University of Michigan Press Blog

Q&A with Jennifer Gabrys, author of Digital Rubbish

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Design and Convener of the Masters in Design and Environment in the Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Powering the digital: Author of 'Digital Rubbish' tackles electronic waste

This is a guest blog by Jennifer Gabrys, author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, available now. 

Electronic waste is an increasing environmental issue. As one of the fastest growing waste streams, e-waste quantities—which are notoriously difficult to gauge due to a whole host of issues including stockpiling in homes and ambivalent classification systems—are estimated to be anywhere between 20-25 million tons per year to 35-40 million tons per year. Some studies suggest that e-waste will “peak” at 70-75 million tons annually by 2015. While countries such as the US and UK have been major contributors to the flow of e-waste, developing countries including China and India are now contributing to the overall volume of waste—waste that is hazardous and difficult to recycle without suitable infrastructures.

As I document in Digital Rubbish, e-waste is clearly an issue of considerable environmental significance; yet it also speaks to our contemporary material cultures of technological fascination, repetitive consumption, built-in obsolescence, shambolic resource use, and labor inequalities. In Digital Rubbish, I address these political and affective aspects of electronics, and examine specific instances of electronic waste across resource-intensive manufacturing, information overload and product obsolescence. In order to make the book a negotiable size, many other “waste spaces” fell outside the scope of the study, including mining sites where materials necessary for electronic conduction are procured; and off-shoring of manufacturing to Southeast Asia where labor and resource issues emerge for factory workers and software programmers alike.

'Poetry's Afterlife' wins acclaim, award

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce UM Press author and Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein has been chosen as nonfiction runner-up in the Society of Midland Authors Award for books published in 2010. 

Stein was recognized for his work, Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age , released by the University of Michigan Press. At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Stein instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased.

Call for Ideas & Essays: Writing History in the Digital Age

 
From DigitalCultureBooks, an innovative partnership between the University of Michigan Library and the University of Michigan Press with the intent of modeling library-press collaboration at U-M and elsewhere. Established in 2006:

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past -- or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? Explore these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, a born-digital, open-review edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series @ digitalculturebooks, its imprint.

We invite you to contribute in the following ways:

 - Post your one-paragraph theme and discuss other ideas by June 30th, 2011.

 - Submit a full draft of your essay and bibliography by August 15th, 2011.

- Comment on essays, with invited experts, during the open review in Fall 2011.

Pending final selections, revisions, and approval by the Press, the volume will be published in traditional print and open-access digital versions. We welcome innovative essays that incorporate first-person perspectives, collaborative authorship, and links to online source materials. But each essay, at its core, must address our central theme on digital technology and historical writing.

Read more about essay ideas, post your own, and join the discussion at our website.

Co-editors: Jack Dougherty (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA) and Kristen Nawrotzki (University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany)

UM Press director Phil Pochoda to retire, consult; directorate will take interim lead

After a distinguished career in publishing, University of Michigan Press Director Phil Pochoda will be (technically) retiring September 1.

Over the past decade, Pochoda took the Press from being a publisher concentrated on traditional delivery of books to being an innovator in the field. Virtually every book the Press now produces is available to read or hear in a multitude of ways, from traditional words on paper to a variety of electronic, ebook and audio formats. Over a thousand back and front list titles are now also available electronically for sale, for rent, or for free viewing. The Press continues to break ground in new areas ranging from innovative digital partnerships and products, such as its work with the HathiTrust and its digitalculturebooks program with the University of Michigan Library, to the ways in which it reaches potential readers.

Prior to joining the Press, Pochoda was associate director and editorial director of the University Press of New England; editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press at Doubleday; and vice president at Simon & Schuster while publisher and editor in chief of Prentice Hall Press.

But while he is technically leaving the Press, Pochoda will continue to shape those new directions. Over the next year, he will be serving as a consultant to the UM Library and its MPublishing division, of which the Press is a part, helping to set a new course for scholarly publishing during the market’s continuing transition to digital readership. He will also be a fellow at the Humanities Institute during its year of digital humanities.

Author Bonnie Nardi writes A Brief Lesson in American History, or Why 'World of Warcraft' Matters

[Editor's note: U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, recently singled out the research of Bonnie Nardi, author of the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, in his "Wastebook 2010: A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful Government Spending of 2010" report. The book is based on Nardi's research on the social culture of online gaming, as paid for by a National Science Foundation grant.

Her response follows.]

Many readers are probably too young too remember Senator William Proxmire. I am sorry to say he served in the US Senate from 1957 to 1989. Despite some good works, Senator Proxmire’s lasting legacy has been as an enemy of science.

In 1975 he established the Golden Fleece Award for government projects he deemed wasteful. The National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Park Service, and other agencies received these awards. One of my professors, an anthropologist, was nominated for one, for a study of the Ghanaian economy. She is now an eminent anthropologist who has made significant contributions throughout her career.

Proxmire’s attack on science created a dangerous precedent and normalized the idea that people who don’t know beans about science can, by reading the title of a grant application, criticize specific scientists.

Recently my own work came under the modern version of Proxmire’s “awards,” in the form of scrutiny for funding I received from the National Science Foundation. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) judged my research on World of Warcraft wasteful. The work concerned WoW play in North America and China.

New areas in 'World of Warcraft: Catacysm' a disappointment? Press author comments

The University of Michigan Press has been running a series of blog entries about the online world game World of Warcraft and its new "Cataclysm" expansion/update, which is due to launch later this year, brought you to by the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest, by Bonnie Nardi.

Here Nardi tackles the new areas for players to slowly build their new characters in the Horde faction from levels 15-22, which transform with the release of the expansion. These descriptions are based on the beta test of the newly changed areas.

For previous blog entries in this series on the Worgen starting area, the Goblin starting area, Blizzard Entertainment's aborted attempt to require gamers to use real life first and last names on their forums, the look of the changed zones in the game, and a Q&A about the book, please see these links or the book's detail page.

"After the cuteness of Kezan, and the loopy pleasures of beginning a Goblin, the next stage of play has been, I would say, more interesting than fun. 

Leveling my character Primrose from 15-22 was much like standard World of Warcraft except for changes to the game geography. I had hoped there would be more variation in quests and a different feel to leveling. The quests do not engage new game mechanics. Though they hold few surprises, there is, nonetheless, still much to enjoy.

Q&A with Bonnie Nardi, author of "My Life as a Night Elf Priest"

World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

Bonnie A. Nardi is an anthropologist by training and a professor in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is the social implications of digital technologies. She is the author of A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing and the coauthor of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart and Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design.

This Q&A is part of a blog series brought to you by Nardi's book. For previous blog entries in this series on the new World of Warcraft: Cataclsym expansion/enhancement coming out later this year, including descriptions of the Worgen starting area, the Goblin starting area, Blizzard Entertainment's aborted attempt to require gamers to use real life first and last names on their forums, and the look of the changed zones in the game, please see these links or the book's detail page.

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Plagiarism is an opportunity for teaching, UM Press editor tells Salon.com

When Salon.com decided to respond to a New York Times piece on skyrocketing plagiarism rates in high school and college in the age of the Internet, they turned to Caroline Eisner, coeditor of the University of Michigan Press book Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age.

In the extensive Q&A for Salon.com, Eisner discusses her feelings about plagiarism in general, why it appears to be so prevalent now - which may surprise you - and what she thinks instructors should do about it.

"Plagiarism at the K-12 and college level should not be considered a crime," she said to us after the Salon.com interview. "It should be considered a failing of good teaching.

"Across the disciplines, all teachers and professors should create writing assignments that ask students to use higher-order critical thinking skills - analysis, synthesis, induction, and deduction - rather than simple summary and 'compare and contrast.'

"The best critical process for all types of writing, but especially academic writing, involves recursivity. That involves drafts, evidence building, thesis construction, and peer review. The faculty member or professor should be involved throughout the process with the writer."

Click here for more details on Eisner's book for purchase or course use.

'World of Warcraft: Cataclysm' - new landscapes, leaders, and gaps in logic

This is the latest in a series of blog posts regarding the upcoming "Cataclysm" update/expansion pack for the online game World of Warcraft. It is based on the beta tests under way now and brought to you by the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropologist's Account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi, available now from The University of Michigan Press.

Previous blog entries dealt with the new worgen starting area, the new goblin starting area, and Blizzard Entertainment's aborted attempt to require real life first and last names from the millions of posters on their official forums. Future updates will deal with the level 80-plus areas in the new expansion, the new areas for level 10-60 characters, and professions.

The "Cataclysm" expansion pack for World of Warcraft, expected at the earliest sometime this fall and in testing now, has to offer the game's 11 million subscribers something new, and it does: two new races to play, a whole new storyline to follow, new zones to experience and new dungeons to conquer. But more importantly, it also gives the game's developers a chance to both literally and figuratively reinvent history.