http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/index.php?issue=5 This issue is dedicated to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig, a true pioneer of the digital humanities.

Over the last several years, I have simultaneously been doing two very different kinds of writing about new technology, one examining race and digital media, often in relation to representation and identity, and one engaging the formal and phenomenological structures of new media. I am continually amazed by how easy it is to hold these two types of work apart and have come to believe that the very forms of electronic culture encourage just such a partitioning or modularity, making it hard to sustain connections across fields of knowledge. In our engagement with digital media, we tend to focus at one level or on isolated examples, unable to move between modules or across scales.

Many writing on new technology in the mid 1990s commented on the parallels between the ways of knowing modeled in computer culture and in theories of poststructuralism. Meanwhile, critical race and postcolonial scholars have highlighted how certain tendencies within poststructuralist theory simultaneously respond to and marginalize blackness. This maneuver may at least partially be possible because of a parallel and increasing dispersion of electronic forms across culture, forms which simultaneously enact and shape these new modes of thinking. Certain modes of racial visibility and knowing coincide or dovetail with specific technologies of vision: if the electronic underwrites today's key modes of vision and is a central technology in post-World War II America, these technologized ways of seeing and knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges and representations of race.

In trying to understand how difference matters in the digital era, we should perhaps suspect that the very structures of our information economy (and of the code that underwrites it) look a particular way today precisely because the Civil Rights and other freedom movements happened at mid-century. Both cybernetics and Civil Rights were born in quite real ways of World War II and are caught in tight feedback loops. Certain aspects of modularity, fragmentation, and dispersion that are endemic to digital media also structure the more covert forms of racism and racial representation that categorize post-Civil Rights discourse. I am not so much arguing that one mode is causally related to the other, but, rather, that they both represent a move toward fragmentary or modular ways of knowing and of organizing information, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the later half of the 20th century. From Charles Babbage's 19th century "Difference Engine" to Derrida's 1980s neographism "Différance," the notion of difference has served as a provocative metaphor for thinking about language, culture, politics, technology and identity, while it has simultaneously fueled our thinking about both race and identity.

This issue of Vectors stages multiple examinations of the notion of difference as it plays out in a variety of spheres, discourses and practices, while also privileging race and ethnicity as a central throughline of digital culture, a recurring ghost in our networked machines. Wendy Chun's "Programmed Visions" queries the work of the archive in the 20th century, investigating in particular our continued cultural beliefs that race is somehow knowable and mappable. In creating a kind of anti-archive, this project hints at the many ways in which race and (genetic) code mutually construct each other. In "Nation on the Move," Minoo Moallem deploys the Persian carpet as a powerful analytic for the varied ways that nations travel and differences are consumed. The project toggles across scales, moving fluidly between theoretical paradigm and lived reality and resisting the temptation to fix the meaning of the carpets in only one register or place. Jennifer Terry's "Killer Entertainments" seeks to contextualize a diverse collection of video footage related to the Iraq War, drawing out threads of connected meaning between what might seem to be diverse clips. She asks probing questions about each video, designed to focus our attention on the larger political and social webs of meaning that engender each excerpt's production and circulation.

Projects by David Goldberg and Christian Sandvig also tease out the oft-repressed connections that structure diverse aspects of daily life, in times of both crisis and normalcy. "Blue Velvet's" evocative explorations of the cityscapes of New Orleans both pre- and post-Katrina help us to understand that the seeds of the devastation wrought by Katrina were sown years before the storm touched ground. In mining the subterranean layers of the city's history -- from historic redlining to the budget cuts of the neoliberal era -- the project powerfully connects the dots between culture, politics, economics, and ideology. In "The RED Project," Sandvig and his team extend our conceptions of redlining from real estate or insurance policies to the invisible Wi-Fi networks that enable so much of our privileged connectivity in the present. They have created a prediction machine that refuses the purely indexical and quantitative dreams of so much of technology, instead pushing us to question what operations of power such mimetic fantasies paper over or conceal.

Mark Kann likewise questions a certain faith in predictability or rationality. In "Deliberative Democracy and Difference," he argues that theories of deliberative democracy must suppress certain variables or predispositions in order to model a world of rational discourse and democracy and instead offers a simulated glimpse into how such theories are likely to fall short. The final project of this issue, "ThoughtMesh," continues our goal of including in each issue lively "tools to think with," projects that serves as springboards to collaboration or interaction rather than as mostly "finished" pieces. As with "The RED Project," the team behind ThoughtMesh invites you to push beyond the surface of your screen and the modular nature of much of digital culture toward larger enmeshed meanings.]]> en-us Tue, 10 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT usc.vectors@gmail.com http://www.vectorsjournal.net/issues/05_issue/deliberativedemocracy/main.html
Mark Kann's "Deliberative Democracy and Difference" unpacks the core assumptions of such theories, questioning any easy fantasy of disinterested discussion and evaluation. He challenges the notion that participants in deliberative democracy proceed solely via rational discourse. As was the case with those early denizens of cyberspace, we can not easily shed our predispositions and emotions. We carry our histories with us in complex ways, whether we are entering Second Life or a deliberative forum, and these histories powerfully shape our ability to act 'neutrally.' Further, systemic conditions of inequality and oppression mean that some participants will experience arguments or spaces that may seem 'objective' to some as laced through and through with power.

Kann's argument proceeds largely as linear text, looking much like a traditional print article ported to the online spaces of Vectors. But Kann has worked with designer Alex Ceglia to enact his argument through a series of animated models or simulations that bring his words to life. The last of these simulations invites you to join in, assuming the role of moderator in a deliberative forum. Algorithmically revamping the classic role playing game, Dungeon and Dragons, this exercise illustrates the degree to which preexisting (and typically gendered) traits can reroute the experience of a seemingly 'neutral' interaction, enabling some to speak more freely and forcefully than others.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.net/issues/05_issue/deliberativedemocracy/main.html http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/bluevelvet/ Vectors. For the past two years, we at the journal have returned more than once to Katrina and to the cityscapes of New Orleans. We are intent both on keeping the city and its ongoing struggles in scholarly view and on exploring the possibilities for multimodal expression to capture the complex histories interlaced in what our government would have us believe was simply an act of nature. "Blue Velvet: Re-dressing New Orleans in Katrina's Wake" represents our most sophisticated exploration of this terrain. Combining sound, text, photography, video, and several maps, the piece sculpts an evocative and poignant landscape that nonetheless refuses all registers of nostalgia, insisting as it does that we locate Katrina and the Crescent City among multiple trajectories of policy, memory, and representation.

While the piece proceeds via a loose linear structure, Goldberg, Hristova, and Loyer complicate this linearity via a logic of accretion and sedimentation. Meaning shimmers and dissolves, responding to the mouse and accumulating elsewhere, asking the user to follow its twists and turns into darker places. Words break apart but also serve to reorient us, allowing both drift and continuity. Such an information architecture serves to reinforce key claims of the project, foregrounding the reality of, for instance, a structural racism that always seems to disappear from view, connecting the dots between life in New Orleans and the growing prison population of the United States. As Goldberg observes, "Incarceration has many modalities."

It is crucial that we continue to underscore - as "Blue Velvet" so powerfully does - that the tragic events that unfolded in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast were possible precisely because of years of neoliberal policies that underwrote the necessary conditions for such devastation in the first place. Likewise, the decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq directly impacted ongoing efforts to repair the city's levees, with pursuit of empire trumping domestic infrastructure and safety. Several non-profits estimate that the cost of one day of the war in Iraq for the U.S. is $220 million. The cost of the war for one day would almost have completed the levee repairs begun in Louisiana in the years before Katrina. The poetic pace and haunting spaces of "Blue Velvet" take us closer to that truth than any evening spent with CNN.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/bluevelvet/ http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/nationonthemove/index.html Nation on the Move, Persian carpets function as both literal objects of textual analysis and also as metaphors for how objects of transnational exchange are produced, marketed and consumed. Along the way, they accrue a multiplicity of meanings and provide glimpses into complex circuits of labor, ideology and imagination. Erik Loyer's interface for the project is deceptively simple, mobilizing a playful metaphor for the weaving process itself, as users are invited to make connections between nodes of information, artifacts and analysis by stretching a string across the surface of an image. Moallem's analysis is dense with allusion and a multiplicity of voices that create a rich (dare I say?) tapestry of perspectives, analytical paradigms and potential axes of investigation. Among the most powerful elements of this far-reaching exploration are the author's own ethnographic research materials, which remind us of the labor and lived experience of the women who actually make the carpets. Their stories and experiences are rendered through images, conversations and testimonies that ground the analysis of broader circuits of distribution and consumption.

Nation on the Move is also one of the first Vectors projects to deploy an alternative indexing system which makes the project's full contents available via an interface, generated dynamically from the database of materials feeding the project. The visualization engine used for this parallel interface reveals the categories and connections used to map the materials feeding Loyer's interface, but significantly, each item in the database is assigned a discrete URL to facilitate citation, indexing and accessibility. Although the primary Vectors interface remains the richest and most stimulating means of experiencing Moallem's work, we hope that making each element of her research and analysis available externally will help the project find a broader audience and suggest possibilities for extending her investigation even further.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/nationonthemove/index.html http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh
This project, created as a collaboration between Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich, aims to facilitate the intelligent parsing and tagging of the content of academic articles hosted either externally on the net at large or internally on the Thoughtmesh server. The system then generates connections via tag clouds of the contents of all articles tagged using Thoughtmesh protocols. Like all metadata schemes, Thoughtmesh is only as useful as its community of users makes it and its power grows exponentially as more users begin to see its value and feed their own content into the system. Each issue of Vectors features at least one such "tool to think with," which invites contributions and functionality beyond the bounds of a one-time publication. Part of the promise of Thoughtmesh is its appeal to clearly defined constituencies within the academic community. And while certain sectors of academia -- particularly in the humanities -- continue to struggle to see the value of online publication, Thoughtmesh offers to amplify the value of electronic publication by making it not only more timely, cost-effective and widely distributed, but also more intelligent, dynamic and contributing to a more vibrant cultural discourse.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/programmedvisions Vectors, the piece urges you to shift your line of vision and to think about the larger stakes our frenzy of digitization might likely conceal.

The piece begins by locating race as an archive and also as a potential origin for all archives, "as justifying the desire for an order and an origin." As the user begins to navigate, traditional expectations of the cursor's effect are frustrated and denied. Text shifts and emerges via an internal logic that confounds our epistemophilic desires. Historical texts, scientific treatises, legal documents, excerpts of theory, and snippets of fiction all collide. Quotes are cut off, sources are unclear, everything's a bit opaque and chaotic: all in all an archivist's nightmare. Clicking the blue triangle reveals a map of sorts, but there is no easy transit from this overlay to the data 'below.' By segregating the macro from the micro and divorcing the detail from the overview, the piece frustrates our expectations of digital media. From Mapquest to video games, electronic forms and their interfaces encourage us to imagine that we can zoom effortlessly between scales and link easily from point to point. "Programmed Visions" derails any such pretense of mobility and control in order to take us elsewhere, insisting we can never fully "know" racial difference or its multiple valences.

Race permeates this archive, even as the archive refuses to unfold for us, underscoring the strange mutability of race as at once origin and effect. The structure of "Programmed Visions" reminds us, as does an excerpt from Ann Laura Stoler within the archive, that race and racism "take on the form of other things." In the interplay between "form" and "content," we are meant to understand that our desires to standardize the world and make it interoperable are not innocent. Such desires inform today's coding practices and information architectures, but they also permeated eugenics in the early 20th century, if in slightly different forms. Race should read as a root cause in such operations, inhabiting our very systems of classification and structure.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/programmedvisions http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/killerentertainments
Terry's text also refuses the screen-media convention of text that has been reduced to digestible lexia. The micronarratives, profiles and backstories that make up Terry's analysis, like the unedited videos themselves, insist on a certain investment of time, thought and connection-making. Curiosity and patience are rewarded with a rare feeling that one is not simply the conduit for one of several predetermined responses being called up by mainstream media or academic commentary. In an age when the Google search engine can claim to return over 6 million references to "iraq war" in "(0.11 seconds)," the issue no longer seems to be gaining access to information so much as knowing what to do when we have it at our fingertips. Part of the power of Terry's commentary lies in the flat understatement of her text. When she drops raw figures -- such as the fact that coalition forces have fired more than 250,000 bullets for every "insurgent" killed in Iraq -- the number seems to hang impossibly on the page. The point is not to dramatize, shock or dismay, but to suggest the importance of educating ourselves out of our narrowness of concern. The Iraq war is happening now -- with men and women killing and dying in our names whether we like it or not. We owe it to them, at the very least, to watch, read, listen, think, and then decide for ourselves exactly how we intend to act.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/killerentertainments http://pactlab-dev.spcomm.uiuc.edu/red/
Maps, as Francois Bar reminds us in the peer response to The Red Project, function as powerful metaphors that can shape or constrain the thinking of policy makers and government officials as well as the public at large. Geographer Bernard Nietschmann stated it even more bluntly, "Maps are power. You either will map or you will be mapped." The Red Project stages a mashup of two powerful epistemes represented by the high-tech satellite imaging of Yahoo Maps and demographic data mined from the U.S. Government's Census Bureau. Sandvig strikes a delicate balance between these two ways of viewing/quantifying the world and its inhabitants by creating a tool that does not fully embrace either system. Users of the Red Project are presented not with an indexical rendering of actual wifi signals (as if such a thing were possible!), but with a prediction engine which invites speculation, interpretation and resistance. Sandvig's project thus resists the temptation to simply replace one cartographic and epistemological regime with another, opting instead for an analytical tool that invites reflection on systems of knowledge, power and representation.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://pactlab-dev.spcomm.uiuc.edu/red/