History 513 2007-08 24. Histories of the Future

9 Apr 2008

The phrase “histories of the future” is ambiguous, covering both ideas of the future in the past, and ideas of the past in the future. In the final week of the course, we talk about the relation between the two and implications for historical practice.

“Google circa 1960,” Fury.com

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly (Jul 1945).

Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Farewell to the Information Age,” in G. Nunberg, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: California, 1996.

Rosenberg, Daniel. “The Trouble with Timelines,” Cabinet 13 (Spring 2004).

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (Dec 1998): 1530-52.

Still, Brian. “Hacking for a Cause,” First Monday 10, no. 9 (Sep 2005).

Aarseth, Espen J. “Introduction: Ergodic Literature,” from Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1997.

Winder, William. “Robotic Poetics,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.