Doyle) How to Transition into the Coding World: Lessons Learned from Teaching Humanities Students (Joseph Fanfarelli) Raspberry PMREK (John Bork