Designing Culture: Investigating the Link Between Technology and Culture, an interactive transmedia project by Anne Balsamo

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I use it as an on-line filing cabinet. When I learned about Anne Balsamo's recently published book, part of a larger interactive transmedia project, I decided that it warranted more than a "plug" and a quick link.


It warranted a shrine.
For this reason, I've embedded a number of videos and presentations from the project's website, along with a host of links.  Prepare to spend some time exploring her work over time!  It is food for reflection.


DESIGNING CULTURE     "Investigating the link between technology and culture, this transmedia project is realized as a print book, a dvd, and this interactive flash website ." -Designing Culture


"Anne Balsamo is a Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a co-founder of Onomy Labs, a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Previously, she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research group at Xerox PARC that created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She is the author of Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, also published by Duke University Press." -Designing Culture


Video Overview:

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.


BOOK
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
Anne Balsamo, Duke University Press, 2011


BLOG: Designing Culture


DVD (packaged with the book)
Women of the World Talk Back: Gendering the Technological Imagination


PUBLIC INTERACTIVE WALLS: Designing Technological Literacies -Interactive Wall Books "Interactive Wall Books are large-scale dynamic mixed-media documents"
Here are a few links to online versions of the wall books for your convenience: Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 1     Episodes in the History of Reading, Part II  Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 3     Deslizate En El Tiempo: Epsodios en la Historia de la Communicacion (Developed for the Children's Museum of Mexico City)  Science for All Ages

XFR: EXPERIMENTS IN THE FUTURE OF READING  A museum exhibit.
(The above link will take you to the Onomy website's version of the exhibit. The project version can be found on the Designing Culture website.)


MAPS: Mapping the Technological Imagination Spatial Documents.
Learning to Love The Questions - an interactive semantac map, for the online journal VECTORS
Where is the Museum? Mapping the Distributed Museum -presentation at Museums and the Web 2011
Ways of the Hand: Tinkering in the Digital Age -presentation at DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media conference, 2010
Working the Paradigm Shift: The Cultural Work of the Digital Humanities - presentation at the Digital Arts Conference, 2008


VIDEOS
Tools for the Asking

Anne Balsamo HASTAC Presentation 4_16_2010 from IML @ USC on Vimeo.


Gendering the Technological How a Robot Got its Groove


Cool Fusion: Designing Culture - Working the Paradigm Shift



RELATED
Reviews of Designing Culture by Lawrence Grossberg, Cathy N. Davidson, and John Seely Brown (Amazon.com site for the book)
Balsamo's New Book Details Technological Imagination at Work
Annenberg News, 8/10/11
HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advance Collaboratory


Anne Balsamo worked on the following project:
Tangible Interface for Viewing the Aids Quilt

"This project will develop an application that enables collaborative browsing of a database of images of panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt that have been “virtually stitched together.”  The application will be used with Onomy Lab’s Tilty Table, a tangible interactive device that serves as a display surface for large-scaled images." -(info from Anne Balsamo's blog)

Quick Post/Link: digitalculturebooks: New Media Studies & Digital Humanities at University of Michigan

I graduated from the University of Michigan years ago and would have been thrilled to participate in a project such as the new "digitalculturalbooks".  Sadly, the my undergraduate education pre-dated the internet and the explosion of engaging technologies!  

Here is information about digitalculturebooks from the "about" section of the website, via graduate student Jonathan Tarr:


digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. digitalculturebooks seeks to explore all aspects of new media and its impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication and will present work that exhibits and advances the understanding of the relationship between humanities and digital technologies. The imprint aspires to both investigate and demonstrate new forms of scholarly practice in the humanities.
digitalculturebooks is an experimental publishing strategy with a strong research component. By making our content available in print and online, we intend to:

• develop an open and participatory publishing model that adheres to the highest scholarly standards of review and documentation;
• develop a model for press/library collaboration at Michigan and elsewhere;
• showcase and extend Michigan's leading role in the development of digital resources;
• encourage and participate in a national dialogue about the future of scholarly communication.

• About Us
• Our Books
• Book Series
• Use Guidelines

• News
• For Authors
• XML Publishing

What We're Reading

• Au Courant
• booktwo.org
• Collision Detection
• danah boyd
• Media Commons
• Mimi Ito
• O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing
• Publishing Frontier
• Scholarly Communications @ Duke

 Jonathan Tarr established a Facebook page for digitalculturebooks.    More info to come!