Matt,

The conference was quite intellectually stimulating, with unexpected synergies of themes (as well as interesting differences in approach) among the papers and respondents. F. Kittler and L. Daston, unfortunately, were not able to make it to the event, though their papers were represented. The format of the conference was somewhat unusual: the audience was to have read the papers in advance, and the presentations at the actual event consisted in each case of a "response" to the paper and then a "rejoinder" by the author of the paper. (Mark Hansen gave an excellent response to my paper; and I gave a rejoinder that contrasted his phenomenological approach to the "embodied" reception of information with my approach to the production of information in the collective bodies of corporations.) One of the great surprises and highlights of the conference was the presence of David and Judith MacDougall from Australia, who screened their documentary _Photo Wallahs_ about the use of photography in an hill station town in India. The screening and discussion (about the nature of photography and its transmission through the film medium) occurred at the end of the conference, however. Prior to that, as WJT Mitchell observed at one point in the proceedings, the conference concentrated almost wholly on the the arts of transmission in the ages of print and of the Internet. (Indeed, this was the unofficial theme of the event, since so many of the papers, even when addressing early print culture, were explicitly haunted by the contrast of digital culture. Chartier's paper was a case in point.) Missing until the MacDougall event was any real attention to the rich spectrum of audiovisual media from photography on.
Critical Inquiry now has a "preprint" series called _Rough Cut_, which is analogous to a scientific preprint series. The papers for this conference are now on the preprint site in both HTML and PDF, and will later be published in Critical Inquiry. The site does require a login, but I'm not sure of what sort. I can get in through my university library's proxy server.

Thanks for the report, Alan. I'm glad to see Critical Inquiry now supporting work in media/digital studies. (Maybe PMLA will follow in another five years.)

I found the Rough Cut page and downloaded a stack of essays, yours included.