As a librarian, I help students with research projects all the time. For this class, to start out, I decided I wanted to do a little experiment related to research on new media studies. The story by Borges and the article by Vannevar Bush inspired me, as they were from two completely different disciplines. So I chose three different library databases in three different subjects and did a search for “new media” to see what would come up (to find out about library databases and what types of information you can find by searching through them, see these two pages).
The three databases I chose were the MLA International Bibliography (MLA is the Modern Language Association and this database contains the following subjects: literature, language, linguistics and folklore), the ACM Digital Library (ACM is the “Associaion for Computing Machinery and this database contains all the articles from their journals, newsletters and conference presentations) and Sociology Abstracts (contains international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences).
I wanted to see what searching for “new media” in these different disciplinary databases would turn up. What types of research, projects, ideas are out there that are being described as “new media.” Here is what I found.
MLA International Bibliography
(It is interesting to note that the MLA doesn’t have “new media” as a subject heading. The term “new media” is instead found in titles, abstracts and journal names. The subject headings that are found instead are, for example: “electronic publishing,” “internet,” “computer technology,” “social network,” “relationship to hypertext,” “role of digital technology,” “role of image-text relations,” and “technology and media.”)
Almjeld, Jennifer Marie. “The Girls of MySpace: New Media as Gendered Literacy Practice and Identity Construction.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 69.6 (2008): 2252-2253.
Galey, Alan. “Signal to Noise: Designing a Digital Edition of The Taming of a Shrew (1594).” College Literature 36.1 (2009): 40-66.
Hughes, Janette Michelle. “Poets, Poetry and New Media: Attending to the Teaching and Learning of Poetry.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 68.9 (2006): 3769.
Jansz, Jeroen. “The Paratextual Pleasures of Reading about Playing Video Games.” New Media & Society 10.5 (2008): 793-801.
Parish, Nina. “From Book to Page to Screen: Poetry and New Media.” Yale French Studies 114 (2008): 51-66.
Tabbi, Joseph. “Locating the Literary in New Media.” Contemporary Literature 49.2 (2008): 311-331.
Turner, Henry S. “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare.” South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association 26.1-2 (2009): 197-217.
Zimmer, Michael. “Renvois of the Past, Present and Future: Hyperlinks and the Structuring of Knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 95-114.
ACM Digital Library
Biswas, Amitava et al. “Assessment of mobile experience engine, the development toolkit for context aware mobile applications.” Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology. Hollywood, California: ACM, 2006. 8. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1178823.1178834&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Holmes, Tiffany Grace. “Eco-visualization: combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption.” Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity \& cognition. Washington, DC, USA: ACM, 2007. 153-162. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1254960.1254982&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Kerhervé, Brigitte, Anis Ouali, and Paul Landon. “Design and production of new media artworks.” Proceedings of the ACM workshop on Multimedia for human communication: from capture to convey. Hilton, Singapore: ACM, 2005. 11-16. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1099376.1099381&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Leggett, John J., and I. I. I. Frank M. Shipman. “Directions for hypertext research: exploring the design space for interactive scholarly communication.” Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Santa Cruz, CA, USA: ACM, 2004. 2-11. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1012807.1012812&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Manovich, Lev. “Inventing new media: what we can learn from new media art and media history.” Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia. Berkeley, CA, USA: ACM, 2003. 363-363. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=957013.957015&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Merhi, Yucef. “Super atari poetry.” Proceeding of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: ACM, 2008. 1137-1138. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1459359.1459602&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Polaine, Andrew. “The flow principle in interactivity.” Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment. Sydney, Australia: Creativity \& Cognition Studios Press, 2005. 151-158. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109180.1109204&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Sumner, Tamara, and Josie Taylor. “New media, new practices: experiences in open learning course design.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Los Angeles, California, United States: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1998. 432-439. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=274644.274703&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Winget, Megan A. “Archiving the videogame industry: collecting primary materials of new media artifacts.” Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. Austin, TX, USA: ACM, 2009. 459-460. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555400.1555512&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.
Sociology Abstracts
Atanasoski, Neda. “Roma rights on the World Wide Web: The role of internet technologies in shaping minority and human rights discourses in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12.2 (2009): 205-218.
Brooker, Will. “All Our Variant Futures: The Many Narratives of Blade Runner: The Final Cut.” Popular Communication 7.2 (2009): 79-91.
Cheng, Chung Tai. “New Media and Event: A Case Study on the Power of the Internet.” Knowledge 22.2 (2009): 145-153.
Duque, Ricardo B, and Marcus Antonius H Ynalvez. “Internet practice and sociability in South Louisiana.” New Media & Society 11.4 (2009): 487-507.
Giddings, Seth. “Events and Collusions: A Glossary for the Microethnography of Video Game Play.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2009): 144-157.
Gorski, Paul C. “Insisting on Digital Equity: Refraining the Dominant Discourse on Multicultural Education and Technology.” Urban Education 44.3 (2009): 348-364.
Groshek, Jacob. “The Democratic Effects of the Internet, 1994–2003: A Cross-National Inquiry of 152 Countries.” The International Communication Gazette 71.3 (2009): 115-136.
Katz, James E, and Chih-Hui Lai. “News Blogging in Cross-Cultural Contexts: A Report on the Struggle for Voice.” Knowledge 22.2 (2009): 95-107.
Kucklich, Julian. “A Techno-Semiotic Approach to Cheating in Computer Games: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2009): 158-169.
Wright, David W, and Twyla J Hill. “Prescription for Trouble: Medicare Part D and Patterns of Computer and Internet Access Among the Elderly.” Journal of Aging & Social Policy 21.2 (2009): 172-186.
Super Atari poetry, digital versions of Shakespeare, combining art and technology to help the environment, studying internet culture in the South, in Eastern Europe, among the elderly, to study democracy, human rights, medical care… New Media studies is cross-disciplinary, interactive, and ever evolving.
This just scratched the surface of what I found in the databases. Does anything strike you as interesting in these lists?
