The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics

Edited by Andrew Klobucar, New Jersey Institute of Technology

July 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-959-2
Availability: In stock
211pp. ¦ $79 £60 €68

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels.

Florentine Ariosto Jones: A Yankee in Switzerland and the Early Globalization of the American System of Watchmaking

Frank Jacob, Nord University, Norway

July 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-887-8
Availability: In stock
129pp. ¦ $46 £33 €38

This book recounts the story of Florentine Ariosto Jones, who after the Civil War decided to manufacture watches. Combining the cheap labor available at the time in Switzerland with US manufacturing technologies, Jones embarked on his venture to produce affordable watches for the American market. Consequently, he became a pioneer in the business of outsourcing labor for economic purposes through his contracting of labor to Europe. While the company still exists today, very little is known about Jones. The present book will undoubtedly change this by telling the fascinating story of an American adventurer and his pursuit to globalize American watchmaking at the end of the 19th Century.

Mary Hunter Austin: A Female Writer’s Protest Against the First World War in the United States

Jowan A. Mohammed, Nord University, Norway

July 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-753-6
Availability: In stock
169pp. ¦ $49 £36 €41

Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) is often referred to as an important American writer of the early decades of the 20th century, with much of her work concerning nature and Native American culture. Hunter Austin was also considered to be one of the early feminist writers, whose works had an impact on the redefinition of gender roles during the First World War. This study examines the feminist perception of her later years, connecting feminist history to questions related to memory through a study of literature, politics, and interpretations of the past (both feminist and gendered). It demonstrates how far the perception and remembrance of the past are determined by later agendas and considerations. This work is an insightful and detailed study, meant to expand knowledge within the field of collective memory about Mary Hunter Austin’s life and work alike. This book is intended for those with a general interest in feminism, socialism, World War One and gender issues. Academics and specialists in the field will value new research on a crucial figure in American literary history.

Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production

Tracy Gaynor Harwood, De Montfort University and Ben Grussi

March 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-273-9
Availability: In stock
271pp. ¦ $63 £48 €54

This important new work focuses on the pioneers in machinima, considered to be the grassroots and beginnings of virtual production. Machinima’s impacts are identified by the community, supplemented by Harwood and Grussi’s research and experience over a period of 25 years – from game, film and filmmaking to digital arts practice, creative technologies developments and related research and theory. Machinima is the first digital cultural practice to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre. Its latest transformation is evident through the increasing convergence of games and film where real-time virtual production as a professional creative practice is resulting in new forms of machine-generated interactive experiences. Using the most culturally significant machinima works (machine-cinema) as lenses to trace its history and impacts, ‘Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production’ provides in-depth testimony by filmmakers and others involved in its emergence. The extensive reference to source materials and interviews bring the story of its impacts up to date through the critical reflections of the early pioneers. This book will be of interest to machinima researchers and practitioners, including game culture, media theorists, students of film studies and game studies, digital artists and those interested in how creative technologies have influenced communities of practice over time.

Classical Music in a Changing World (Audio CD Edition)

Crisis and Vital Signs

Edited by Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University and Alberto Nones, Conservatory of Music of Gallarate; Associazione Europea di Musica e Comunicazione (AEMC), Italy

May 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-213-4
Availability: Available 4 weeks
116pp. ¦ $52 £39 €44

In recent years classical music has become a test case for debates over the future of culture. As times have changed, the value traditionally placed on this music has been challenged on social rather than aesthetic grounds. Lovers of classical music have been asked how its privileged history can be reconciled with growing demands for social justice and social inclusiveness. They have been asked how the music’s standing as one of the great accomplishments of the West can be reconciled with the many injustices on which those accomplishments in part depended. How can the future of classical music escape the darker shadows of its past? ‘Classical Music in a Changing World: Crisis and Vital Signs’ addresses the crisis provoked by such questions in two complementary ways. Several of the chapters show how the classical music world is already grappling with the crisis, and finding vital signs beyond the borders of the music’s traditional European strongholds: in Turkey from Ottoman times to the present, in Colombia, and in a Black American film. Other chapters identify areas that still need improvement, especially on behalf of female and LGBTQ+ musicians, and suggest how advances can be made both on concert stages and in schools. This volume, which opens with an introduction by Alberto Nones that contextualizes the book and outlines the main arguments of its chapters, contains an essay by Lawrence Kramer that examines the place of classical music in the history of consciousness—a history now changing rapidly—and concludes with a Postscript written by the two editors. The writing in this volume will be accessible to a wide audience, including scholars and students, professionals and amateurs, performers and listeners. Teachers will find it a source of lively classroom debate, and scholars a source of learning outside the usual arenas. The book’s “vital signs” include the accompanying audio tracks (available for download at: https://vernonpress. com/book/1281), which feature vibrant music-making from a diverse range of performers and composers.