Resources/Reading

Anticipated Resources

The creation of Documenteur will be, from a technical perspective, a five-step process, and we envision working with the design experts from Vectors and the Institute of Multimedia Literacy on the final four. The first step involves compiling a set of relevant articles from newspaper archives (available online and through our academic institutions) and transforming that set into a database. The latter will be searchable by keyword tags (“undocumented,” “illegal,” etc.) and will also include basic metadata (year, publication title, and article title). The second step will involve incorporating concordance capabilities, either by designing a program in Python using regular expressions, or by way of existing software such as AntConc or the programs available through the TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) network. The third step will involve designing a basic composite-image program. The fourth will involve designing a program to track and utilize user-data on the fly to generate the onscreen “digital passport.” And the fifth will involve incorporating these three programs (the concordancer, the compositor, and the “documenteur”) with the text-and-image database into a fluid, interactive website.

The hardware requirements of Documenteur should not exceed our personal laptops and the resources readily available at a university campus. The limiting factor will instead be our knowledge of computer programming. Members of our team have experience helping design a comparative concordance in Processing for a seminar with N. Katherine Hayles and Rita Raley; practice using the Python programming language in a graduate course with Mark Hansen in Statistics at UCLA; considerable comfort with HTML; and familiarity with much of the back catalogue of Vectors projects. However, the development of Documenteur will necessarily be a highly collaborative process. We look forward to working with the world-class designers from Vectors and the IML and learning what particular programming options are most practical and most desirable as the project takes its digital shape.

A. Primary Material

“Commondreams.org.” http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1219-09.htm

“Immigration Detention Facilities.” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements. http://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities/index.htm

Eastern Group Publications – publishes a chain of eleven newspapers, focused on East LA

La Opinion

LA Weekly

Los Angeles Business Journal

Los Angeles Independent

Los Angeles Sentinel

Los Angeles Times

San Diego Reader

San Diego Union Tribune

The Santa Barbara Daily Sound

Santa Barbara Independent

Santa Barbara News-Press

Ventura County Star

B. Reading List

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Balsamo, Anne. “Rethinking Ethnography: A Work of the Feminist Imagination.” Studies in Symbolic Interactionism 1990:75-86.

Boler, Megan, ed. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (edited collection). Boston: MIT Press, 2008.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Ghosh, Bismal. Huddled Masses and Uncertain Shores: Insights into Irregular Migration. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1998.

Gomez-Pena, Guillermo. Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Harrison, Steve, Scott Minneman, and Anne Balsamo. “The How of XFR: Genre as a Way of Design.” Interactions May-June 2001: 31-41.

Harrison, Steve, Scott Minneman, Maribeth Back, Anne Balsamo, Mark Chow, Rich Gold, Matt Gorbet, and Dale Macdonald. “The What of XFR: eXperiments in the Future of Reading.” Interactions May-June 2001: 21-30.

Kittler, Friedrich. “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization.” PMLA 117 (2002); 32-42.

Kropp, Phoebe. “Citizens of the Past: Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s Los Angeles.” Radical History Review 81 (2001) 35-60.

McGahan, Christopher. Racing Cybercultures: Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet. Routeledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Sassen, Saskia. Global Networks, Linked Cities. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Terranova. Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. New York: Pluto Press, 2004.

Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.