After testing the waters in the Grad Center’s Digital Humanities program last year, I have taken the plunge into the English PhD. I am particularly interested in the ways periods of rapid technological transformation affect memory (cultural and personal). Many tools that seem to displace the burden of memory or alter the responsibility of cultural preservation, shift our sense of ourselves, and I am interested in developing work that tests or represents the ways we share memory across time and space and across the span of technological advances and obsolescence.
I look forward to another provocative and motivational semester with the ITP team!
-Jojo
Jojo — How did I not realize those were your research interests… Fascinating!! To share a relevant story: during the big snow storm last month, my parents dug up a cassette tape of a radio show that broadcast during the huge blizzard that snowed out their wedding over 30 years ago. They were excited to listen to it, since it mentioned their plight, and they wanted to reminisce, but alas, they don’t own a tape player anymore! Your research interest made me think about that…
Sara! I love this story. Especially after a show&tell in Matt Gold’s amazing Text Transformations seminar last spring, I am really interested in the junk of replaced systems, the evolutions of outmoded to retro, and that stash of cables and cords that everyone seems to have. The library has a secret graveyard of card catalogs and old machinery. My mother still has several shelves worth of audiotaped lectures — the content is still useful but inconvenient in the age of on-demand access.