New deadline CfP: Taking Control: critical and creative uses of digital tools in screen, literature, graphic texts, and visual culture narratives

This is a slightly revised call.

This call is for abstract submissions for an international edited collection entitled Taking Control: critical and creative uses of digital tools in screen, literature, graphic texts, and visual culture narratives.

Currently I am seeking a number of academics and professionals in the field who might like to send me an abstract for consideration for inclusion in the book.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, we have extended the deadline date for abstracts.

Abstracts now due: 30 April 2022.

The aim of Taking Control is to highlight the human-AI (think computer) blend in creativity as a vibrant inter- and multidisciplinary area where we urgently need better understanding and clear parameters to judge success and failure.

Taking Control seeks to examine the current uses, and the potential for expansion and extension, and possible future uses of AI in relation to screen and literature, including e-books and electronic literature genres and graphic texts, and visual culture narratives; as well as the little explored angles of cultural criticism and cultural meaning in those human-AI (computer) assisted productions.

Suggestions for potential contributions to consider, include, but are not limited to, are, how the use of AI (computer) in creative productions may:

• expand the range of imaginative invention through new techniques and themes;
• challenge the audience’s perception of the boundary between human and machine;
• introduce entirely new genres and modes;
• reach audiences in new ways born of big-data studies of human cognition;
• provide new immersive interactivity for audiences;
• include perspectives from a vastly increased range of groups and individuals globally; and
• eliminate the limitations of included content based on the cognitive capacities of the human creative team and analogue physical formats.

Potential contributions in relation to critical and interpretative methods include, but are not limited to, how the use of AI and machine learning may:

• allow entirely new insights, especially into large collections of creative works;
• provide models of the reception of creative works in audiences, which can be interrogated to test theories of how creative works have their impact, at levels down to the subliminal; and

lead to new hypotheses about works of art based on multiple overlapping layers of context in time, space, other works in the same and different genres, cultures, and physical and mental environments.

Technology can be misused; yet in the human-AI (computer) blend humans have the power to intervene. In these interactions, there is the potential to take things to a different level. The power of the human, the ability to think differently, and critically and creatively, together with the technical abilities of the computer for holding, sorting, and providing masses of big data, hold out the possibility of expanded human creativity. When you use the computer, and choose and use information fairly, it makes the outcome compelling and accurate. AI affects what people look for, what they enter into the computer and how they respond, and what that reveals and changes about the people can affect our societies and cultures. Wherever you add questions about our environment, for instance, AI it sharpens it so we can relate to it.  Thus, how it relates to the human experience, to our world, and human society, much depends on how we manage it, where we take it and what we do with it.

Questions remain: In what ways can human-AI (computer) assisted treatment and examination of screen, literature, graphic texts  and visual culture narratives expand, grow, and bring deeper understanding of ourselves, our worlds, our environment, our culture and society, and bring about change?  How do these works address cultural criticism, and social and cultural meanings, and add to our understanding of our cultures and society? What is the potential for exploring human experience and that connect to our world, and the possible import of these productions for the future? Admittedly, there are differing views and opinions on the future of AI (the computer). Some think an Artificial General Intelligence can or has the potential to exist independently of human input, and others think not—that artificial intelligence requires human input, control, and computer skills. What does all this mean for our future society and culture?  

At this initial stage, in lieu of “chapters,” this proposed work, Taking Control, is taking extended abstracts for consideration for inclusion in the book.

Submission instructions:

1. The extended abstracts must be more than 1,000 and less than 1,700 words.

(Full-length chapters of approximately 7,000 words each will be solicited from these abstracts.)

1. Please keep in mind that your essay-chapter will stem from your extended abstract. Your abstract will carry the same title as your essay-chapter.
2. Abstracts must be in English, and submitted as a Word document.
3. When writing your abstract use Times New Roman point 12, and 1.5 spacing.
4. At the beginning of your extended abstract, immediately after the title of your work and your name, add 5 to 8 keywords that best relate to your work.
5. Use the Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition.
6. Use English spelling not American English spelling.
7. Use endnotes, not footnotes, use counting numbers not Roman numerals, and keep the endnotes to a bare minimum, working the information into the text where possible.
8. Do cite all your work in your extended abstract as you would in a full chapter.
9. a) in the body of the abstract, add parenthetical in-text citations (family name of author and year, and page number/s) (e.g. Smith 2019, 230);
10. b) fully reference all in-text citations in alphabetical order, in the References list at the end of your abstract.
11.  Please send your abstract and your documents as attachments to an email. At the same time as

 submitting your extended abstract, in separate documents please send the following:

1. Your covering letter, giving your academic title/s, affiliation, your position, and your home and telephone, and email contact details;
2. A short bio of no more than 200 words;
3. Your C.V., giving your publications to date, and the publishing details and dates.

Papers should be forwarded to:

Jo Parnell Jo.Parnell@newcastle.edu.au  alternatively annette.parnell@newcastle.edu.au  or joandbobparnell@bigpond.com 

Dr Jo Parnell. PHD. | Honorary Lecturer
School of Humanities and Social Science

College of Human and Social Futures

M: +61 (0)421 993 253
E: Jo.Parnell@newcastle.edu.au
W: newcastle.edu.au/profile/Jo-Parnell 

International author and editor  

Latest books:

Representation of the Mother-in-Law in literature, film, drama, and television (Lexington Books USA, 2018).

New and Experimental Approaches to Writing Lives (Macmillan International Higher Education, Red Globe Press, 2019).

The Bride in the Cultural Imagination: Screen, Stage, and Literary Productions (Lexington Books USA, 2020).

Taking Control: critical and creative uses of digital tools in screen, literature, graphic texts, and visual culture narratives. (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2022/23).

Writing Australian History on Screen: television and film period dramas “down under,” with Julie Anne Taddeo (Lexington Books, USA, forthcoming 2022).

Cultural Representations of the Second Wife: Literature, Stage, and Screen (Lexington Books, USA, forthcoming 2022).

The University of Newcastle
University Drive, Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia

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I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land in which the University resides and pay my respect to Elders past, present and emerging.
I extend this acknowledgement to the Awabakal people of the land in which the Callaghan campus resides and which I work.

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