DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

The final week of June and the 147th of the DCRC continued conversations about the next academic year, brought presentations abroad and capped off the wettest June on record. In 1865, 147 years ago, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was published and Brunel's SS Great Eastern laid 2600 miles of the 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable.

As the BBC prepares for a change of Director General, Senior Research Fellow Mandy Rose, a former BBC producer, has written an open letter to new Director General, whomever it proves to be, on the topic of innovation in documentary making. As Mandy suggests "In order to satisfy its commitment to technological innovation, the BBC needs to place greater emphasis on experiments with interactive programming. Recognising this is not a case of smoke and mirrors but imperative to representing the public interest." The letter forms a part of the OpenDemocracy ourBeeb.com project, which seeks to make the next Director General of the BBC "truly accountable to the public, and to debate the future of our BBC".

Patrick Crogan continues his sojourn in Australia, he gave a talk at the Society for Animation Studies conference held at the RMIT University, School of Media and Communication between 25th and 27th June. Patrick's talk was entitled 'The "perceive and act vector": animating military robotics'. In the coming week, Patrick will deliver two papers, he will give his military robotics paper at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, on the 3rd of July and, on the 4th of July, Patrick is giving a paper entitled ‘Attention, technics, and the digital: Bernard Stiegler’s Post-Grammatology’ at School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales.

Over the weekend, Tom Abba attended the 10th International Conference on the Book in Barcelona (30th June/1st July) and gave a paper entitled: 'The Future of the Book Isn’t Bound: Post-artifact Writing'. In his talk Tom asserted that digital platforms are not simply a means by which to republish existing works, altering their form to facilitate a tablet computer or a smartphone; they offer the opportunity to address the form of storytelling, the explore the facticity of media and writing. He suggested that it might be reasonable to propose that the future of the book isn’t the book at all, rather a new hybrid, and that the role of the author and their responsibility to story and character will be a very different one in a digital world. This offers a timely additional reason to book a place on the 'Future of the Book' event that the DCRC and the Centre for Fine Print Research are convening next week,

Helen Kennedy’s talk, entitled 'Bit­ter Fruit: Why They Love to Hate Women in Games', at the recent and inaugral Feminists in Games event has been posted online as two videos. The Feminists in Games workshop initiative seeks to create and support a more strongly networked community of scholars and practitioners to create bridges between the industry and academy, forging collaborations around the common goal of enacting and sustaining change in three areas: methodologies, scholarship and industry. More information and several more videos of talks are available from the Feminists in Games website, as well as an informative blog.