February 2009

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• Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Humanities, Life Writing

  Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing

  25.02.09 | Permalink | Comments Off on Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing

  In this first decade of the twenty-first century we are caught up in the midst of a technological shift of the kind that Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, attributed to the increasing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century. The essence of that change was the unprecedented capacity to create infinitely reproducible multiple copies. For the first time the idea of the primacy of the singular work of art was seriously open to question. ‘The history of every art form,’ writes Benjamin, ‘shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form’. Photography initiated a change that Benjamin recognised as being as profound in its impact on people’s lives as the introduction of the printing press.

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Professor Paul Arthur is Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Global Issues, at Edith Cowan University, Australia. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he speaks and publishes widely on the global impacts of technology in culture and society. He has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America and is Co-Chair of centerNet, the worldwide network of digital research centres. Paul Arthur has served on the executive boards and councils of the global Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO); centerNet—the worldwide network of digital research centres (Co-Chair, 2015–2017); the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA); the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (founding President, 2011–2015); the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC); and the NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources) Super Science initiative of the Australian Government. Click here for full Profile.

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