Dr. Drew Morton will present a program on new media in the first lecture sponsored by the new Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities at Texas A&M University-Texarkana on Thursday, Nov. 16, at 12:15PM in University Center 210 on the A&M-Texarkana campus, 7101 University Ave., Texarkana, Texas.

According to a press release, co-sponsored by the Program for Learning and Community Engagement, Dr. Morton’s lecture, titled “Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media,” will focus on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of mediation for the digital age that argues that new media achieve their cultural significance by paying homage to, rivaling and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film and television. They call this process of refashioning "remediation."

“The beauty of the Bolter and Grusin’s conceptualization of remediation is that it helps us realize that all media are ‘new’ at some point and that digital media is drawing upon many other forms of analog media for its vocabulary,” Dr. Morton said. “In short, it demystifies the relationship between the old and the new.”

Located in Science and Technology 120 on the A&M-Texarkana campus, the Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities offers an engaging space to foster collaboration among faculty scholars, students, librarians and practitioners for the exploration and advancement of innovative research in the humanities.

In addition to the lecture series, the lab has established a book club and is hosting book club discussions.

“Part of the challenge of starting the Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities is prompting the community to start thinking about humanities work in digital or new media terms, speaking the same language so to speak,” Dr. Morton said. “While the term ‘digital humanities,’ which is tossed around a lot, gets nods of abstract recognition or acknowledgment, I still find that my fellow scholars do not really know what that means in a tangible sense.  I can say, ‘humanities research realized through digital applications,’ but that’s still vague and ambiguous. In my experience, the newness of new media scares people. Studying Shakespeare with the help of a computer may sound slightly sexy, but it's also foreign and alien. So in order to broach those philosophical obstacles, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

PLACE is a faculty-led program designed to create a community of learners comprising A&M-Texarkana students, faculty, staff and the community at large. PLACE chooses an annual theme around which to organize a lecture series and other activities that provide focal points for learning and discussion. This year’s theme is “Science and Technology.”

For more information, visit the Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/RRILH/ or contact Dr. Morton at Drew.Morton@tamut.edu.

For more information about PLACE, contact Dr. Corrine Hinton, PLACE chair, at Corrine.Hinton@tamut.edu and visit the PLACE website at tamut.edu/PLACE.

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