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The subject of my dissertation is how phenomenology can be used as a tool for understanding the intersection between texts and technology. What I am suggesting here is that, specifically in connection with the focus of our program in Texts and Technology, there are very significant questions concerning how digital communications technology extends our humanity, and more importantly what kind of epistemological and ontological questions are raised because of this. There needs to be a coherent theory for Texts and Technology that will help us to understand this shift, and I feel that this should be the main focus for the program itself. In this dissertation I present an analysis of the different phenomenological aspects of the study of Texts and Technology. For phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, technology, in all of its forms, is the way in which human consciousness is embodied. Through the creation and manipulation of technology, humanity extends itself into the physical world. Therefore, I feel we must try to understand this extension as more than merely a reflection of materialist practices, because first and foremost we are discussing how the human mind uses technology to further its advancement. I will detail some of the theoretical arguments both for and against the study of technology as a function of human consciousness. I will focus on certain issues, such as problems of archiving and copyright, as central to the field. I will further argue how from a phenomenological standpoint we are in the presence of a phenomenological shift from the primacy of print towards a more hybrid system of representing human communications.

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In this paper, I explore digital history and community engagement. I do so by exploring intersections between public history and new media theory, distilling a set of nine best practices, and applying these to several digital history initiatives: Historical Society of Pennsylvania's PhilaPlace, Baltimore County's Baltimore '68: Riots and Rebirth, and two projects initiated and hosted by Temple University. / History

This dissertation examines Asian North American rearticulations of the inorganic—a quality that has historically been assigned to Asians, rendering them counterfeit, abstract or not-quite-human—in new media, film and literature. By analyzing circulations of Asian North American disassembled body parts, “copies,” and gendered inter/faces, I argue that the excess, failures and ambivalence of Asian North American labour and performance constitute virtual modes of racialization that disrupt neoliberal, postracial temporalities in the Information Age. Asian American studies has held in tension its critiques of the West’s monopoly of liberal humanism in techno-Orientalist narratives (David S. Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta A. Niu) and the oppositional strategies of reappropriating techno-Orientalist tropes. My project does not seek to recuperate the Asian North American subject from the dehumanizing processes of fragmentation, surplus reproduction or abstraction—an impulse described by Rachel C. Lee as returning the “extracted body part” to the racialized “whole” in order to resolve anxieties about subjective “incoherence” or cultural inauthenticity. Instead, I turn to modes of inorganic life that do not produce an agential, autonomous Asian North American subject, but engender racializing disassemblages that work out survival and wellbeing within the neoliberal, abstracting pulls of the Information Age. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the creation of new forms of subjectivities that represent the integration of digital and information technologies into construction of the self and bodies. I argue that to this point there has not been a satisfactory theoretical framework for the experience of bodies in virtual environments that does not default to problematic binaries of physical and virtual, real and unreal, and meaningful and meaningless. These dualistic constructions render experiences of bodies within virtual settings meaningless. In order to examine how this power differential between physical and virtual came to be, I engage with Katherine Hayles' evaluation of information as a disembodied entity. I argue that Hayles' humanist principles prevents her from fully understanding the experience of bodies within virtual spaces as meaningful and important. I then deconstruct the materialist basis of representation in order to demonstrate how information can be reconceived as an embodied force. I further analyze digital media art installations, specifically dance performances, to examine how digital bodies are currently experienced in relationship to corporeal forms. I finally offer two new theories of <reality> and the networked body in order to dismantle the binary between physical and virtual and to make a space for all embodied experiences to be valued. / Master of Arts

Studies of Frankenstein-related cultural, literary, and filmic productions tend to either focus atomistically on a particular cultural artifact or construct rather strict chains of filiation between multiple artifacts. Media scholars have developed rich conceptual resources for describing cross-media appropriations in the realm of fandom (including fan fiction and slash fiction); however, many scholars of digital literary culture tend to describe the relationships between new media artifacts and their print counterparts in terms that promote what is "new" about these media forms without attending to how older media forms anticipate and enter into conversation with electronic multimedia formats. This paper suggests an alternative to this model that emphasizes the extent to which media forms remix, appropriate, and speak through other media and cultural artifacts. Studying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, James Whale's classic Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein films, Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and some of the scholarly literature around the Frankenstein narrative, the construction of gender, and the discourse of post- humanity, this paper explores the mechanisms through which these artifacts draw attention to their participation in a greater "body" of Frankenstein culture. Additionally, this paper explores how these artifacts use what Bolter and Grusin have described as the logic of hypermediacy to emphasize the specificity of their deployment through a particular medium into a specific historical situation. / Master of Arts