Lori Emerson is an associate professor at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

and founder of the Media Archaeology Lab, a museum dedicated to obsolete technologies spanning from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. She is known for her work in

media archaeology Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media s ...

digital preservation In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and ...

, and

digital archives Digital Archives ( no, Digitalarkivet) is a website of the National Archival Services of Norway for publishing digitized archival material. The website contains sources that are both and transcribed (searchable) and scanned. The most important sea ...

Education

Emerson has a B.A. from the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

(1998), and M.A. from the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary insti ...

(2001) and an M.A. from the

University of Buffalo The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 18 ...

(2004). In 2008 she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo. She joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2008. As of 2022, she is an associate professor in the English department. She is also the founder of University of Colorado's Boulder's Media Archaeology Lab.

Career

Emerson's areas of study include cultural studies, poetics and

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

computer history The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. The first aids to computation were purely mechanic ...

, telecommunications networks,

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

and

textuality In literary theory, textuality comprises all of the attributes that distinguish the communicative content under analysis as an object of study. It is associated with structuralism and post-structuralism. Explanation Textuality is not just abou ...

, and

. Emerson writes on and teaches experimental American and Canadian writing from the 20th and 21st centuries, the history of computing, and media theory. Her interest in the predecessors to ASCII art was part of a 2014 story in ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

.'' A component of Emerson's work centers on media archaeology or how to preserve digital memories. The Media Archaeology Lab she founded at the University of Colorado Boulder campus collects obsolete technologies in order to foster study and understanding of them. Carrying the motto "The past must be lived so that the present can be seen," the lab maintains all of these items in working order and allows them to be used at any time. It houses the world's first portable computer, the

Osborne 1 The Osborne 1 is the first commercially successful portable computer, released on April 3, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighs , cost US$1,795, and runs the CP/M 2.2 operating system. It is powered from a wall socket, as it has no ...

, as well as video game consoles, typewriters, audiovisual materials, and audio equipment. In exploring the ways in which the Media Archaeology Lab both differs from and adheres to the expectations of a traditional archive, Emerson and coauthor Libi Striegl describe that the Media Archaeology Lab "changes from year to year, depending on who is in the lab and what donations have arrived at our doorstep, and thus it undoes many assumptions about what archives as well as labs should be or do". This form of digital archaeology is a term used by Emerson to describe how people have interacted with computers over time. Her work establishing a media lab has been mentioned by other researchers in the field.

Selected publications

* * * **Reviewed by the ''Emily Dickinson Journal'', ''

Digital Humanities Quarterly ''Digital Humanities Quarterly'' is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. The journal is also a community experiment in journal publication. The journal is funded and published by t ...

'', '' Huffington Post,'' and others * **Reviewed by the ''Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association'' in 2014 *

Awards and honors

In 2015, Emerson received an honorable mention from the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature for her work ''Reading Writing Interfaces''. In 2015, she received the ASSETT Teaching With Technology Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder for her work in the Media Archaeology Lab.

References

External links

Media Archaeology Lab

Interview with Emerson, 11 October 2012
University at Buffalo alumni University of Victoria alumni University of Alberta alumni University of Colorado Boulder alumni University of Colorado Boulder faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Living people {{Improve categories, date=January 2022