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Book Club

Book Club

Early in the project, the academic team of PI Simone Natale, Co-I Ross Parry and RA Petrina Foti began to meet every two weeks for a two-hour session to share and discuss relevant literature to the project, including their own work. ‘Book Club’ as these sessions affectionately began to be known proved to be invaluable to developing the project’s theoretical framework. After the initial few weeks, the academic team slowly open these sessions up to the Circuits of Practice partners and advisers.

During these meetings, a different article or book chapter would be selected for the group to read ahead of time. The group would then spend between one to two hours discussing the article and how it relates to the project. Topics ranged from media studies, museology, computer science, and the history of technology.

Book Club has proved to be a valuable way to connect with our project partners and engage with academic literature outside of our individual professional interests. The Circuits of Practice Book Club has fostered an interdisciplinary community of academic peers and we anticipate that these sessions will continue long after Circuits of Practice has formally ended.

The list of Book Club sessions are as follows:

22 May 2020

  • Natale, S., 2016. Unveiling the Biographies of Media: On the Role of Narratives, Anecdotes, and Storytelling in the Construction of New Media’s Histories. Communication Theory, 26(4), pp.431-449.
  • Natale, S., 2019. If software is narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, artificial intelligence and the biographies of ELIZA. New Media & Society, 21(3), pp.712-728.

5 June 2020

  • Foti, P., 2018. Collecting and exhibiting computer-based technology: Expert Curation at the Museums of the Smithsonian Institution. Routledge. [Chapter 6 ‘Internal processing The methods of curating computer-based technology’ and Chapter 7 ‘The ever- evolving future.’]

22 June 2020

  • Parry, R., 2019. How museums made (and Re-made) their digital user. In Museums and Digital Culture (pp. 275-293). Springer, Cham.
  • Drotner, K., Dziekan, V., Parry, R. and Schrøder, K.C., 2018. Media, mediatisation and museums: A new ensemble. In The Routledge handbook of museums, media and communication (pp. 1-12). Routledge.
  • Parry, R. 2018. Socially Purposeful Digital Skills. In Connecting Digital Practice with Social Purpose: Let’s Get Real 6. Report from the sixth Culture24 Action Research Project (Culture24, December 2018), pp. 34-35.

8 July 2020

  • Cavarero, A., 2014. Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. Routledge. [Translator’s Note & Introduction]
  • Turkle, S. ed., 2011. Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT press. [ ‘What makes objects evocative?’ pp. 307-326]
  • Kopytoff, I., 1986. The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, 68, pp.70-73.

29 July 2020

  • Gardner, J.B. and Henry, S.M., 2002. September 11 and the mourning after: Reflections on collecting and interpreting the history of tragedy. The Public Historian, 24(3), pp.37-52.
  • Bunch III, L.G., 2019. A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump. Smithsonian Institution. [Chapter 5 ‘Finding the Stuff of History’ and Chapter 8 ‘Exhibiting American History Though an African American Lens: Making a Way Out of No Way’]

16 September 2020

  • Weber, M., 2016. Self-fulfilling history: How narrative shapes preservation of the online world. Information & Culture, 51(1), pp.54-80.
  • Author and Circuits of Practice partner Marc Weber attended.

25 September 2020

  • Keramidas, K., 2015. The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide. Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture.
  • Author and Circuits of Practice partner Kimon Keramidas attended.

30 September 2020 / 7 October 2020

  • Bell, J.A., Kobak, B., Kuipers, J. and Kemble, A., 2018. Unseen connections: The materiality of cell phones. Anthropological Quarterly, 91(2), pp.465-484.
  • Bell, J.A., Kuipers, J., Hazen, J., Kemble, A. and Kobak, B., 2018. The Materiality of Cell Phone Repair: Re-making Commodities in Washington, DC. Anthropological Quarterly, 91(2), pp.603-633.
  • Author and Circuits of Practice partner Joshua A. Bell attended both sessions

14 October 2020

  • Domínguez Rubio, F., 2016. On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach. Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), pp.59-86.

28 October 2020

  • Agar, J., 1998. Digital patina: Texts, spirit and the first computer. History and Technology, an International Journal, 15(1-2), pp.121-135.

11 November 2020

  • Rosner, D.K., Shorey, S., Craft, B.R. and Remick, H., 2018, April. Making core memory: Design inquiry into gendered legacies of engineering and craftwork. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).

25 November 2020

  • Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 2004. From ethnology to heritage: The role of the museum. SIEF Keynote, Marseilles, April, 28(4).

3 December 2020

  • Yurchak, A., 2015. Bodies of Lenin: The hidden science of communist sovereignty. Representations, 129(1), pp.116-157.

9 December 2020

  • Natale, S. and Bory, P., 2017. Constructing the biography of the Web: An examination of the narratives and myths around the Web’s history.
  • Co-author Paolo Bory attended.

3 March 2021

  • Mihelj, S., Leguina, A. and Downey, J., 2019. Culture is digital: Cultural participation, diversity and the digital divide. New Media & Society, 21(7), pp.1465-1485.
  • Authors Sabina Mihelj & Adrian Leguina attended.

24 March 2021

  • Cox, B.J., Naroff, S. and Hsu, H., 2020. The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 4(HOPL), pp.1-74.
  • Author and Circuits of Practice partner Hansen Hsu attended.

19 April 2021

  • Ceruzzi, P.E., 2019. Calvin Mooers, Zatocoding, and Early Research on Information Retrieval. In Exploring the Early Digital (pp. 69-86). Springer, Cham.
  • Author Paul Ceruzzi attended.

5 May 2021

  • Schorch, P. (2013). Museum encounters and narrative engagements. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, pp. 437-457.

26 May 2021

  • Lawrence, H. M. (2021) Siri Disciplines. In Your Computer is on Fire. (Mullaney, T.S., Peters, B., Hicks, M. and Philip, K. eds.) MIT Press, pp. 247-275
  • Author Halycon Lawrence attended.

9 June 2021

  • Cameron, F., 2007. Beyond the cult of the replicant: Museums and historical digital objects: Traditional concerns, new discourses. In Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse. (Cameron, F. and Kenderdine, S., 2007) MIT Press, pp. 49-75.

23 June 2021

  • Atkinson, P., 2010. The curious case of the kitchen computer: products and non-products in design history. Journal of Design History, 23(2), pp.163-179.

7 July 2021

  • Domínguez Rubio, F., 2020. Still life: Ecologies of the modern imagination at the art museum. University of Chicago Press.
  • Author Fernando Domínguez Rubio attended.

28 July 2021

  • Sumner, J., 2014. Defiance to compliance: Visions of the computer in postwar Britain. History and Technology, 30(4), pp.309-333.
  • Author James Sumner attended.

4 August 2021

  • Parry, R., 2013. The end of the beginning: Normativity in the postdigital museum. Museum Worlds, 1(1), pp.24-39.

26 August 2021

  • Atkinson, J., 2018. Steampunking heritage: how Steampunk artists reinterpret museum collections. In A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage (pp. 205-220). Routledge.