Very exciting talk at SDSU this Thursday by DH pioneer, digital rhetoric and feminist scholar Elizabeth Losh. Please see below:
Elizabeth Losh (Associate Professor of English and American Studies, College of William and Mary)
“Hashtag Histories”
Thursday, September 27 at 4pm
DH Center (Love Library 61)
“Hashtag Histories”
Celebration and criticism of so-called “hashtag activism” rarely addresses the hashtag itself as an artifact or tries to locate its place in the history of information design. Although the story of the hashtag tends to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or power users like celebrities, the hashtag is actually the result of accreted sets of practices and invisible labor involving negotiating competing claims about identity, ownership, and naming conventions. This talk discusses how the #hashtag actually exists in two pieces, with two separate but related design histories. The # is a special kind of character used to facilitate non-human machine-to-machine communication that has a prehistory in teletype machines, touch-tone telephones, and IRC chat. The letters after the # also are part of a bigger narrative: the human-to-human story of metadata. The history of technological adoption and adaptation by social movements and hashtag feminism in particular offers a new way to think about theories of political performance and assembly. Case studies for this talk come from the United States, Ukraine, India, and Singapore.
About Elizabeth Losh
Elizabeth Losh is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at William and Mary with a specialization in New Media Ecologies. Before coming to William and Mary, she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is a core member and former co-facilitator of the feminist technology collective FemTechNet, which offers a Distributed Open Collaborative Course, a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central, and part of the international organizing team of The Selfie Course.
She is the is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014). She is the co-author of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013; second edition, 2017) with Jonathan Alexander. She published the edited collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education with the University of Chicago in 2017.
She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on feminist digital humanities from the University of Minnesota Press and author of a forthcoming book on the hashtag as a cultural object from Bloomsbury. Her current work-in-progress focuses on ubiquitous computing in the White House in the Obama and Trump administrations.
She has also written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code in journal articles and edited collections from MIT Press, Routledge, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Oxford, Continuum, University of Alabama, University of Pittsburgh, and many other presses. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights.
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