Kari Kraus Named Kluge Fellow for 2018-19

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress sponsors the annual fellowship in Digital Studies to support scholars exploring how “groundbreaking technological innovations” can serve as “agents of broad and profound [societal] change.”

Professor Kraus’s project engages what is variously called “digital patina” and “computational wear” in the research literature. Broadly, digital patina involves the simulation of material traces on interactive media based on underlying usage data. In the physical world, for example, books mold, vases crack, factories rust, and castles crumble. Screen information, by contrast, can appear strangely impervious to time. Drawing on the Library’s collections, Kraus will use them as design resources and inspiration for prototyping new user interfaces.

Because the project of digital patina is predicated on a positive affective experience of age and entropy, Kraus will also create a small corpus of materials from the collections that will inform a participant-based study aimed at better understanding the emotional register that different representations of textual and pictorial wear provoke.