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Digital genres, a May 30–31 conference at the University of Chicago:

In 1924 Gilbert Seldes' The 7 Lively Arts made one of the earliest and most powerful arguments that popular genres of entertainment such as jazz and cinema deserved the same critical attention afforded the fine arts - a view that is now widely accepted. This conference seeks to do today for digital genres what Seldes did for the lively arts eighty years before.

The conference is based on the idea that digital and network technologies are creating new methods of communication that, like the popular genres of the 1920, allow novel forms of creativity and expression. After a half-century dominated by the mass-media, we argue that it is these new genres - the genres that will preoccupy us on this side of the millennium - that are the true successors to Seldes' lively arts. What can slash, blogs, massively multiplayer games, fan fiction, chat rooms, and other popular genres tell us about how humans communicate? And how do they shed light on human meaning making more generally? Moving away from Seldes' concept of 'art' to a more embracing notion of 'genre' as a general method of understanding the structured, meaningful, and dialogic nature of cultural production, the conference examines a wide variety of cultural production enabled by digital technology. Please join us.

Guest speakers will include Greg Costikyan, Edward Castronova, AKMA, and keynote speaker David Weinberger.

I don't even know what "slash" is. Link via AKMA.

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