Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Anne Cong-Huyen, "Flightpaths" Team

1.  Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Jenkins states: “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grass roots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.” (2) It is this last part, the “unpredictable ways” that is fascinating in terms of multimedia texts.

Many products of convergence culture are examples of “transmedia storytelling”: “Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other…and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience.” (21) In order for any reader to fully understand the implications of such text in relation to context, one needs to explore the other nodes that initially inspired the text, and other ones that would engage with it.

2. Rodriguez, Ileana. "Reading Subalterns Across Texts, Disciplines, and Theories: From Representation to Recognition." The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Ileana Rodrigues, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. (1-34)

The introduction to a large collection, this essay situates the history of Latin American subaltern studies alongside a larger history of Marxist, postcolonial, modernist, and postmodernist critique.  Like many Latin American or Chicano studies texts, this collection is heavily invested in the political, the social and the material conditions of it subjects. Though rather dense on the historical aspect, Rodriguez makes some significant observations about the transportability of "subalternity" studies, which originated with Gramsci but has been primarily used to examine South Asians. The most significant issue, which I think applies to our project is the issue of representation vs. recognition. Rodriguez writes, "The focus of this volume is, on the one hand, the problem of representation, and on the other, what Jesús Martín Barbero would reveal as the desire for recognition. The question is, are we moving away from the politics of representation to those of recognition?" (29) This question is particulaly pertinent to our inquiries into the media and narrative landscape of "Flightpaths" and the intent and effect it produces. Does it just represent a type of migrant narrative? And representation, especially of an ethnicized "other", is always complicated by issues of agency and power. Or does it also recognize or aid in processes of recognition? Which would be more significant for its refugee efforts.

3. Rogoff, Irit. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2000.

Rogoff, a professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of London, offers a fascinating perspective on geography and politics and their relations to visual culture. She examines how diverse media and visual artifacts like painting, installation art, photographs, film, performance art, etc. have engaged with the traumatic events and experiences of the 20^th century (from the Holocaust to the US-Mexico Border conflicts). As she states in her introduction, “I wanted to set up an exploration of links between, first, the dislocation of subjects, the disruption of collective narratives and of languages of signification in the field of vision, and second an epistemological inquiry which stresses difference rather than universal truth.” (1) This is particularly important in relation to vast narrative or transmedia storytelling, which converge over a common topic but produce widely variant stories and divergent narratives that are significant to study as a larger phenomenon. At the same time, Rogoff’s approach highlights the importance of recognizing difference and not attempting to force a single cohesive story or goal out of this web of narratives and texts.

4. "TouchGraph Google Browser." TouchGraph, LLC. 2007. <http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html>

TouchGraph Google Browser is a free, easy-to use network mapping tool that allows users to create interactive network visualizations of interconnected websites. Users simply enter a keyword or URL into the search bar, and after clicking the “Graph it!” button, a unique window pops up with the visualization that can be zoomed in and out, nagivated, and further filtered. This particular TouchGraph product uses the information drawn from Google databased to connect related sites. It is a Java application and requires Java 1.5 to run.

TouchGraph also offers visualization tools to map networks on Amazon.com and social networks of Facebook.com. These three tools are free applications offered by TouchGraph, which is a for-profit private company. They do not need to be downloaded and can be utilized from an Internet browser.

Though this was not particularly useful for certain websites, especially ones where most of the texts components are internal and many of the connections are not via Internet URLs and are instead print essays and the like, it can be very useful to examine how different websites and organizations are connected. Below is a map of www.hastac.org.

5. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

Warner provides a foundational definition for the term"public" that, when viewed with Jenkin's model of "convergence culture" is very useful.  Unlike some media or communications theories, Warner's notions of "public" is one in which the public itself is active in its own construction. He also introduces the term "counterpublic," which can be used alongside Rodriguez's essay.

He discusses what a public is and how a public is formed, and what a counterpublic is and how it differs from a public, and why that matters. To dramatically simplify his argument for the purposes of this assignment, Warner defines a public as “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself…It exists by virtue of being addressed” (67).  The notion of a public differs from that of the public. Warner goes on to further define the public along three more specific axes. First, there is the public, which is a “a kind of social totality,” then there is a public as a “concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space…bounded by the event of by the shared physical space,” and lastly there is “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (65-66). These definitions reveal the specificity that go into the assemblage of publics and the contexts that make them distinct and can serve as a fruitful framework for this project, where not only is a public viewing "Flightpaths", but it is also actively engaging and contributing to its universe.

In contrast, however, is counterpublics: "some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying…it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status” (56).