DCB Releases Two New Open Access Books; Announces Forthcoming Titles
We're pleased to announce that two titles in our imprint have just been posted for free online reading with Creative Commons licenses (BY-NC-ND):
Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law, by Richard L. Schur, and
Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games, by David Myers
Both books are for sale in print from the University of Michigan Press.
Parodies of Ownership examines how contemporary African American writers, artists, and musicians have developed an artistic form that Schur terms "hip-hop aesthetics." This book offers an in-depth examination of a wide range of contemporary African American painters and writers, whose absence from conversations about African American culture has caused a misunderstanding about the nature of contemporary cultural issues and resulted in neglect of their innovative responses to the post-Civil Rights era. By considering their work as a cross-disciplinary and specifically African American cultural movement, Schur shows how a new paradigm for artistic creation has developed.
Play Redux is an ambitious description and critical analysis of the aesthetic pleasures of video game play, drawing on early twentieth-century formalist theory and models of literature. Employing a concept of biological naturalism grounded in cognitive theory, Myers argues for a clear delineation between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of texts. In the course of this study, Myers asks a number of interesting questions: What are the mechanics of human play as exhibited in computer games? Can these mechanisms be modeled? What is the evolutionary function of cognitive play, and is it, on the whole, a good thing? Intended as a provocative corrective to the currently ascendant, if not dominant, cultural and ethnographic approach to game studies and play, Play Redux will generate interest among scholars of communications, new media, and film.
digitalculturebooks will be releasing a number of new titles this summer. Keep an eye out for other forthcoming books, including Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age, by Kevin Stein; My Life as a Night Elf Priest, by Bonnie A. Nardi; and Media, Technology, and Society, edited by W. Russell Neuman.
We are also pleased to announce that digitalculturebooks will be publishing Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt’s crowdsourced collection Hacking the Academy: A Book Crowdsourced in One Week. Read more about Hacking the Academy on The Chronicle of Educations's Wired Campus blog.
In addition to publishing high-quality print and open-access editions of books, the digitalculturebooks blog will develop into a space where we participate in a discussion of the issues surrounding "digital culture" through interviews with our authors, series editors, and members of the digitalculturebooks project team. We will also endeavor to engage in local conversations about the digital activity on our campus - from the digital developments at our Press and Library, to profiles of digital scholarship being undertaken by our faculty.
If you are interested in learning more about digitalculturebooks, or have ideas about what you'd like to read about on this blog, please contact us at digital-culture [at] umich [dot] edu. You can keep up with us on this blog by subscribing to our feed or on Twitter (@Mdigitalculture).
Tom Dwyer, Acquisitons Editor
Shana Kimball, Project Lead
