HASTAC Conference/2011

Our HASTAC network at the University of Michigan, led by our Steering Committee member Daniel Herwitz, and with regional assistance from SC member Julie Klein (Wayne State), is meeting to begin planning for next year's HASTAC International Conference. It's still a year away but they have confirmed a date so you can mark your calendars: December 2-3, 2011. This conference promises to be bold, wide-ranging, and urgent. You won't want to miss it!

The event will be held in the North Quadrangle at University of Michigan, a new center of digitally and technologically-driven units at UM, from Screen Arts and Cultures to the School of Information, including living-learning dorms, classrooms, interactive meeting areas, and other innovative spaces. The theme, Digital Scholarly Communication, will unfold in its most expansive version, as a collaboration of various departments, the Sweetland Writing Center, the Library, and the newly inaugurated digital press (hosted at the Library), including DigitalCulture Books (and the HASTAC first-publication prize too). The conference will feature many north-south international projects (such as the Law and Slavery project), with a focus on issues of changes in language and thinking in the internet-bred generation, issues around innovation in the Ph.D. and graduate education more generally, issues of equality, inequality, access (globally and nationally), circulation, and representation, all of the broadest and most incisive issues of scholarly communication (moral, social, legal, conceptual, and international in scope).

In the coming months, we will be hearing much more about this conference, but we wanted to share this breaking news with you now. Enormous thanks to all of those at the University of Michigan who are already thinking ahead to make this our best HASTAC conference ever. We'll all be hearing more over the months ahead. Stay tuned!