I am part of a group of CUNY faculty members, researchers and doctoral students affiliated with the CUNY Graduate Center's Digital Media Studies Group, that has organized The Digital University, an all-day conference on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan.
Bringing together an invited group of media practitioners, academic publishers, digital content developers and academics, the conference is designed to assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy and authority.
Participants include:
Cheryl Ball Illinois State University
Brett Bobley NEH Office of Digital Humanities
Steve Duncombe New York University
Kathleen Fitzpatrick Pomona College
Eileen Gardiner ACLS Humanities E-Book
Josh Greenberg New York Public Library
David Greetham CUNY Graduate Center
Ann Kirschner Macaulay Honors College, CUNY
Clifford Lynch Coalition for Networked Information
Ronald G. Musto ACLS Humanities E-Book
Phil Pochoda University of Michigan Press
Tom Scheinfeldt George Mason/CHNM
Trebor Scholz The New School
Bob Stein The Institute for the Future of the Book
Siva Vaidyanathan University of Virginia
John Willinsky Stanford/Open Journal System
Conference Description
The conference is built around a series of workshops, roundtable discussions and panels, spread across the day, at which conference participants will discuss and debate a broad range of issues related to the main conference themes, including: the impact of digital technology on academic instruction and research; the transformative impact of digital media on traditional forms of publishing, including academic monographs, textbooks, and academic journals; tenure and promotion in an era of digital scholarship; and collaborative research relationships within and across academic institutions and national boundaries. Demonstrations of diverse digital media projects, developed by faculty and doctoral students, will be offered throughout the day.
The conference will culminate in the evening with a public keynote address by cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). We anticipate streaming the conference panels and keynote, both to preserve a record of the proceedings and also to make them accessible to those who are unable to attend in person.
The conference is designed to launch a dialogue about the radical changes made possible by digital media as they fundamentally reshape academic practice at all levels. We hope to explore multiple approaches to these major issues, mixing together academic skeptics and enthusiasts, media visionaries and naysayers, scholars from the global North and the global South, as well as digital and traditional publishers and content developers and providers.