The New Media Colloquium is an experimental graduate seminar designed for advanced students who have a dissertation or other substantial project underway. It offers students the opportunity to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams to create Web projects based on their dissertation or other research. After a getting-acquainted period in which participants discuss their proposed projects and interests, participants form teams of 2-3 people, an emergent process flows from discovering or creating connecting threads between their various research projects. One goal of the New Media Colloquium is to give participants in extended collaboration in creating a project with significant intellectual content. Another goal is to facilitate a rhetorical orientation that conveys the necessarily specialized discourses of scholarly research to a broader audience that can access the material through a web site, including developing striking and relevant visual displays, graphics, auditory and other materials that dramatizes research results and serves as a Web resource for national and international scholarly communities. Finally, the New Media Colloquium is designed to help participants develop materials suitable for inclusion in their portfolios that they can use when applying for professional positions, in or out of academia.
The 2005-2006 New Media Colloquium attracted twelve participants. The five teams that emerged developed a diverse range of projects, including an investigation of software as genre, an installation on the architectures of narrative, a game exploring the significance of the avatar for the construction of subjectivity, a multimedia interpretation of the works of W. G. Sebald, and an exploration of critical methods for reading digital texts. The work culminated in two public presentations in Spring 2006, one to the staff at the Center for the Digital Humanities and a second to the general university community.
