Transforming culture in the digital age

Call for papers

Tartu, Estonia, 14-16 April, 2010
http://www.transformingculture.eu

Increasingly, we see new forms of culture being born in the variety of online environments. Users have become producers taking over production of online content and traditional hierarchies of users and producers are collapsing. At the same time, traditional memory institutions like museums, archives, libraries and acknowledged artists struggle to make sense of the transformations that are coming together with new technologies. In this interdisciplinary conference we aim to look at the questions as how such developments influence culture - how is culture transformed in the digital age with a specific focus on the intersection of individuals and institutions. We hope to look at the notion of culture and transformations of the cultural heritage through a variety of disciplines ranging from arts and history to heritage studies and from museum studies to sociology and from media and literature studies to archival studies. The conference calls for variety of people both researchers and practitioners to discuss and analyze how digital culture is produced and consumed both in traditional and new forms.

This conference aims to explore the questions above through wide variety of themes. Possible paper topics are (but not limited to):

CONFERENCE THEMES

I ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL IN THE CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION

1. Changing User

·         User, consumer, creator, producer?

·         User as a creator of the content

·         Role of the user in the heritage world

·         Cultural participation

·         Using globalised content

·         Global or local user practices?

·         Digital libraries and user preferences

·         User in the archives: practices and expectations

·         Museum collections in the hand of the visitor

2. Re-Mediating Personal Memory

·         New forms of storytelling and expression

·         Blogging your own history

·         Digital photos and videos as part of self

·         Re-imaging self in the digital age

II CULTURAL MEMORY AND MEMORY INSTITUTIONS

3. Rewriting Cultural Memory

·         Rewriting the histories of arts

·         Changing hierarchies: canon, centre and periphery

·         New cultural history and the reception strategies

·         Role of the audiovisual archives

·         Archive as a creator of the content of memory

·         Digital resources of the cultural memory

4. Cultural Heritage

·         Questioning and interpreting the concept of heritage

·         From national to global: collections as a determining power

·         Collecting heritage today

·         The role and the future of the original

·         Future perspectives on different memory institutions

·         Making digital content available

·         Cultural heritage and Web 2.0 strategy

III LANGUAGE OF ART

5. Digital Literature

·         The perspectives of digital literature

·         Hypertext and cybertext theory

·         Author and the cyberspace

·         Reader and the cyberspace

·         Electronic poetry and electronic narratives 

·         Blogging and literature

·         Fan culture in Internet

·         Creating new canons: questioning the borders of literature

6. Digital Art

·         Digital creativity

·         Immaterial art and real artists

·         Creativity in surveillance environment

·         Artworks  between locations

·         New media art and problems of reception

·         Digital art and authorship

·         New media art education

 

For participating: please submit a 500-word abstract with the name and institutional affiliation of the speaker (mailing address & email address) through our conference website. The deadline for abstract submission is 23. November, 2009.