*CFP: The Poetics of Metadata* *The Society for Textual Scholarship * *Sixteenth Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference * *March 16-18, 2011 * *Penn State University* * * This panel at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship seeks to expand recent directions in media studies by focusing on metadata—data about data—as a category of aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural inquiry. Recent critical trends in media studies have emphasized various aspects of and approaches to the materiality of technology and media information, with methodologies including digital forensics, platform studies, and critical code studies offering both a deep interest in the close reading of technology and a jumping-off point towards multiple larger literary, cultural, and philosophical questions. This panel aims to extend these approaches through a close focus on metadata. How does metadata relate to data in discursive, informational, and ontological terms? How and to what extent does metadata inform the materiality of technology? What kinds of aesthetic, economic, geopolitical, philosophical, and historical questions emerge when we focus our attention on texts such as caches, server logs, search histories, and other instances of the metadata of the digital? How might contemporary metadata resemble, remediate, or break from the metadata of earlier periods? How might we write metadata into media history, and how does its presence coincide with or complicate existing narratives of media change? Papers welcome on all aspects of metadata across all periods and media. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a short c.v. via email by October 10, 2010 to Paul Benzon, Temple University ([log in to unmask]); initial queries also welcome at this address. All participants in the STS 2011 conference must be members of STS. For information about membership, please contact Secretary Meg Roland at < [log in to unmask]> or visit the Indiana University Press Journals website and follow the links to the Society for Textual Scholarship membership page. For conference updates and information, see the STS website at <http://www.textual.org>. Paul Benzon Department of English 1127 Anderson Hall Temple University 1801 N. Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122 [log in to unmask] ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]