Emoji Dick: Prequels and Sequels

Speaker(s): Lisa Gitelman

This is the second in a sequence of talks that takes a 2010 "translation" of Moby Dick into emoji as an opportunity to consider the conditions of possibility that might delimit books and literature in the contemporary moment, when "print"—whatever else it may have been—is quickly becoming a backformation of digital media. A massive white codex and extended work of crowd-sorcery, Emoji Dick points toward the varieties of reading and of not reading that characterize our ever more digitally mediated, data-described, and smart-phoney world. Here I proceed by considering Emoji Dick in light of a key group of precursors and successors.

About the Speaker:
Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward A Media History of Documents (Duke University Press 2014). She has an edited collection, "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013). Previous works include Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press 2006). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. 

For lunch, RSVP here: http://bit.ly/2jcFVYG