Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities

As both material artifacts and cultural processes, sound objects and musical media invoke the Einsteinian mantra, “nothing happens until something moves.” Music studies have dealt with this concept through the veins of teleology, codification, and rupture, while the Digital Humanities extends this challenge to forms of inertia old and new. This conference appeals to the curator who recognizes the creator in herself; the writer who transitions from word processor to image processing; the composer as user-experience designer; the archaeologist turned 3D installation artist; the scholar as performer.

 

Grown from a tree with many branches, the landscape of the Digital Humanities has evolved into a transdisciplinary network that has tackled topics ranging from the curation of “radiant” texts and the interrogation of multimedia modes of argumentation, to the 3D modeling of historical space and the large-scale mapping of cultural data. Yet the soundscape of the Digital Humanities remains rather quiet, as scholar-practitioners and digital pedagogues have yet to embrace fully the ways in which sound and music can enhance the multimodal forms of teaching and research that the field has championed thus far.

 

This conference 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, and other collaborative activities. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

 

• Sounding texts and the textuality of sound: manuscripts, notation, software, and code for sound design, curation, and production
• Soundscapes and virtual worlds in architecture, archaeology, and beyond
• Open source, copyright, and the politics of information architecture
• Digital pedagogy: technology in the classroom; problems and approaches
• Analog(ue): histories of sound and music within and without the digital
• Theory and practice in production cultures, from musical performance to multimedia composition and editing
• Visualization and sonification: listening through “big data”
• Sonic warfare and digital ethics: surveillance, torture, noise, and silence
• Musical networks, old and new
• Sound play, games, and the ludohumanities 
• GIS, locative media, and musical geographies

Please send 300-word proposals via Word document [last name_first name.docx] to inertiaconference@gmail.com by 15 September 2014. Along with your name, affiliation, and email address, indicate any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.