Hi all, The biannual Digital Arts & Culture conference takes place in California in December 2009 (http://dac09.uci.edu) The abstract submission deadline is coming up soon - May 1st! This year, the conference is theme-based (ie paper proposals have be to submitted to a theme), and as one of the theme organisers, Im happy to announce that a new theme, of interest to perhaps some people on this list, has recently been added: "Theme: The Present and Future of Humanist Inquiry in the Digital Field What contributions may literary, poetic, and aesthetic idioms of humanist inquiry -- traditionally associated with problems of lyrical expression, narrativity, linguistic subjectivity, and authorial and readerly agencies -- continue to offer to the analysis of medial practices and systems in the era of mobile, distributed, and social media? The crux of this question, we propose, lies in the specifically historical purchase of humanist method: its ability to (re)situate new symbolic practices in complex and nuanced relation to prior traditions and atavisms of expressive language and action -- in contrast to the reductively progressivist, de-historicizing impulses of much of contemporary digitalism. This theme welcomes exemplary close readings (literary-theoretical, formalist, narratological, ludological, etc.) of electronic literature and poetry, single- and multiple-player computer games, social media, and hard and soft medial apparatuses of the digital field. Especially encouraged are such close readings which also make general claims regarding the significance of humanist investigations of digital arts and cultures." More info at: http://dac09.uci.edu/call.html best, Liz Klastrup ------------------------------------------------------------- Lisbeth Klastrup Associate Professor, Innovative Communication Research Group IT University of Copenhagen Rued Langgaardsvej 7 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark Phone: +45 7218 5029 web/blog: www.klastrup.dk