Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age

Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age

The Division for 20th-century German Studies at the MLA 2014 presents a series of three panels on digital practice, organized by Deniz Göktürk (University of California, Berkeley).

You can view abstracts and, even more importantly, provide feedback for each of the papers by clicking on their titles.


Digital Practice (1): Literary Remediations

Moderator: Leslie Morris
Respondent: Richard Langston

Digital Practice (2): Moving Images

Moderator: Deniz Göktürk
Respondent: Eric Ames

Digital Practice (3): Social Networks Across Borders

Moderator: Stefanie Harris
Respondent: Yasemin Yildiz


In the digital era, academic and artistic work is recalibrating the interplay of aesthetics, science, and politics. Art entails research, and research draws inspiration from art in seeking new forms of interactive presentation, public participation, and multilocal collaboration. Geopolitical categories such as center and periphery are dissolving, and institutionally guarded boundaries between media, genres, and disciplines call for transgression.

The Internet opens for search boundless archives of data, but how do artists and scholars use the abundance of accessible documents? What is lost and found in the process? What is the critical purchase of terms like fiction and nonfiction, authorship and audience? What are political interventions in the uneven terrains of circulation?

While the first panel on literary studies maps out theoretical foundations and the second is devoted to a discussion of moving images in the digital era, the last panel will turn to popular forms of digital practice, circulation, and participation with a focus on online communities as social networks across borders.