How do you conceptualize the history of media? What can media history teach us? What kinds of cultural negotiations are involved in refashioning the past with new media? How does our own technological present affect the ways we define, interpret or even appropriate the past?

Doing Media History: Archives, Ages, and the Accretion of the Past

New media, in the ordered ways by which they gather together historical artifacts and thus endow them with historical weight, are perpetually producing the past in various forms of coherence. -- Will Straw, "Embedded Memories," Residual Media, pg. 14

Whenever Samuel Pepys posts a blog entry or Rick Astley rolls a new young fan, the past asserts its (sometimes unwelcome) presence through media. These cultural residues invite us to re-examine our relationship to history, particularly within a field obsessed with "newness." This forum explores how we do media history, and is open to discussions on (among other topics): media archaeology; media in transition; residual media and the role of nostalgia; theorizing the archive; the "four information ages"; periodicity; and our relationship to other historical studies of the book, film and culture.

The HASTAC Scholars Program recognizes graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in innovative work across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. This group of select Scholars from institutions across the nation act as the eyes and ears of HASTAC?s virtual network, bringing the work happening on their campuses and in their region to international attention. The HASTAC Scholars facilitate regular discussion forums on www.hastac.org, sometimes in conjunction with guest presenters, on a wide range of topics related to digital media and learning. Past discussions have focused on "Participatory Learning" (with social networking pioneer Howard Rheingold, led by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz) and "Metaverses and Scholarly Collaboration" (led by Ana Boa-Ventura). Forthcoming discussions will likely include such topics as fair use, digital publishing, online activism, the open source movement, and digital archiving. The HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forums are open to public and we invite your participation!

Whitney Trettien is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she works for the HyperStudio Lab for the Digital Humanities. Her academic interests include computational poetry, medieval robots, history of the book, dictionaries, ars combinatoria and systems for organizing information, both digital and analogue. Whitney is also a Truman Scholar and political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom. In her free time, she makes clothing and music.

Thanks to "dizzyjosh" for posting this image of "the inimitable and brilliant Whitney Trettien" on his flickr stream.