scholarly journals Shelving Books?: Representations of the Library in Contemporary Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Margaret-Anne Hutton

Established for over two decades, archive studies have often conflated the archive and the library, leading to the theoretical neglect of the latter. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, critical and historical works on the library have been on the increase. At the same time, a body of fictional texts offers a very specific representation of the library in the digital age. The literary libraries discussed here – a sample published post-2000, drawn from seven national literatures and representing various genres – champion the codex and construct the library as an affective, nostalgic material space. Acknowledging the ubiquity of digitization whilst nonetheless eschewing a simplistic material/ digital binary, they rework familiar tropes such as the universal library, the library destroyed, and the library as a symbol or repository of cultural memory. Finally, these are spaces of (gendered) familial psychic dramas, tracing oedipal conflicts, family romances and troubled transgenerational legacies.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Heekyoung Cho

This article examines the webtoon (wept'un)—a term coined in Korea to refer to webcomics—which is arguably the most pervasive and powerful form of digital serial production in twenty-first-century Korea. Webtoons have developed by utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partial) free web/mobile distribution, profit from advertisement and page viewing, and transmedia production. As a new cultural medium, the webtoon is thus inseparable from its platform and organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from the ecosystems that other (global) mega-platforms create. Engaging with the insights from recent studies of platforms and utilizing empirical media analysis, I argue that Korean webtoon platforms demonstrate the continuing and intensifying dependency of art on platforms—a process that I call “the platformization of culture”—and that this specific type of platformization is reinforced by what I call “the artist incubating system.” The case of webtoon platforms reveals a number of telling aspects of media ecosystems for art production in the digital age—aspects that are spreading and expanding to various fields of art.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Stewart M. Hoover

Abstract The persistence of religion in the twenty-first century has renewed the importance of scholarships devoted to it. At the same time, the digital age has re-positioned and recentered the affordances of mediated circulations around "the religious." This increasing presence and significance of media and religion suggests that substantive scholarships of religion must necessarily articulate media as well. Religious controversies therefore present a special challenge and a special opportunity to scholarships of media and religion. New ways of doing scholarship, and doing so publicly, present themselves. All scholarships of mediated religion must necessarily be public, so scholarship is articulated into these circulations, and at the same time can build on and benefit from knowledge-building that occurs outside the formal boundaries of the academy. This paper explores emerging theories of digital mediation and proposes a circulation-focused understanding of the role, place, and potentials of scholarships today.


2021 ◽  
pp. 507-524
Author(s):  
Ted Gioia

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, many pundits announced the “death of jazz,” yet recent years have shown the exact opposite trend. Jazz has returned to popular culture, whether one looks to rising stars such as Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, or to popular artists (Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar) who draw heavily on jazz influences. At the same time, jazz started showing up in hit movies such as La La Land, Green Book, and Whiplash, where it was mythologized as a touchstone of musical excellence and artistry. All these trends served to reinvigorate a jazz tradition that many had written off as moribund, creating a powerful convergence of historic styles and new commercial styles. This chapter also explores the jazz vocal scene of recent decades, and its contribution to this broadening of the genre’s appeal. Other artists discussed include Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and Bobby McFerrin. The chapter concludes with an assessment of jazz’s relationship with the emerging technologies of the digital age.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512093731
Author(s):  
Floor Fiers

The prevailing presence of social media in the twenty-first century has changed processes of self-presentation. This study questions how Instagram users employ the platform’s tagging features to claim and seek status. Content analysis on a random sample of 787 posts carrying the hashtag “instagood” revealed that they utilize the tagging affordances to make their audience aware of their capital. In addition to displaying their capital through tags, however, users employ hashtags and account tags to increase their visibility on the platform. Interestingly, analysis shows the prevalence of attempts to conceal these obvious paratextual status-seeking strategies. Over half of the Instagram posts in the sample showed traces of the creators taking active steps to hide their use of like-hunter hashtags, through which users explicitly ask other Instagrammers for likes and follows. This finding builds upon Marwick’s concept of aspirational production: The perfecting of one’s online presentation does not only happen by producing a high-status image, but also by concealing the “inauthentic” nature of this production. Furthermore, the fact that traces of obvious status seeking can be found online implies that the lines between Goffman’s front- and backstage are blurred in the digital age.


Author(s):  
Ralph McLean

The image of Britannia long pre-dated the eighteenth century, but throughout its history she was often viewed as the victim of outside aggression rather than as the defender of the realm. This chapter demonstrates how Thomson’s refashioning of Britannia, most notably in the masque Alfred, which he and David Mallet wrote for the young Prince Frederick, created an imperial icon that was subsequently used to export a brand of maritime patriotism across Britain’s expanding Empire. Thomson’s Britannia, representing both the Scottish and the English contribution to the British state, celebrates the Anglo-Scottish Union and the impact that this Union had on liberty and commerce. Such was the popularity of Thomson’s vision of Britannia that it inspired repeated imitations, emulations, and parodies, and continues to be a part of the British cultural memory in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Jon Bing

The article celebrates the reopening of the National Library of Norway in its refurbished Oslo building in the centenary year of Norway's independence. It describes the evolution of the Library and its separation from Oslo University Library. The deposit function of the Library is centred on its Mo i Rana branch, which now stores material in digital form as well as in traditional formats. The author considers the place of the Library in the wider Norwegian library scene, where the National Library can play a coordinating role. The Norwegian Digital Library, for example, involves other libraries, information providers and system vendors, as well as the National Library. In the digital age, what the National Librarian of Norway describes as the ‘extended notion of texts’ means that society is documented not only by conventional texts, but by sound and images, broadcasts and performances. Preserving these ‘texts’ and making them available to a wide range of users is a challenge of the twenty-first century that the National Library is happy to accept.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksey Mamychev ◽  
Daria Petrova ◽  
Yana Gaivoronskaya ◽  
Olga Miroshnichenko ◽  
Yulia Karimova ◽  
...  

The monograph covers various areas of influence of digitalization on the legal, economic and political system of society. Fundamental, sectoral, and interdisciplinary aspects of the transformation of law in the digital age are considered. Special attention is paid to the interaction of law, politics and the digital economy, which is reflected in the legal policy of modern Russia. The content of the work allows us to show the multidimensional nature of digitalization. The monograph will be useful for legal scholars, legal practitioners, students and postgraduates studying in the field of "Jurisprudence", as well as all those interested in the digital transformation of society, law and the state.


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