ABSTRACT

In 1992, at the onset of the digitally networked aged, publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and novelist William Gibson issued their collaborative artist book Agrippa (a book of the dead), whose last pages contained a self-encrypting, “vanishing” poem on a diskette. The poem immediately went viral on the networks and clinched Agrippa’s status as a prototypical networked book or “book that became a network.”

Basing his talk on Agrippa as well as on The Agrippa Files site that he and graduate students built to document the book’s media and contexts, Alan Liu speculated on how a “network archaeology” might be possible that extends the scholarly approaches of “media archaeology” and “the history of the book” to past works that are networked.

Liu concluded with a presentation of the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) online system that the Transliteracies Project he directs created to capture networks of past writers, readers, and works through present social-network technologies. RoSE is built on the following rules:

• Treat individual works of media as proto or micro-networks
• Treat micro-networks of individual works as part of a macro-network
• Treat the past as a network
• Treat past and present networks differentially

BIO
Professor Liu is Chair and Professor of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program, and the author of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. He founded the NEH funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara, Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and the University of California multi-campus, collaborative research group, Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading.