Listen to the podcast of this Digital Dialogue

A MITH Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, April 15, 12:30-1:45

MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Rezzing Books: Codex Technology in the Metaverse”

by KARI KRAUS

Since its official launch in 2003, Second Life, the popular 3D interactive world created by Linden Lab, has become an unlikely destination for librarians, bibliophiles, authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, and book artists. At the center of this nexus of users is the book itself, a virtual artifact that differs from its physical counterpart by being comprised of bits, not atoms; of textures, animated scripts, and geometric primitives rather than paper, ink, cloth, and thread. In this talk I will examine the infrastructure that supports this in-world bibliographic culture: specifically, the technologies used to create and read SL books; the social networks designed to promote and popularize them; the information services to collect, access, curate, and catalogue them; and the legal and economic systems developed to commodify them. I will look at how the Second Life platform conditions our ideas of “bookness” by presenting us with interfaces for reading that borrow incongruously from print and manuscript traditions, first-person shooter games, and even military aviation. And I will suggest that the mixed economy of Real Life and Second Life makes it necessary to understand these immersive books as compound objects that exist within a system of relationships that include both in-world and out-world content, thereby complicating efforts to study, link, document, and preserve them. The talk will also include a demonstration of books I have made in SL and discuss future projects.

KARI KRAUS’s research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, and intellectual property. This past fall she joined the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor. Kraus is a local Co-PI on a Library of Congress NDIIPP grant for preserving virtual worlds, including the multi-user virtual environment Second Life; a project participant on an NEH Digital Humanities Level I Start-Up grant on approaches to managing and collecting born-digital literary materials for scholarly use; a founding member of the editorial board for MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network under development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book; and a member of the internal advisory board for Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB). She has taught at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, and in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University. In 2006-2007 she was technology evangelist for Zotero, an open-source research tool for the Firefox web browser, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Coming up @MITH 4/22: Jonathan Auerbach (English), “Early Cinema as New Media”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).