Digitality

Das Badische Landesmuseum verfolgt seit einigen Jahren die Umsetzung eines neuen Museumskonzepts, in dessen Zentrum die Neudefinition der Besucher*innen als aktive Nutzer*innen des Museums steht. Sind in den aktuellen Sammlungsausstellungen rund 13.000 Exponate zu sehen, wird durch die Öffnung der Depots Schritt für Schritt der Gesamtbestand von etwa500.000 Objekten erschlossen und zugänglich gemacht. Wie in einem „Archiv der Sachkultur“ erhalten die Nutzer*innen Zugang zu ihrem kulturellen Erbe.

Back in the 1960s videogames were a big deal and were being played on computers. No one would have probably guessed that this form of playing would sooner or later change in a way that it would come close to the motion pictures, which was entertained in the movie theatres. However, in the 21st century, the two different entertainment media, videogames and movies, have now come to a point where they almost seem to merge together. According to Steven Shaviro, film has given way to television as "cultural dominant" for a long time ago, and television has in turn given way in current years to computer-and network-based, and digitally generated, "new media". He states, that "film itself has not disappeared, of course; but filmmaking has been transformed, over the past two decades, from analog process to a heavily digitized one" (Shaviro 130). Thus, we are witnessing an emergence of a different mode of production, than the ones who dominated the 20th century. The art of storytelling is therefore altering and the way we view movies will never be the same. In 2018, Netflix released its hyper-experimental interactive or "choose your own adventure" movie. The award-winning sci-fi series Black Mirror, has been a popular show, known for highlighting the negative effects of digital technology. Unlike the series previous seasons, which were mainly episodes, Black Mirror released a movie instead, called Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), introducing an entirely new way to experience content. This paper will examine the digitality of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Netflix 2018) and discuss issues of interaction and database cinema.

Der Begriff der Digitalität ist erst in jüngster Zeit ins Zentrum der Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaft gerückt. Er entspricht nicht dem Verständnis von Digitalisierung im Sinne der Entwicklung von Technologien, der Erfassung und Speicherung von Daten und der Automatisierung von Abläufen. Vielmehr reflektiert Digitalität auf kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Realitäten und Lebensformen, die mit der Digitalisierung einhergehen und diese im Wechselspiel wiederum ermöglichen. Ziel des Bandes ist es, das Phänomen der Digitalität näher zu bestimmen und den Blick auf kulturelle, didaktische und soziologische Aspekte des Lebens in einer digitalisierten Welt zu richten. Folgende Fragen stehen dabei im Zentrum:
- In welchem Verhältnis stehen die Phänomene „Digitalisierung“ und „Digitalität“?
- Wie verändern sich Lehr- und Lernprozesse im Kontext von Digitalisierung und Digitalität?
- Welche Herausforderungen, Chancen und Probleme ergeben sich aus der Digitalität für die Zukunft der Gesellschaft und der Universitäten?
- Wie lässt sich die Kultur der Digitalität gezielt gestalten und vermitteln?

Published in Animism in Art and Performance edited by Christopher Braddock (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. pp 91-107). This chapter addresses the work of non-digital text-based art in the age of digital media through a discussion of an installation by Australian artist/writer Lynne Barwick. It highlights the movement of the reader and the animation of space, considering text as simultaneously writing and image. Key to the discussion is the animating power of the word and the ways in which entangled bodies depend on media as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness. Referencing writers such as Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, Gibbs explores the language of text as an assemblage that we cannot stand apart from, operating beyond a necessity for strategic communication. Accordingly, the focus is not about the individual ego but about language itself as a conduit or collaborator.

The meme is an idea, element of culture or behavior passed down from one person to another through imitation. A more specific form of meme is the internet meme, which involves images, videos, text, or other content rapidly spread, and often modified, over the internet, and sometimes transcending the mere digital into the material world. Internet memes are often global and therefore help establish commonality between people across cultures, oceans, and national boundaries. They also can help further knit together particular communities already bonded through digital interaction. Yet, despite the cultural impact and pervasiveness of these virtual memes and artifacts in the late-20th and early-21st century, the heritage field has only just begun to recognize the importance and impact of online sub-cultures and viral phenomenon, and the future heritage value that these sub-cultures and phenomenon will hold. Meme historians are few and meme museums even more scarce. Because internet memes and cultures evolve so rapidly, and website links often move or expire, many, probably most, of these virtual objects and intangible heritages, are in danger of being forgotten and lost over the long term. Compounding this difficulty is the sheer volume of memes and artifacts to curate and sift through for selective preservation. This thesis explores the research question of how to select internet memes for preservation as virtual tangible and intangible heritage, and postulates that participatory, community-based efforts could prove invaluable to developing and implementing selection strategies.

The use of digital technologies in contemporary global society has brought about a genuine anthropological and anthropotechnical transformation of the individual, on three interconnected levels: 1) the level of everyday behaviour; 2) the level of cognitive processes; 3) the symbolic level. In this paper, I will analyse these transformations in relation to a specific phenomenon of digital technology which falls within the range of practices of the quantified self, namely the phenomenon of lifelogging. The phenomenon will be analysed on three levels: 1) Processes of subjectification. Why are such data collected? The purpose of lifelogging is no longer "self-knowledge" – as in the modern and contemporary philosophical and cultural tradition – but rather self-motivation and self-optimisation. In terms of processes of subjectification, these practices may be understood as digital technologies of the self, to quote Michel Foucault, which is to say as modes of controlling and transforming one’s self by acting upon one’s body. 2) Social recognition. The data collected are also shared on social media platforms in order to receive comments and feedback through which to reinforce the construction of self. Can we describe this virtual community as a digital form of social belonging? And what are the implications of this for traditional forms of social recognition? 3) Business. The phenomenon of lifelogging includes not just lifeloggers but also the developers of lifelogging apps, devices, and software. Lifelogs (i.e. databases about individual physical performances) are widespread in many fields, such as those of fitness, healthcare, and education. Given the highly integrated level of the phenomenon and the risks it entails (particularly in terms of privacy policies), a pressing need has emerged to fill a gap in academic knowledge by investigating lifelogging within the context of the global digital society.

“Play” has been a central concept in video game studies for the last several years. Through a close look at the recent Danish-developed game Inside (2016) and an overview of the medium, this paper argues that “work” is an equally productive concept, one that foregrounds the ways that video games simulate capitalist forms of physical and intellectual labour, usually as a means of accumulating digital goods. From the twinkling coins of 1985’s Super Mario Bros. to the outfits, arsenals, and emotes of 2014’s Destiny, gamers trade physical labour—their “work” at a ludic interface—for digital wealth.

Presenting various scenes from the game, I also contend that Inside functions as a compelling subversion. “Work” is still central, and in fact the game’s setting is a kind of self-enclosed industrial wasteland. But here the “work” of the player and her avatar, a young boy, lead not to wealth but to repeated death and horrific transformation, opening the space for a thoughtful exploration of the technocultural nexus of labour, repetition, and death that is so dominate under advanced capitalism. The paper concludes by considering the potential for interactive media to critically investigate how we work and, relatedly, how we die.

This magazine is intended to provide a comprehensive insight into the Creative Collections project. The project was funded from February 2018 to December 2020 in two phases of the program "Digitale Wege ins Museum" of the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg. After delays due to the pandemic, the project came to a close at the end of June 2021 with the publication of Ping! The Museum App. Building on the new museum concept of the Badisches Landesmuseum, the project aimed to actively involve citizens in the digital reorientation of the museum. The aim of the magazine is to bring together the contexts, results and backgrounds of the projekt and to provide an insight into the resulting perspectives, projects and positions.

What potential applications and benefits do artificial intelligence methods offer museums? The field has recently gained momentum in the German-speaking world, with pilot projects underway at many cultural institutions and universities, the topic being discussed in exhibitions, and festivals and hackathons dedicated to experiments in the artistic field. In the English-speaking world, Oonagh Murphy (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Elena Villaespesa (School of Information, Pratt Institute) founded "The Museums + AI Network" in 2019 and developed a toolkit in workshops to make the topic more accessible. With the founding of the German-speaking network "KI & Museen", it made sense to undertake a translation of the toolkit and to expand it with ongoing projects from the German context. It offers insights into the use of artificial intelligence in museums, supports the conception of own projects with several worksheets and explains central terms of the debate. English and Spanish versions: https://themuseumsai.network/toolkit/

This thesis focuses on the development of sociability within digitality, through an examination of three primary relationships: people and music, people and the Web 2.0 and people and each other. Mobile digital devices, such as the iPod, represent the convergence of musical taste and the internet. Both are inherently social, and, while critics have accused mobile digital devices as being socially isolating, the youth in this study have demonstrated an environment in which this technology is used as a means of communication. For these digital youth, such technologies are seen as a gateway to communication and the sharing of experiences. Having grown up fully immersed in digitality, these youth are negotiating new relationships with technology and each other, through the perceived invisibility of the technology.

An important aspect of this research is the formation of identity and taste in digitality. Music is an integral facet of identity, a means to relate to others and form judgments on those we meet – but how is this affected by digitality? The internet encourages a loss of genre distinction, and a culture of eclecticism, whereby people can listen to a multitude of genres, often without knowing what exactly they are listening to, and without aligning their identities with specific genres or subgenres. Based on empirical data, it is demonstrated that this fragmentation of taste matches an intensified fragmentation of identity through social networking sites.

The essay culls from classical texts and personal experiences of libertine intimacy with strangers to address age-old academic blind spots regarding group sex as a recurring fantasy and sexual practice. What is brought forth is a Freudian and Lacan-ian analysis of the relationship between contemporary desire and digitality through " the gangbang " as articulated on digital platforms. The focus is on digitally-assisted gang-bangs involving a transvestite and several heterosexually identified males, and what such events reveal about digital media's and heterosexuality's demands. The author argues that this sexual configuration is a re-enactment of " the great misdeed " , which Freud recounts in Totem and Taboo as the mythic primordial killing of the Father by the band of brothers. This symbolic occasion is described as the genesis of social organization and re-emerges as a form of mourning the disappearance of the fleshly body as new media turn it into digital code. Such a codification of the body awakens anxieties around the fictitious conflation between penis and phallus. In the face of the digital, man outsources his phallic power, which is suddenly required to be represented corporally at all times, to a virtually organized multitude that is willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of the group, and the legitimation of hetero-masculinity that it can presumably grant. The gangbang also appears as a digitally mediated opportunity for old fantasies of aggression and expiation to articulate themselves without putting the white male heterosexual body on the line.

This book investigates a paradox of creative yet scripted play—how LEGO invites players to build ‘freely’ with and within its highly structured, ideologically-laden toy system. First, this book considers theories and methods for deconstructing LEGO as a medium of bricolage, the creative reassembly of already-significant elements. Then, it pieces together readings of numerous LEGO sets, advertisements, videogames, films, and other media that show how LEGO constructs five ideologies of play: construction play, dramatic play, digital play, transmedia play, and attachment play. From suburban traffic patterns to architectural croissants, from feminized mini-doll bodies to toys-to-life stories, from virtual construction to playful fan creations, this book explores how the LEGO medium conveys ideological messages—not by transmitting clear statements but by providing implicit instructions for how to reassemble meanings it had all along.
Note: If you are teaching any of this book in an undergraduate class and are interested in a virtual classroom visit, feel free to drop me a line.

The ways in which technology mediates the relationship between people and music has increasingly evolved since the advent of playback devices. With the arrival of digital music, and its inherent culture of digitality, new issues have emerged regarding musical engagement at the level of fan and/or consumer. This paper will explore how and what people are engaging with music, as mediated by technology. These two issues will be categorized by: (1) the immense quantity of popular music available digitally is promoting a culture of eclecticism, whereby people are not tied to specific genres when defining their tastes. Personal genre alliance has fallen out of favour, and replaced by fluid definitions of genres and artists, that are user-driven and highly personalized and subjective: for example, folksonomies. (2) One of the primary ways in which people consume music is through portable media devices, such as the iPods. It is shown that there are statistically significant differences in genre preference between those who use MP3 players and those who do not. This paper utilises a dataset comprised from both qualitative and quantitative means.

Digitalität und Citizen Science sind Schlagworte der laufenden Transformation von Museen. Im Hintergrund stehen grundlegende gesellschaftliche Veränderungen: Zum einen durchdringt das Digitale in rasanter Geschwindigkeit alle Lebensbereiche und geht einher mit neuen Verhaltensweisen und Erwartungen von Besuchern an Museen; zum anderen differenzieren sich potentielle Besucher auch sonst nach Bildung, Herkunft, Alter und Lebensstilen immer stärker aus. Diese Entwicklungen stellen Museen vor neue Herausforderungen, öffnen zugleich aber auch neue Möglichkeiten zur zielgerichteten Interaktion mit potentiellen Nutzern – letztlich geht es sowohl mit Blick auf Digitalität als auch Citizen Science um die Öffnung von Museen und die Kooperation mit den Nutzern auf Augenhöhe.

Die Digitalisierung prägt und transformiert unser alltägliches Leben zunehmend; eine digitale Lebenswelt entsteht. Sie ist  in ihrer Komplexität nicht mehr rein technik- oder medienphilosophisch zu verstehen, sondern bedarf eigener «Kategori- en der Digitalität», die in diesem Essay entwickelt werden.  Dazu grenzt sich der Autor von spekulativen Positionen ab, welche die Entwicklung der Digitalisierung derart aufl aden, dass daraus utopische Science-Fiction-Szenarien werden. Denn die digitale Lebenswelt sollte nicht nur als eine technologische  Innovation verstanden werden, sondern als eine neue ontologi-sche Struktur, die es philosophisch zu erkunden und zu begreifen  gilt.

Everyday people's opinions and actions matter to governments and corporations because we are both citizens and consumers. Despite the EU's muted response to the USA's and UK's surveillance scandal, we can deliver a strong response (as citizens and consumers) by carefully selecting which services, goods, and companies we employ. When citizens and consumers voice their opinions clearly and act upon them, governments and corporations respond accordingly - the EU's experience with ACTA last year proves that, without a doubt.

The last five years have been increasingly transformative in the realms of broadcast and electronic media; following an inevitable convergence with internet-centric technologies. The emergence of new platforms has enabled the untethering of audiovisual content from specific temporal and spatial bounds as consumption of AV programming has embraced the facets of mobility. This paper critically examines content streaming applications like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Voot in conjunction with similar platforms of streaming content for media forms like podcasts. By analyzing the content on offer, the various modus-operandi for content creation and dissemination and the way consumers engage/consume content on these platforms; this paper hopes to arrive at a nuanced understanding of binging both as an activity and as a new way of engaging with broadcast content. In terms of market value, the Indian online streaming market is estimated to be over 100 million regular subscribers and is valued at USD 280 Million. By using specific cases and situating the analysis in the context of an increasingly connected world; this paper will extend the academic understanding of binging by building on the foundations of a remediated understanding (McLuhan) and giving it a social dimension.

Everyday people's opinions and actions matter to governments and corporations because we are both citizens and consumers. Despite the EU's muted response to the USA's and UK's surveillance scandal, we can deliver a strong response (as citizens and consumers) by carefully selecting which services, goods, and companies we employ. When citizens and consumers voice their opinions clearly and act upon them, governments and corporations respond accordingly - the EU's experience with ACTA last year proves that, without a doubt.

Brice Dellsperger pushes the boundaries of genre and
gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film
sequences—all assembled under the title Body Double—
the cineast and artist reenacts selected scenes from
well-known films frame for frame and lets his
“body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male
or female. In this conversation between Dellsperger and
Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender
discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual)
identity as products of a cultural construction informed
by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet
do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish
an image of it and its (normative) framework.
Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he,
starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing
identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies
for subjectivity.

diktyochóros/diktyotopia [1]
[the next imaginarium in cyberterritory: a digital archive and a digital diagram]

[1] diktyochóros [δίκτυοΧώρος] – network space, diktyotopia [δίκτυοτοπία] – network place


http://www.strand.rs/2018/05/05/diagrammatics/#more-432

The ways in which technology mediates the relationship between people and music has increasingly evolved since the advent of playback devices. With the arrival of digital music, and its inherent culture of digitality, new issues have emerged regarding musical engagement at the level of fan and/or consumer. This paper will explore what and where people are engaging with music, as mediated by technology. These two issues will be categorized by: (1) the immense quantity of popular music available digitally is promoting a culture of eclecticism, whereby people are not tied to specific genres when defining their tastes. Personal genre alliance has fallen out of favour, and replaced by fluid definitions of genres and artists, that are user-driven and highly personalised and subjective: for example, folksonomies. (2) One of the primary ways in which people consume music is through portable media devices, such as the iPods. My data shows that people are predominantly utilising these devices in three sites of engagement: mobile, immobile and quasi-mobile activities. These issues are explored through the results of a large-scale, international study, utilising both quantitative and qualitative approaches, in the form of interviews and surveys, both conducted online and in person. Throughout this paper, I make distinctions between how digital youth, or digital natives, those under the age of thirty who have grown up entirely immersed in digitality, and those over thirty, or digital immigrants, have developed diverse systems of musical engagement. I argue that digital youth, whose relationship with music is increasingly mediated by digital technologies, such as the iPod, are no less emotionally engaged with music than their older counterparts, but their tastes are less genre-focused.

espanolEl siguiente trabajo se propone pensar un tipo de imagen contemporanea: el meme. Como parte de nuestra economia visual actual, se da cuenta de su impacto y genealogia que se presenta no solo como hilo historico sino como necesaria para entender por que los memes son tan eficaces y populares. Se propone pensar en particular a los memes politicos, anclados en la tradicion de la satira, planteando a estas imagenes “pobres” no como una emergencia totalmente nueva sino mas bien desde una continuidad con artefactos visuales que las precedieron. EnglishThis article aims to think over a particular type of contemporary image: the Internet-meme. As a part of our visual economy, it is intended to expose its impact as well as its genealogy to understand why memes are so popular and efficient nowadays. This piece focuses on political memes, as belonging to a satirical tradition of images, implying that these so-called “poor” images are not a totally new phenomenon but, on the contrary, a ...

Slender Man’s radical alterity resides not only in his vacuity, but his proximity. His movements are already there, perverting children through the prosthetic use of cybernetics and blogging. We ourselves are there, in front of the screen, engaged in the process of becoming cyborgs. The face of Nothingness is in your face. Slender Man’s horroristic communicativity and sadistic seduction of young girls opens up portals to destructive writing, in which the non-existent sender makes his inner complexity available to naiive, doomed social agents. The message is sharp, like the knives it brings into motion. All this is brought about through a perverse, ecstatic posthuman connectivity. Digital technologies predicated upon a supposed need for constant contact deterritorialize social fields, until the barrier
separating simulation from reality is forever breached. Slender Man’s messages demand the removal of the Other’s face. Underneath the pale mask, there is nothing. Not only is he a postmodern meme, but also a prophet of acentred acephallic subjectivity and the end of all
metanarratives.

Academic publishers are confronted with a number of new challenges. Besides significant changes of the regulatory environment, business models have been evolved as a consequence of digitization. They shape publis- hers’ internal reactions as well as their competitive repositioning.

Wissenschaftsverlage sehen sich einer Vielzahl neuer Herausforderungen gegenüber. Neben einer Änderung des regulativen Umfelds machen es Ge- schäftsmodelle im Gefolge der Digitalisierung erforderlich, durch interne Maßnahmen und ein geändertes Wettbewerbsverhalten auf Marktherausforderungen zu reagie- ren.

Das Phänomen der Digitalisierung ist erst seit kurzem in den Fokus der geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung gerückt, nachdem es in breiten Teilen der Gesellschaft Fuß gefasst hat. Philip Specht, Autor des Buches „Die 50 wichtigsten Themen der Digitalisierung“, vertritt die These, die Digitalisierung werde uns „mit der wohl größten zivilisatorischen Herausforderung konfrontieren, die es je zu bewältigen galt.“ (Specht 2018, 10) Sollte dies zutreffen – und vieles spricht dafür –, dann dürfen gerade auch die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften dazu nicht schweigen. Bislang gibt es noch keine Reihe, die das Phänomen der Digitalisierung aus dezidiert geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive behandelt. Hierfür soll der Begriff der „Digitalität“ im Gegensatz zum rein technischen Begriff der „Digitalisierung“ verwendet werden. Während die Digitalisierung das technische Phänomen der Umwandlung analoger in digitale Information betrifft, reflektiert die Digitalität von einer Metaebene auf diese Transformation. Sie befragt diese Transformation nach ihrer kulturellen, ästhetischen, ontologischen und ethischen Bedeutung. Die neue Metzler-Reihe soll ein Forum für Analysen dieses Phänomens aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven der Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften bieten.

Brice Dellsperger pushes the boundaries of genre and
gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film
sequences—all assembled under the title Body Double—
the cineast and artist reenacts selected scenes from
well-known films frame for frame and lets his
“body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male
or female. In this conversation between Dellsperger and
Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender
discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual)
identity as products of a cultural construction informed
by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet
do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish
an image of it and its (normative) framework.
Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he,
starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing
identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies
for subjectivity.

In this series of notes from 2014, first published on the Empyre list after being asked, "What is a digital process?" and edited down for this posting, it is argued that the digital is moved by exterior forces, that process is not inherent to it, and that the bits, pixels and voxels of the digital domain are animated from the outside. This not only illuminates the limits of the digital but also sheds light on the meaning of "process".

The core interest of this study will be the relationship between space, data/information, spatial inscription and representation, reasoning and decision-making as part of the current digital phase. We will look at how digitality (as the cultural and philosophical framework), digital sciences and technologies (as its practical counterpart) and digital media and creativity have transformed spatial awareness, action, notation and imagery, and what role spatial/architectural design thinking and performance have taken within these tendencies as both - their  initiators and leading developers, and their contributors highly influenced by digital ideologies, tools and the unlimited design possibilities warranted in the digital world.

Starting from the outline of space informatisation and cyberisation as a broader social condition, more focused arguments will be built upon the question of what digital diagrammatics stands for. Operating along the scale from the logical abstractions and complexities in inferencing that guide intellectual plots, processes and relational networking behind the ideas and concepts to their materiality, objecthood or different physical manifestations, digital diagrammatics has acquired a specific role of spatial agency by data. Datascapes – environments defined/designed/mapped by data; scapes of information themselves; superpositions of multiple physical and virtual realities inasmuch as one of them alone - will be examined from the diagrammatic architectural perspective asking: How diagrammatic and spatial strategies employ and articulate data for different purposes and what are the outcomes of digital data operations in a diagrammatic spatial layout? What are the ways they are practiced through across the disciplinary systems while dealing with data in a documentary, scientific or creative manner? Supported by comments on historical precedents and forms that made their foundations, the answers on how digital language and literacy (as pivotal features of the underlying system of new digital media and its hybrid aesthetics) have transformed the ways spatial or any other information is used and comprehended, are expected to come as a conclusion.

El presente ensayo tiene como objetivo explorar de qué manera las nuevas lógicas y necesidades de la comunicación contemporánea, mediadas a través de la digitalidad, exploran y utilizan los emojis como recurso necesario para la extender las capacidades comunicativas entre los individuos.

This chapter considers the degree to which digital technology extends ontologies of the distant past by comparing modern interactions with a digital dimension to those of the ancient Egyptians with a divine dimension. Its technical foundation is provided by the methodology used to 3D scan and digitally reconstruct the fragmentary statue of the admiral Hor in the Manchester Museum (Acc. no. 3570), merging the authentic reproduction with a digitally sculpted reconstruction to grant Hor renewed presence. In Egypt, the deceased’s body parts were ritually enumerated and associated with gods, transposing the individual, piece by piece, into the divine dimension. The reduction of an object to a collection of data points, and its reconstitution in digital space, would have equally been seen to be laden with magical potential, with the model transcending the original. Ancient textual sources demonstrate further parallels, such as those between the programmer’s method and the priest’s ritual or the inherent dangers of exposed identities in a virtual dimension. The chapter aims to recontextualise work in digital heritage by exploring how digital technology can be reinterpreted, within the context of ancient belief systems, to gain new insights into both the past and the present.

ABSTRACT Figures such as graphs, illustrations, and photographs play important epistemological and pedagogic roles in the communication of science. In this presentation, I take as a case in point a figure from a research article published in 2001 in the paper and online editions of the New England Journal of Medicine. The figure represents a cross-section of a blood vessel and depicts the proposed response of a certain protein in regulating inflammation and coagulation in severe sepsis. The figure includes verbal resources, and is a hybrid of schematic and (semi-)naturalistic elements. In its original digital environment, the figure (like others in the journal) is not only part of a composite text, i.e., the research article; it is also a discrete text in its own right, one that can be searched, downloaded, read, and redistributed in various formats. Since its original publication in 2001, the figure has been reused and adapted for use in a number of different contexts. In this paper, I present and discuss some of these recontextualizations by examining changes in selection, arrangement, foregrounding, and social repositioning (Bezemer and Kress 2008) and by considering variations in the field, tenor, and mode of discourse. I investigate these recontextualizations (and their inevitable “recotextualizations”) more-or-less chronologically, starting with the figure’s origins in the New England Journal of Medicine before examining online repurposing of the figure in other research articles, in blogs, and in videos. Despite there being only minor transformations of the original figure, some of the recontextualizations suggest radically different readings from those of the original publication.