Four titles in our imprint, digitalculturebooks, have just been made available to view for free online through Creative Commons licenses (BY-NC-ND):
- Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, by Jennifer Gabrys
- The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, edited by Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell
- Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life, by David Buckingham, Maria Pini, and Rebeckah Willett
- The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
All four books are available for purchase in print and ebook format from the University of Michigan Press.
Digital Rubbish explores the physical life of technological devices. In contrast to other studies of electronics that focus primarily on virtual characteristics, this book examines digital technologies through a lens of their material, spatial, cultural, and political qualities. As a result, electronic waste can also considered in both digital and physical form.
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age is a collection of essays by scholars and professionals interested in and involved with digital humanities. With a specific focus on American literary studies, this volume explores the new and changing world of scholarship in the digital age. Topics include technical issues, like tool development and usability studies; more classic literary issues, like editing, textual scholarship, and questions of race and ethnicity; and professional structural issues, like training new scholars and questions of tenure and promotion criteria.
Home Truths explores the effects of home video-making on everyday life. This study focuses on the rise of the video camera as a common household item, and the increase of accessibility for users through dropping prices and the variety of devices with recording capabilities, such as mobile phones and digital still cameras. This book will be of interest particularly to those in the fields of Sociology and Media/Cultural Studies.
The New Woman International discusses the relationship between 19th and 20th century femininity and photograph and film media. Situated in the space between the suffragist era of the 1870s and 1960s feminism, this book explores the dissemination of gender norms through technological media. The essays in this book also explore the modern woman’s use of the same media to fight back against gendered stereotypes and explore new modes of femininity. This book represents a global dialogue of the subject, as diverse cultural histories are included in the discussion.
digitalculturebooks is dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. It was established in 2006 as an innovative partnership between the University of Michigan Library and the University of Michigan Press. If you are interested in learning more about digitalculturebooks, please visit the website, or contact us at digital-culture [at] umich [dot] edu. You can keep up with us on the digitalculturebooks‘ blog or by following us on Twitter.