« HOME

The Center

Fellowships

Workshops

Events

Digital

Lecture Series

New Directions in Humanities Research, 05-06

1:00 p.m. Friday, March 17- Board Room

Bob Stein
Director, Institute for the Future of the Book

Rethinking Books in the Era of the Network

For the past several hundred years intellectual discourse has been shaped by the rhythms and hierarchies inherent in the nature of print. As discourse shifts from page to screen, and more significantly to a networked environment, the old definitions and relations are undergoing unimagined changes. The shift in our world view from individual to network holds the promise of a radical reconfiguration in culture. Notions of authority are being challenged. The roles of author and reader are morphing and blurring. Publishing, methods of distribution, peer review and copyright - every crucial aspect of the way we move ideas around is up for grabs. The new digital technologies afford vastly different outcomes ranging from oppressive to liberating. How we make this shift has critical long term implications for human society.

Robert Stein is the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. The institute, based at the University of Southern California, has two principal activities. One is building high-end tools for making rich media electronic documents (part of the Mellon Foundation's higher-ed digital infrastructure initiative) and the other is exploring and hopefully influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression and discourse. Previously Stein was the founder of The Voyager Company where over a 13-year period he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than seventy-five CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Seven years ago, Stein started Night Kitchen to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing.

Web site »

New Directions in Humanities Research, 04-05 »