Inertia: Momentum
A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities
April 28 – 30, 2016 @ University of California, Los Angeles
Keynote Speaker: Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT)
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As the modern experience becomes increasingly immersed in technology, digital tools also allow us to archive, recreate, remix, and revive material artifacts, sound objects, and soundscapes. In recent years, music, media, and the digital humanities have become intertwined, creating new modes of scholarship that move beyond the written page to incorporate performers, designers, and engineers of digital spaces and sounds.
Last year’s inaugural Inertia Conference asked what the digital humanities and sounds studies could offer to each other; this year we build on that momentum by asking what these disciplines can offer to our understanding of the past. How do we tell stories of sound and what kinds of stories does sound tell? How can digital technology (re)constitute historical practices and new paradigms of historical thinking? Can these new approaches broaden our definition of sound—and if so, should they?
Inertia: Momentum welcomes submissions on a broad range of topics related to sound, music, and multimedia. We are particularly interested in alternative format presentations, including workshops, lecture-demonstrations, roundtable discussions, performances, poster sessions, and other collaborative activities. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
• Reconstruction of the past through digital media and the digital humanities
• The imagined past in sound and media: antiquarianism, medievalisms, romanticism, modernism
• Histories of sound and music within and without the digital
• Sounding texts and the textuality of sound: manuscripts, notation, software, and code for sound design, archival, curation, and production
• Social media and social justice: the sounds of politics and protest, online and off
• Soundscapes and virtual worlds in architecture, archaeology, sound engineering, and beyond
• Digital approaches to queer(ed), racialized, and gendered soundscapes, including contested sites of speech and expression within the academy
• Open source, open access, copyright, and the politics of information architecture
• Theory and practice in production cultures, from musical performance to multimedia composition and editing
• GIS, locative media, and musical geographies: charting musical networks, old and new
• Digital pedagogy: incorporating technology into learning environments
Please send 300-word proposals as a Word document [last name_first name.docx] to inertiaconference2016[at]gmail.com by 1 December 2015. Along with your name, affiliation, and email address, indicate any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.