Cybercultural Bibliographies

With the proliferation of work on cybercultures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (but also, as the Cyber_Reader foregrounds, throughout the entire twentieth century and with a prefiguring intellectual history before then), it becomes increasingly difficult to cohesively map the terrain explored by these works. Contributing to the difficulty of this mapping is that many of the works take a theoretical focus that resists the possibility of tracing stable, categorical lines through them; for instance, a few major theoretical ideas in play across the readings I’ve undertaken have been the rhizome (an endlessly generative process of offshooting without a recognizable hierarchy) and forms of hybridity such as the cyborg (which blurs the boundaries between human/machine/organism/body). Nonetheless, I’ve set myself the task of identifying key themes that are covered by the literature in cybercultures and documenting some of the major texts that engage with those themes by compiling a bibliography.

What I’ve ended up with is a double clustering, or perhaps a set of “enfolding themes” would be more appropriate. There are a total of fifteen thematic categories with a small handful of major texts in each category. However, I’ve arranged these into four larger groups: From Descriptive to Critical: Early Issues in Cyberculture Studies; Cultural Difference in Cyberspace; Form in/and Practice; and Documentaries and Imaginaries. By grouping the more specific categories together this way, my intent is to illustrate some tension, boundary discourse, dialectic, or relational between and across categories. Thus, these categories should not be read as stable and separate identifiers, but as representative of particular locations within larger intersecting discourses, materialities, and practices. The texts I have included in the bibliography are also more directed toward particular themes and research foci rather than general overviews of cyberculture (as I’ve covered a decent chunk of the latter already!). Below, I summarize some of the tensions at play in each of the four groups before presenting my compiled bibliography. I have also developed a personal set of ten key texts that, while not necessarily representative of the cybercultures literature as a whole, point to some concrete directions for where I will delve next in the field. I also provide brief descriptions of major issues in each of these ten texts, especially as related to my own current interests and disciplinary orientation.

From Descriptive to Critical: Early Issues in Cyberculture Studies – Identity, Communities

I place identity and community together not necessarily to isolate them from their many relationships with the rest of the categories in the bibliography, but more to indicate their centrality in cyberculture studies, and specificially, how work in these areas has telegraphed a more general shift from “descriptive” to “critical” work in cyberculture studies. As David Silver points out, “it is upon these twin pillars -- virtual communities and online identities -- that cyberculture studies rests.” Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier are two of the foundational works for cyberculture studies in identity and community, and each of these works has been critiqued from various angles for lacking a particular “critical” perspective and participating to some extent in the popular “Internet as frontier” rhetoric. With the roles of identity and community in founding cyberculture studies, there are a number of key issues that still remain to be explored. How does the construction of online identity play into localized and global power relationships: empowerment and liberation on the one hand, discrimination and subjugation on the other? How does the identity work of individual avatars collide with online communities’ sense of collective identity or with the community rules/norms in place? Likewise, the tension between “descriptive” and “critical” labels raises key questions. What counts as “descriptive” and “critical” in the first place? What can we gain by re-reading “descriptive” or “populist” historical accounts with a more critical lens?

Cultural Difference in Cyberspace – Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, Bodies & Embodiment

Part of the emergence of a “critical cyberculture studies,” in Silver’s terms, is signaled by an increased focus on issues of cultural difference in cyberspace. The appearances of race, class, gender, and sexuality are unsurprising as thematic categories listed under “cultural difference,” but they of course remain critical to foreground for discussions of cultural difference, as they intersect with issues of identity, access (including the infrastructural digital divide but also issues of technological literacies and training), communities, globalization, cyberspatial politics, and so on. I have included Bodies & Embodiment as a reminder of the close connection between embodiment (or disembodiment) in cyberspace and issues of cultural difference. For instance, William Gibson’s (and many others’) fantasy of “jacking in” and losing one’s cumbersome body in favor of a vast cyberspace network has been critiqued for its erasure of sexual and racial difference. Catherine Waldby’s chapter in The Cybercultures Reader highlights the ways in which the male and female, “Adam and Eve,” Visible Human bodies are caught up in medical (male) anxieties and desires over the body and its role in scientific medicine. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” explores feminist political strategies in the wake of the “informatics of domination” that have seized control of women’s bodies. As these examples illustrate, the place of bodies and embodiment is a key question for any consideration of cultural difference in cyberspace.


Form in/and Practice – Space & Architecture, New Media, Research Methodologies

One of the more abstract themes running through the cybercultures literature has to do with form: in the context of architecture, for instance, how digital technologies and things like “genetic algorithms” are changing the form of urban buildings and spaces, often away from modernist conceptions of gridlike form. For new media, form has to do with the relationship between pre-existing media technologies, histories, and genres (such as film and television) and the “new” media forms (of hypertext, interactive multiuser games, hybrid spaces, networked online communities, etc.) produced by digital technologies. I’ve also linked the theme of form with the notion of practice. For research methodologies, Internet research is shaped by form (for instance, the set of guidelines for virtual ethnography outlined by Christine Hine), but there is also a constant element of practice—research happens with situated researchers in a particular cultural and material/virtual context, with a demand on researchers to revise their practice as they encounter and respond to contingent, contextual forces. As discussed in the Cyber_Reader, views on architecture are also shifting from architecture as a form of static control over urban space to architecture as a lived, inhabited, interactive social practice.

Documentaries and Imaginaries – Histories, Politics & Policy, Critical Theory, Cybercultural Lit, Future Imaginings

Cyberculture is characterized by a number of projections into the future, which attempt to speculate, sketch out, or even anticipate what future human/technology relations might look like. From cyberpunk literature (such as Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash) to work on robotics (such as Hans Moravec’s Mind Children), the future imaginary has long been a captivating idea for cyberculture writers. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in “Computing the Human,” these futurisms also hold implications for how we think about and treat present relations between humans and machines. An interesting counterpoint to these theoretical speculations is the work that documents various histories of technology and cybercultures, such as Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet. Histories of cyberculture and work on global Internet policy take a more grounded, empiricist approach that attempts to trace cultural histories influencing the present as well as construct arguments (in the case of work on policy) that suggests what political strategies will best address the current reality as it is situated both locally and globally. The juxtaposition of work under Documentaries and Imaginaries also questions the boundaries between “legitimate” (i.e., factual, reliable, and authoritative) evidence and science fictional theorization, a tension which is at the heart of Colin Milburn’s piece in The Cybercultures Reader, “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science.”


Identity

Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 1-17.

Jones, Steve, ed. Virtual Culture: Identity and Community in Cybersociety. London: Sage, 1997.

Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. London: New Riders Press, 2008.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Communities

Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993.

Smith, Mark, and Peter Kollock, eds. Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 1999.

Sudweeks, Fay, Margaret L. McLaughlin, and Sheizaf Rafaeli, eds. Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1998.

Race

Kolko, Beth, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 2000.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Nelson, Alondra, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines, eds. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Class

Carvin, Andy. “More than Just Access: Fitting Literacy and Content into the Digital Divide Equation.” EDUCAUSE-Review 35.6 (2000): 38-47.

Loader, Brian, ed. Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in the Information Society. London: Routledge, 1998.

Gender

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Cherny, Lynn, and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996.

Flanagan, Mary, and Austin Booth, eds. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Green, Eileen, and Alison Adam, eds. Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption, and Identity. London: Routledge, 2001.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association, 1991.

Kendall, Lori. Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Sexuality

Campbell, John Edward. Getting it on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004.

Consalvo, Mia. “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games.” The
Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003. 171-194.

O’Riordan, Kate, and David J. Phillips, eds. Queer Online: Media, Technology, and Sexuality. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Bodies/Embodiment

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hillis, Ken. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge, 2000.

Space/Architecture

Mitchell, William. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Spiller, Neil. Digital Dreams: Architecture and the New Alchemical Technologies. London: Ellipsis, 1998.

Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago, 1999.


New Media

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Research Methodologies

Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000.

Jones, Steve, ed. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

Mann, Chris, and Fiona Stewart. Internet Communication and Qualitative Research: A Handbook for Researching Online. London: Sage, 2000.

Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2000.

Schneider, Steven M., and Kirsten Foot. “Web Sphere Analysis: An Approach to Studying Online Action.” Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Ed. David Gauntlett. London: Arnold, 2005. 19-30.

Stringer, Ernest T. Action Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.

Histories

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fiscetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999.

Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Tofts, Darren, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, eds. Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Politics & Policy

De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge, 1999.

Lessard, Bill, and Steve Baldwin. NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Loader, Brian, ed. The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology, and Global Restructuring. London: Routledge, 1997.

Wilhelm, Anthony. Democracy in the Digital Age: Challenges to the Political Life in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Critical Theory

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. London: Verso, 1997.

Cybercultural Lit

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: Athlone, 2000.

Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992.

Future Imaginings

Drexler, Eric K. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.



In addition to the thematic cybercultures bibliography above, I’ve selected ten texts that represent possible directions I could go next in my reading. I’ve provided short bits of commentary below that indicate a few of the major themes in each text and how I envision the texts might relate to my research interests and my disciplinary orientation (where applicable). But first, a bit about the criteria I used to select these:

a) I tried to draw from across all the themes/groups listed (or as many as I could), which hopefully results in a balance and a diversity of texts. Again, I’m not necessarily going to read all of these now or in the order listed, but they all represent fruitful directions that I could explore.
b) Everything listed here is something that I haven’t read (or at least, haven’t completely read).
c) Everything here is something that I believe can inform my work in a meaningful way (to the extent that I can predict this before reading!), but I also attempted to come up with a mix of books that are currently “at work” in the field (i.e., being employed by scholars in rhet/comp; digital rhetoric; computers and writing; and so on) and those that are not currently as visible but could possibly play such a role.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Turkle’s book provides a close analysis of the multiplicity and fluidity of identity in online spaces. This should be valuable to compare alongside readings of digital identities that come from a rhetorical analysis perspective (e.g., looking at the interplay of text and images in identity construction on Facebook), especially because Turkle’s work is grounded in psychology but also engages with cultural/critical theory. I’m also interested in how Turkle’s early focus on MUDs can inform work on identity construction in online gaming/virtual worlds, which is one of my major interests.

Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993.

As Silver notes, this is one of the “towering,” pioneering works on cyberculture studies. Having read a few critiques of the “Internet as frontier” rhetoric advanced by Rheingold, I’m interested to now go back and see how virtual communities were being discussed in the early 90s. Earlier, I blogged about the role of history/historiography in cyberculture, and tracing discussions of virtual communities is one way to continue documenting a richer historical context for cyberculture studies. Rheingold’s work also seems to have parallels with activity theory (in his discussion of written and unwritten community rules, group norms, etc.), and I’m curious in exploring these parallels because I’ve been working quite a bit with activity theory and genre theory lately.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Lessig’s book holds implications not only for copyright and intellectual property issues surrounding digital media, but also broader political and philosophical implications for how content on the Web should be regulated and distributed. In terms of cybercultural practices like digital remix, (re)appropriation, and political subversion, the laws that govern media and access on the Internet clearly shape what can be said and what the potential dangers or costs might be of participating in countercultural practices. As a digital writing instructor, this text can also inform the ways in which I talk with my students about intellectual property and fair use issues, especially as they intersect with multimedia composing.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I placed Bolter and Grusin’s book under the category “new media,” but it is as much about form and history as it is about any media topic. The theme of remediation is useful in tracing the historical lineage of multimedia artifacts and in exploring how “hybrid” or “multimodal” texts are more precisely constituted. There are also implications here for how the body enters into the experience of new media, as the body is configured differently across various new media forms such as virtual reality, digital art installations, online massively multiplayer gaming, and Internet surfing.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Nakamura’s new book extends the conversation on race in/and cyberspace, following the edited collection Race in Cyberspace and her 2002 book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. I’ve drawn upon some of Nakamura’s work in Cybertypes, particularly the discussion of identity tourism, so I’m interested in exploring the lines of inquiry represented here. This book in particular seems to be aimed at a synthesis between digital and visual rhetorics of race and ethnicity—in terms of identity, then, we can ask what happens when textual practices of identifying (or erasing) race give way to visual representations that boast increasingly greater computational detail.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association, 1991.

Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” has become one of the key theoretical pieces in the construction of the cyborg and, more generally speaking, human-machine configurations in cyberculture studies. Having read this piece in The Cybercultures Reader, I’m interested in tracing back Haraway’s project for its critique of identities and affiliations, especially in the context of feminist science-technology relations. As David J. Phillips notes, Haraway, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, “calls for a radical integration of, a radical networking of, a radical dispersion of, social locations and identities via strategic affinities between social identities, and the blurring and ad hoc reconfiguration of identity boundaries” (221). Haraway’s work is also valuable in that it does not just recognize fluidities of identity, but configures identity locations in relation to what has been encoded as “natural” or what has historically held political dominance.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

As the Future Imaginings section of the bibliography reveals, there are plenty of cybercultural works that speculate on how humans and digital technologies might be configured ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now. What I’ve liked about Hayles’ approach (from what I’ve read so far) is that she critically examines not just a single line of posthuman futurism, but rather draws from pragmatic, scientific approaches as well as romantic and dystopian imaginaries. There are clear implications here for embodiment and what we perceive as our own bodies, but Hayles also looks at cultural representations and the narratives surrounding posthumanism; this approach echoes Bell in An Introduction to Cybercultures, who foregrounds the stories we tell about cybercultures as important artifacts.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

A number of references to Latour and actor-network theory have popped up across the readings, and Latour is pretty popular among scholars in the field, so I think a bit of Latourian theory is in order. The question of agency is an important one as we consider the roles of bodies/embodiment, consciousness, and machines in cyberculture studies. Latour also connects agency to issues of language and the status of non-human “objects” as actors in the world.

Jones, Steve, ed. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

Although I think several of the research methodology texts would be useful for my purposes, Jones’ book covers a range of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, that I think would be useful as an introductory path into online research methodologies. For instance, chapters such as “Configuring as a Mode of Rhetorical Analysis” by James J. Sosnoski seem to serve as a useful bridge with the modes of digital rhetorical analysis that I’m already familiar with. I also like how the book goes beyond considerations of method to include discussions, for example, of ethics in online discourse research and the place of cultural studies as an online research methodology.

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I’m curious to see how Abbate handles the confluence of sociocultural and technological forces in her history of the Internet; the title certainly suggests that the Internet is more aligned with the rhetorical act of invention than a technologically determined process. David Silver and Alice Marwick argue that we must “historicize our object of study and teaching” as we interrogate the relationship between digital technologies and global political/military forces (51). Abbate’s work is a major step in that direction, as it reminds us that the Internet is not a politically neutral development and that the political economies of current Internet usage always carry traces of the past.



Works Cited

Phillips, David J. “Cyberstudies and the Politics of Visibility.” Critical Cyberculture Studies. Eds. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 216-227.

Silver, David. Introducing Cyberculture. 2000. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. 11 Aug. 2008.

Silver, David, and Alice Marwick. “Internet Studies in Times of Terror.” Critical Cyberculture Studies. Eds. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 47-54.

Reflections on The Cybercultures Reader Word Cloud

The word cloud I've generated on The Cybercultures Reader has the most ground to cover in terms of sheer content; the anthology contains 44 chapters and 787 pages. I thought that this might result in the themes being more rhizomatic and less centralized around a few key terms, but it appears that, generally speaking, the same word cloud structure has emerged here. The "foundational" cyberculture studies topics of identity and communities are represented among the larger words, and there is also a significant emphasis on the cyborg (especially as formulated in Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"). I'm a little surprised by how big "human" is, but there are multiple book sections that engage directly with questions of the human (Cyberbodies, Cyberlife, and Beyond Cybercultures are probably the most directly related).

As in the word cloud for Critical Cyberculture Studies, the thematic organization of the book as determined by the editors also shows up here, with terms such as "feminism," "political," "A-Life," "bodies," and "posthuman" appearing. The "Popular Cybercultures" section gets a little buried, and I suspect that's mostly due to its focus on individual pop culture artifacts (such as comic books and Lara Croft's media franchise). However, "cyborg," "media," and "identity" do get at the core issues of that section, even if the specific artifacts aren't as well represented.

As I discussed earlier, I think there's potential for word cloud generation to unpack some of the "hidden themes" of a text: themes that are not selectively foregrounded by the editors or individual authors, in other words. However, in my case, it's as much a question of what I'm selectively recording as much as what actually shows up repeatedly in the text (and also how I interpret it). I tried to maintain as much balance and accuracy as I could, but of course it's a subjective process. I did notice that themes like "surveillance" were popping up in places that I might not have initially expected (before reading, I might have attributed "surveillance" primarily to the Cyberpolitics section). It would be interesting (if work-intensive) to do a section-by-section breakdown and compare word clouds across sections along with the overall cloud. It'd also be cool to compare across readers and see what kinds of coding and interpretation were going on as people read.

The Cybercultures Reader in/as Wordle

This is the final word cloud for my Wordle reading/writing project, based on my reading of The Cybercultures Reader (eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy). I've really enjoyed using Wordle so far, but it's easy to get caught up playing with font and color choices. :)

Reflections on Cyber_Reader Word Cloud

I’m especially curious about the arrangement of this word cloud because of the sheer number of articles that Cyber_Reader covers; rather than grouping texts thematically, the book races through some 34 articles, most edited down to a small handful of pages, and similarly races chronologically through most of the twentieth century. Generally speaking, I’m not surprised by the big words in play: artificial and human, body and machine, etc. Much of the book is devoted to exploring and deconstructing these binary systems. “Cyberspace” and “space” are two more big ones, and a lot of this emphasis follows from Gibson’s work, as does a good deal of other material on cyberspace/cybercultures.

Given Spiller’s own disciplinary orientation in (digital) architecture, I expected “architecture” to be more prominent in the cloud. But part of this architectural emphasis is also contained in terms like “space” and “environment.” What’s also interesting is the comparative smallness of “identity.” There’s a pretty noticeable shift in the book in that the later writings start to address identity more explicitly, whereas the early articles from writers like Babbage are more concerned with articulating things like machine operations and less concerned with individual human subjectivity. My theory is that identity starts to pick up steam through the course of the book, but the lack of early emphasis relegates it to a smaller role in the cloud.

The rhizome has also become a prominent theme in my readings, and the cloud extends that idea with “replication” and “multiplicity.” The spin that this particular book applies, though, seems to be one of anxiety: anxiety over the potentially infinite replication of objects through nanotechnology, for instance, as overwhelming and ultimately destructive. The numerous arguments about the multiplicity of identities also confront the same problems of desire, fluidity, and anxiety, as we consider how to locate distributed selves and distributed performances in cyberspace.

Cyber_Reader in/as Wordle

After testing out another word cloud with my responses to Critical Cyberculture Studies, I'm continuing with this method for my responses to Cyber_Reader. This book is arranged chronologically by date of original publication rather than with thematic sections, so it'll be interesting to see what themes do emerge. I'll return a bit later with some more reflections.

Reflections on Critical Cyberculture Studies Word Cloud

In a previous post, I explored some of the general themes emerging from my first usage of Wordle as an analytical/reflective reading tool. This was generated after comparing my linear, self-organized notes to Bell's An Introduction to Cybercultures with the word cloud version. I also commented on some potential strategies and affordances for thinking about and employing Wordle, more generally, as a reading-response tool.

As mentioned earlier, I took a slightly different approach with the word cloud for Critical Cyberculture Studies. Mainly, I didn't self-organize my notes into neat little bullets before throwing them into the Wordle generator. What I was going for was a more open response to the reading, perhaps even opening up new themes that I didn't consciously focus on.

To gauge how well this strategy "worked" necessarily means comparing it against other possible reading strategies and purposes for reading. There are a few obvious words in the cloud that don't exactly make for great thematic analysis but are reflective of the content (such as "Internet"). What I find more interesting are words like "design," which have led me to think "hey, this book talks a lot about design and holds a lot of web design/policy design implications." In other words, I'm unsure if I would have said "design" was a major theme if I hadn't created the cloud.

The cloud also reflects some of the key theorists and theories I had manually made categories with my original reading of Bell. Authors like Rheingold, Turkle, Foucault, and Hall made their way in there, even though I didn't consciously attempt to select key theorist names. There's also the appearance of "actor-network," which continues to intrigue me.

Another outcome I was interested in exploring was how the themes of the cloud match up with the four major sections of the book, which are "Fielding the Field," "Critical Approaches and Methods," "Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture," and "Critical Histories of the Recent Past." Key terms are represented from all of these categories: for the first, "discipline," "research," and "theory" (which also overlap heavily with the second); also for the second, "analysis" and "criteria"; for the third, "identity," "gender," "race," "masculinity," "femininity," and "diaspora"; for the fourth, "historical" and "historicize." Those are just a few, but it shows that the major organizational efforts by the editors do come through in my reading and in the word cloud. What's interesting is that the word cloud can also be read as a holistic interpretation of the entire book's themes that can point to new implications. For instance, if we take one of the bigger words, "identity," we can think about how identity plays into the cultural difference essays in terms of individual users and groups of users but also relates to the identity of an emerging academic field. One of the values of reading through word clouds, then, is a particular form of invention (a play of juxtapositions?) that provides new avenues for "seeing" and making sense of a text.

Critical Cyberculture Studies in/as Wordle

Following my reflections on Wordle thematics, I've decided to give it another go with Critical Cyberculture Studies, using a slightly different approach. Rather than summarizing a list of key themes, theorists, and terms myself and then throwing it into Wordle, I've generated a more fragmentary list of notes that reflect what I found interesting, important, etc. as I read (primarily, this reflected content from each article rather than trying to premeditate what the threads would be across articles). The cloud was generated from these notes.

wordle thematics

I'm pleased to say that Wordle has worked out much better so far, for my purposes at least, than the tag cloud generator. Part of what made this work for me is the ability to directly control and limit what text Wordle uses. The "Wordle cloud" that I posted below was generated from my blog entries on Bell's An Introduction to Cybercultures; by focusing on these entries only and not having my entire blog subsumed into the cloud generation, it helped define the kind of thematics I'm looking for.

So what does the Wordle word cloud add up to? I think there are some interesting implications for analytical and reflective modes of reading that deserve exploration. At first glance, Wordle foregrounds two things: a selection of major thematic (or at least repeatedly mentioned) terms and an emphasis on the frequency of those terms, visually scaled to size. But we can also use it to help us understand the assumptions and values that go into particular acts of writing and reading. For instance, assuming that the Bell text was easily accessible online, we could throw it into Wordle and have a cloud generated that covers the whole book. Then, we could read the themes and juxtapositions that emerge from this cloud in light of how Bell is narrating his own, self-defined themes; do they match up? Where and how?

In a similar vein, the Wordle cloud I've posted reflects a remixing of my own interpretation of Bell's book. And it's different in significant ways. In my original postings, I talked about cyberspace as just one key term among several, but in the cloud it takes center stage. I'm also a little surprised by how small "cyberculture" is. In these ways, I can re-evaluate my own process of interpretation and even see where I may have been unconsciously emphasizing some things and de-emphasizing others.

As another kind of thematic, Wordle opens up some "new," and potentially surprising, combinations and juxtapositions of terms that can lead to new avenues for analysis. Out of this cloud, I might pull out "cyborg spaces" or "computer symbolic construction" or "political-economic transparency" or "Visible surveillance architectures" as potential (re)combinations. Some will be more useful than others, but this experiment might point to some of the gaps in how we define and employ these terms.

I do think these are potentially valuable strategies, but I also see a few limitations. First, my word cloud required a lot of set-up work. I had already read the entire book and recorded 2,387 words of thematic analysis before I generated the cloud. This gave me a pretty rich selection for the cloud to work with, but it seems antithetical to expect that kind of (and that much) traditional academic analysis to even get to that point. As a corollary, Wordle's going to be of limited use as a reading response tool unless it can be a bit more mobile. So, I'm going to try a more fragmented response to Critical Cyberculture Studies, where I go back and jot down, in a kind of "automatic" way, the responses I've had so far. I've finished the book, so I've got quite a few of these written in the margins and highlighted in the text already. Stay tuned.

experiment 2: wordle

I thought I'd try something along the lines of a tag cloud again, using a different resource that I recently discovered: Wordle.

why my tag cloud isn't cloudy

Sooooo, yeah. My first tag cloud = FAIL. It's small, doesn't look too cloudy, and doesn't capture the ongoing themes/connections very well. The problem, I think, is that it represents the structure of the blog rather than its contents. This is related to the problem that the cloud generator seems to be pulling only from the post titles rather than the titles + content of posts.

Well, that's why it's an experiment. Interesting failures like this one can illustrate how things like cloud generators work (or how we understand/interpret their workings, which is a theme in Bell's book).