Just want to thank the organizers so much, for doing 
this and for giving me a chance to talk
about my work but more importantly, for
giving us here at CU a chance to
think of ourselves as a community of d.h
practitioners. It's really been a
remarkable five years for me at CU and
over those five years I've really come
to feel like I'm part of a community of
people who practice D.H across a
wide variety of departments from schools
and colleges and programs and yeah it's
been very stimulating and gratifying. So
my job today is just to talk about the
work that I do, there's something of an
implicit argument and that is that media
archaeology, which is when I'm focusing
on nowadays, is a digital humanities
practice. I don't spend a lot of time
explicitly talking about that, so I'm
just going to start with the straightest
scholarship that I do, which is just an
encyclopedia. It's super straight. So I've
been, over the past two or three years
working on editing the Johns Hopkins
guide to digital media with Marie Laura
Ryan and Ben Robertson, which will be
published in the spring. Incredibly, I
don't think this sort of resource exists
yet at all. I'm not sure why and
interestingly enough or not we spent
several months actually debating amongst
ourselves and debating with Johns
Hopkins press about whether to call it a
'guidebook to digital humanities' or
'digital media'. Me personally, I didn't
feel equipped to wade into the debates about
visual humanities to handle that, but I
also think that the term 'digital media'
provides a nice way of framing the
entries that we solicited. Entries
have a very strong historical dimension,
so we have a lot of entries on the
history of gaming, history of computing,
history of electronic literature and
digital art, so our collection I think
builds a nice bridge between the past
and the present so that the field of
digital media isn't purely a present-ist
field of study and I think we're
finding too that as history starts to
accumulate and as the preservation of
digital artifacts become more
and more of a concern, older practices
and technologies are attracting more and
more scholarly attention and sort of
symptomatic of that trend is the
emergence of media archaeology, which
seems to be really gathering ground in
terms of a popular field of study. So
meteor archaeology, that leads nicely
into my other somewhat less straight but
still straight other project. This is
my monograph book project that will
be published in spring and it's called
'Reading Writing Interfaces: From the
Digital to the Bookbound' I think the only
non straight part of it that it starts
from the present and works its way
backwards. It begins and ends with magic.
This is something that I'm becoming more
and more interested in. So from the
stylized David Copperfield inspired
apple launches for iPads, which were
usually touted as truly magical and
revolutionary products of the direct
quote to the impending launch of Google
glass which was already being marketed
as a device that will provide
answers without having to ask, we are
well into the era of the marvelous.
Marvelous in the sense of the wondrous
for it's hard not to wonder... what did
I do? I didn't do anything. Ok, it's hard
not to wonder at how the iPad simulates
the relationship between inertia and
friction or at how Google Glasses is an
invisible portal to information now
embedded into our perception of the
world. But it's also marvelous in the sense
that these devices seem to have
supernatural properties, if they want
to market themselves as that, but of
course, supernatural they are not and so
a lot of the work that I do especially
in the in the framework of media
archaeology, works to demystify these
devices. Especially by looking at how
writers demystify these devices. Looking
specifically at how interfaces limit and
also create certain creative
possibilities. Technological constraints
are nothing new which is why my book
ends in the 19th century talking about
Emily Dickinson's work with fascicles,
little hand sewn and hand created
booklets, but I think what is new is that
the interfaces themselves nowadays,
digital interfaces
and therefore their constraints, are
becoming ever more difficult to perceive
because of the blinding seduction of the
wondrous which at least partly comes
back into view again once we undertake
an excavation of how things could have
been otherwise. So I think that despite
our best efforts to literally and
figuratively bring invisible
interfaces back into view, perhaps
because we're so enmeshed in
these media or because there's a sort of
an overwhelming ideology of the
user friendly that makes it very
difficult to see through, I think at best
we may only partly see the shape of
contemporary computing devices. Media
archaeology however, I think,  provides a
sobering conceptual friction in the way
that certain theorists identified with
the field, use it to undertake and this
is a quote "our hermeneutic reading of
the new against the grain of the past
rather than telling of the histories of
technologies from past to present". On the
whole, media archaeology does not seek to
reveal the present as an inevitable
consequence of the past, but instead looks
to describe it as one possibility
generated out of a heterogeneous past.
Also at the heart of media archaeology,
which is something that I really
identify with, is an ongoing struggle to
keep alive what Siegfried Zielinski
calls variantology or this discovery of
individual variations and the use or
abuse of media, especially those
variations that defy the ever increasing
trend towards standardization and
uniformity among competing electronic
and digital technologies. So following
Zielinski, a lot of the work that I've
been doing recently involves uncovering
a nonlinear, non teleological series of
media phenomenal or ruptures as people
call it sometimes, as a way to avoid
reinstating a model of media history
that tends towards narratives of
progress and generally ignores neglected
failed or dead media. So this book
project that I was just telling you
about, 'Reading Writing Interfaces', it's
also evidence of doing through building,
curating and tinkering in the media
archaeology lab here at the University
of Colorado, Boulder. This is a lab that I
founded in 2009 with a generous grant
from ATLAS and I use it for
cross-disciplinary experimental research
and teaching actively using the tools,
the software, the platforms from the past.
So what makes the media archaeology lab
so unusual is that it is not a museum of
vintage computers. It is a place
where everything works, we've got
computers dating back from 1977 and we
also have a growing collection of
typewriters as well as magic lanterns
and projectors so, dead media of all
kinds. Dead in a sense of zombie media
right? It's dead but still living. Without
having the ability to directly discover
what you can call the variantology of
early computing, without experiencing
what it's like to operate a computer
which predates standardized interfaces
and whose target audience is the D.I.Y-er, the tinkerer, the curious. The
entire book project would not have been
possible and I wouldn't understand, to the
extent that I do now, this ideology of
the user-friendly that I mentioned
briefly that's produced so many of these
closed, supposedly interface free
interfaces. The Mal Hause houses most of
the computers I talk about in my book
including
an Apple II, an Apple Lisa and an Apple
Macintosh. I've sort of focused on
these computers in particular as
really crucial computers for
understanding this development
towards the closed interface. The Apple II,
as some of you I know, was one of
the first and most popular personal
computers and most affordable. It
used the command line interface and it
was one of the first computers adopted
by the, especially the writing community,
to create innovative works of digital
literature in their early 1980s. Whereas
the Apple Lisa, which was the first I
would say commercial computer to have
a graphical user interface, not
affordable though, you could buy it for
ten thousand dollars which is about
twenty thousand dollars in 2013 and then
the Apple Macintosh which I don't have
an original one, but something like this
which came out a year later and that was
the first affordable graphical user
interface and so I've been using the
mouse a kind of thinking device that
enables me to tinker and to track the
utterly unique material specificities of
these computers, their interfaces,
platforms and software, all of which I
think in the end makes it possible to
defamiliarize or make visible for critique,
contemporary invisible interfaces and
platforms. So this, I was also asked
to touch on what sorts of support
I'd like to see happen at CU, so this
leads into my little wish list.
So even though the mal is
absolutely intertwined with my research
as well as the research of about a half
a dozen graduate students, as well as
local and visiting researchers, artists
and writers, at the moment it's
considered part of my service to the
University and yet everything about the
lab as I've just said, comes out of
research and it generates research for
me and a small but growing community of
artists, students and researchers. A more
pressing problem is that despite all the
attention and accolades the Mal
continues to get it currently has a
budget of zero and I'm perversely proud
of this because... I mean, look at this.
There's so much information on this
website, so the website itself, I'll just
go back to the homepage, was made by a
small group of incredible undergraduate
students working on one of their
T.A.M projects for ATLAS last spring, made
for me for free. The catalog, which is
still very much in process but it should
have about a thousand individual items
in it and this was created by graduate
students as well, one of whom is sitting
right there at the back, Kyle, who you
should all say hi to. Kyle did an
incredible job working with me this
summer long with a PhD student Eric Isant
and you know there they come with
standard English literature training but
these graduate students learn how every
single one of these computers works in
the lab which is a feat in itself, they
then learned what accessioning was, then
they accessioned all a thousand items in the
lab, they came up with an appropriate
metadata schema to describe all of these
items, they cataloged everything, they
photographed
everything and put it up on the website.
I also get most of my computers
software, hardware as donations, which
just comes from me haunting Craigslist and making friends with random
strangers on ebay and just sort of
endless networking. But this is the
thing, is that as the lab becomes more
more well-known and as digital artists
and writers start to donate their
original five and a quarter inch floppies to
me from the late 70s and 
throughout the 80s, the lab has a
growing responsibility to preserve
and protect these works and we're just
absolutely not equipped to do that. We
don't have the expertise, we don't have
the resources, so this is a real
issue for me. So again I just want to
underline that I've been tremendously
fortunate to have developed the sort of
grassroots community of people who are
willing to help me. On campus we have
people, friends and IT through the
library's art, journalism, film and
communication. People who have donated
their computers, their equipment, their
time and their expertise. We also have
donors from across the country who will
occasionally create road trips, vacations,
to come to the Mal and help us
repair computers or just help us in
general.
So in short I think if the Mal is going
to continue to thrive and grow into one
of the largest of its kind in North
America, then we really have to find a
way to get access to expert help and
resources across campus that are often
locked away from us because of various
institutional boundaries that make
sharing resources extremely difficult, if
not impossible and I think this kind of
flexibility and interdisciplinarity
would also in the end, lead to a more flexible,
more expensive notion of what counts as
research in the Humanities beyond the
single authored book. That working in a
lab, curating, archiving, all
these activities, are absolutely
researched and the way that the media
archaeology lab crosses disciplinary
boundaries as well as the boundaries
between the institution and
the broader public represents not the
way digital humanities or digital media
will be done in the future, but the way
it's being done now and somehow we need
to figure out how to make institutional
structures more nimble and more able to
react and accommodate entities such as
the media archaeology lab. So thank you very
much for your attention.
