Lori Emerson is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and founder of the Media Archaeology Lab, a museum dedicated to obsolete technologies spanning from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. She is known for her work in media archaeology, digital preservation, and digital archives.

Lori Emerson
Occupation(s)Associate professor, University of Colorado Boulder[2]
Academic background
EducationPh.D., SUNY at Buffalo 2008

M.A., SUNY at Buffalo 2004 M.A., University of Victoria

B.A., University of Alberta[1]
Websiteloriemerson.net

Education

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Emerson has a B.A. from the University of Alberta (1998), and M.A. from the University of Victoria (2001) and an M.A. from the University of Buffalo (2004). In 2008 she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo.[3] She joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2008. As of 2022, she is an associate professor in the English department.[2] She is also the founder of University of Colorado's Boulder's Media Archaeology Lab.[4]

Career

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Emerson's areas of study include cultural studies, poetics and aesthetics, media archaeology, computer history, telecommunications networks, digital humanities and textuality, digital preservation, and digital archives.[2] Emerson writes on and teaches experimental American and Canadian writing from the 20th and 21st centuries, the history of computing, and media theory.[1] Her interest in the predecessors to ASCII art was part of a 2014 story in The Atlantic.[5] Katherine Hayles explains that Emerson theorizes on the combinations of machine and human perspectives.[6]

A component of Emerson's work centers on media archaeology or how to preserve digital memories.[7][8][9] The Media Archaeology Lab she founded at the University of Colorado Boulder campus collects obsolete technologies in order to foster study and understanding of them.[10] Carrying the motto "The past must be lived so that the present can be seen," the lab maintains all of these items in working order and allows them to be used at any time.[11][12] It houses the world's first portable computer, the Osborne 1, as well as video game consoles, typewriters, audiovisual materials, and audio equipment.[11] In exploring the ways in which the Media Archaeology Lab both differs from and adheres to the expectations of a traditional archive, Emerson and coauthor Libi Striegl describe that the Media Archaeology Lab "changes from year to year, depending on who is in the lab and what donations have arrived at our doorstep, and thus it undoes many assumptions about what archives as well as labs should be or do".[13] This form of digital archaeology is a term used by Emerson to describe how people have interacted with computers over time.[14] Her work establishing a media lab has been mentioned by other researchers in the field.[15][16][17]

Selected publications

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  • The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader. Retrieved 6 May 2021. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  • Beaulieu, John; Emerson, Lori, eds. (2013). Writing surfaces : selected fiction of John Riddell. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. ISBN 978-1-55458-852-7. OCLC 816764428.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Emerson, Lori (2014). Reading writing interfaces : from the digital to the bookbound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-9126-5.
  • Ryan, Marie-Laure; Emerson, Lori; Robertson, Benjamin J. (2014). The Johns Hopkins guide to digital media. Baltimore. ISBN 9781421412245.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
    • Reviewed by the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 2014[22]
  • Wershler, Darren; Emerson, Lori; Parikka, Jussi. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies. The University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-5840-8. Retrieved 27 April 2021.

Awards and honors

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In 2015, Emerson received an honorable mention from the Electronic Literature Organization for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature for her work Reading Writing Interfaces.[23] In 2015, she received the ASSETT Teaching With Technology Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder for her work in the Media Archaeology Lab.[24]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Lori Emerson, Background". CU Experts. The University of Colorado Boulder. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
  2. ^ a b c "Lori Emerson". University of Colorado Boulder English. The University of Colorado Boulder. 19 June 2018. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  3. ^ Emerson, Lori (2008). The rematerialization of poetry: from the bookbound to the digital (Thesis). Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International. OCLC 373333885.
  4. ^ Wershler, Darren; Emerson, Lori; Parikka, Jussi. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies. The University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-5840-8. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  5. ^ Madrigal, Alexis C. (2014-01-30). "The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2022-01-08.
  6. ^ Hayles , New York, in the ISBN), Katherine (2020). Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Wellek Library Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 30. ISBN 9780231198240.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ^ Emerson, Lori; Kirby, Jay (June 2016). "Media Genealogy: As If, or, Using Media Archaeology to Reimagine Past, Present, and Future: An Interview with Lori Emerson". International Journal of Communication. 10. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
  8. ^ Emerson, Lori (1 April 2019). "Anarchive as technique in the Media Archaeology Lab". International Journal of Digital Humanities. doi:10.1007/s42803-019-00005-9. S2CID 132419129.
  9. ^ Emerson, Lori (16 Jun 2020). "Afterword: Towards a variantology of hands-on practice". Early Popular Visual Culture. 18 (1): 93–101. doi:10.1080/17460654.2020.1763635. S2CID 221061867.
  10. ^ "Play Oregon Trail on an old Mac at this Colorado lab". KUSA.com. November 23, 2021. Retrieved 2022-01-08.
  11. ^ a b "Media Archaeology Lab". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
  12. ^ Adema, Janneke (2021-08-31). Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. MIT Press. p. 274. ISBN 978-0-262-04602-2.
  13. ^ striegl, libi; Emerson, Lori (2019). "Anarchive as technique in the Media Archaeology Lab | building a one Laptop Per Child mesh network". International Journal of Digital Humanities. 1. Springer Nature: 59–70. doi:10.1007/s42803-019-00005-9. S2CID 132419129.
  14. ^ Keathley, Elizabeth (2014-03-31). Digital Asset Management: Content Architectures, Project Management, and Creating Order out of Media Chaos. Apress. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-4302-6377-7.
  15. ^ Clarke, James (2019-03-12). Media Labs: what you need to know. Aurora Metro Publications Ltd. ISBN 978-0-9566329-8-2.
  16. ^ Parisi, David (2018-02-27). Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. U of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-5619-0.
  17. ^ Jones, Steven E. (2016-03-31). Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards. Routledge. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-317-28654-7.
  18. ^ Smith, Martha Nell (2015). "Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound by Lori Emerson (review)". The Emily Dickinson Journal. 24 (2): 99–103. doi:10.1353/edj.2015.0017. ISSN 1096-858X. S2CID 170559793.
  19. ^ McGrath, Jim (2018-01-31). "Reappearing Acts: A Review of Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound". Digital Humanities Quarterly. 011 (4). ISSN 1938-4122.
  20. ^ "Review: Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound". HuffPost. 2014-08-21. Retrieved 2022-01-08.
  21. ^ Tabbi, Joseph (2017-11-30). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 428. ISBN 978-1-4742-3027-8.
  22. ^ Gades, Naomi (2014). "Review of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media". The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 47 (2): 193–194. ISSN 0742-5562. JSTOR 44066197.
  23. ^ Marino, Mark (7 August 2015). "Hayles and Coover Prizes Announced at ELO 2015". The Electronic Literature Organization. Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
  24. ^ "Students Nominate Emerson's Use of Media Archaeology Lab for Teaching with Tech Award". Arts & Sciences Support of Education Through Technology. The University of Colorado Boulder. 24 June 2015. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
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