How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? Peer production is commonly defined as a mode of production – that is, a social and material structure in which labor takes place.…[Read more]

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

This short chapter began as a blog post arguing that collaboration and sharing is one of the defining aspects of the digital humanities.

The syllabus for DIG 220: Death in the Digital Age, a course taught by Mark Sample at Davidson College in Spring 2019.

A critical introduction to the keyword “code” as it relates to video games.

“Location Is Not Compelling (Until It Is Haunted).” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Death on the internet is not limited to human death. The business model of planned obsolescence, the technical work of preserving old websites, systems, and applications, as well as a cultural emphasis on the new and immediate all combine to make the internet a place where many software technologies have gone to die. Networked modes of living…[Read more]

What image defines the 1990s web? Perhaps it is an “under construction” gif, a “starry night” background or some other fragment of what net artist and scholar Olia Lialina dubbed “a vernacular web” (2005). If not a vernacular, perhaps a sign of an increas- ingly commercial and professional web – the first banner ad, announcing that this par- tic…[Read more]