Jeffrey Schnapp

The on-site installation of GHOST at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art involves iPads distributed in ten locations within the museum. All are running GHOST live via wifi in the kiosk mode, so that as a landing screen visitors experience the open pages of a Guest Book where the (erased) titles of the six database documentaries fade in and out intermittently. The titles vanish the moment one touches (or mouses over them), even as the piece…
 
Read more

The Short Guide, a subsection of Digital_Humanities that my coauthors (Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld and Todd Presner) and I devised both for DH practitioners and for department chairs, deans, promotion committees, provosts and university presidents, is now being released, section by section and with a video preface, by the online edition of the Bard Graduate Center’s journal of decorative arts, design history and material culture W 86th. Though it refers back to the arguments of…
 
Read more

Judging by the buzz at various MLA convention panels this past week, Digital_Humanities seems to be striking a chord. A bunch of reviews have come in since my last posting in early December, 2012. Among them, our favorites are Luca de Biase’s review for the Nova supplement to Sole 24 Ore, Lev Manovich’s post on his Software Studies blog and the book’s selection by Mr. Bit (Matteo Bittanti) for his Best of 2012 category in the online Italian edition of Wired. Here’s a…
 
Read more

Digital_Humanities came out last week from MIT Press and the open edition quickly made the rounds and even yielded a couple of flash reviews. Here’s the first one, by Dene Grigar, of the Creative Media + Digital Culture Program at Washington State University, published in the online edition of Leonardo: I begin with a simple directive:  Everyone in the academy should read Digital_Humanities, no matter the academic discipline or position, because the book provides a cogent…
 
Read more

Reading Don Guttenplan’s smart piece on the digital humanities in today’s New York Times (“Visiting Ancient Egypt, Virtually”) has me reflecting upon how central the redesign of archives, libraries and museums has become to my own thinking as a researcher, teacher and design thinker. In my mind, “redesign” has never meant calling into question the fundamental roles performed by such institutions of memory.  Rather it has always implied expanding their compass and impact, enhancing their ability to…
 
Read more

The inaugural performance of the band The Masses took place at the Teatro Franco Parenti in Milan this September 17 and 18, as part of the MiTo international music festival. With Daniel Perlin on the mixers, bass and drums, Adam Michaels on drums and guitar, Shannon Harvey on keyboards, and yours truly as vocalist and video designer, we performed live versions of the 19 tracks from The Electric Information Album plus an extra improvised encore…
 
Read more

For a copy of the limited edition vinyl LP, go to http://wearethemasses.bandcamp.com/. From the liner notes: On July 15, 1967, a vinyl proposition packaged in a dangling preposition was released into the world under the title of the book that inspired it. I’m talking about “the first spoken arts record you can dance to,” issued by Columbia Records as an acoustical interface to the Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore cut-and-paste Marshall McLuhan paperback primer The Medium…
 
Read more

Four weeks from today The Masses will be debuting E-Info Age Bookmix (The Second Spoken Arts Record You Can Dance To). Behind the cryptic title lies a collaborative work that combines a media archeology of late 1960s attempts to remediate the paperback book for the television age (by, among other things, augmenting it via LP remixes), and a live musical performance of The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). The latter has itself been remixed in…
 
Read more

I have long (secretly) collected phishing messages, tracked their evolution, laughed at their crude hucksterism, and marveled at their (occasional) refinements. Now, I’m publishing my favorites at The Temple of Malicious Muses, a little tumblr blog. If you have your own submissions, please send them along. Masterpieces and failures eqully welcome.

As this year’s edition of the Library Test Kitchen wraps up, the role of spaces of silence, contemplation, refuge and retreat in the library of the future has emerged as a frequent topic of conversation.  For several decades now, libraries have striven to become network hot spots, informationally “hotter” than potential rival public spaces like coffee houses. In so doing, they have quite properly built upon their traditional identity as information hubs and sites of…
 
Read more