About Me
Dr. John F. Barber teaches in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. His teaching, research, and scholarship focuses on theory and practice promoted by digital media and how it shifts relationships between technology, art, science, and the humanities across two broad areas: digital humanities, digital narratives, and technology studies.
Example scholarship and publications in technology studies includes New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments, a volume edited with Dene Grigar, that focuses on the future of writing resulting from its move to inhabit electronic spaces. Dr. Barber has contributed invited chapters to Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers, High Wired, Electronic Networks, The Online Writing Classroom, Texts and Technology, Technical Communication and the World Wide Web, and Technology and English Studies. His work is included in print journals like Works & Days, Studies in Technical Communication, Pre/Text, and Readerly Writerly Text; and electronic journals like Leonardo Digital Reviews, and Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments.
Dr. Barber's work in digital humanities includes the development and curation of Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, an online, interactive information structure known as the preeminent resource on the life and work of Richard Brautigan. Another experiment is The Brautigan Library, an experiment in archiving unpublished manuscrip[ts by authors keen to share their narratives but with no real hope of seeing them published through traditional channels.
Barber wrote Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography and edited Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life, an anthology of essays about Brautigan, his work, and his place in American literature. Additional publications include chapters in Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen, Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, Research Guide to American Literature, and Fine Art Forum; and articles in electronic journals like Hyperriz: New Media New Cultures.
Dr. Barber is also the creator of Dr. John's Eazy-Peazy Guides, web-based, award-winning tutorials for improving skills in writing, research, HTML, public speaking, and creative thinking.
In the area of digital narrative, Dr. Barber is interested in opportunities afforded by Internet radio, online iReportage, and geo-locative audio-based interactive experiences, especially as the might form the basis for engaged narrative. He has produced a number of digital audio narratives that explore opportunities for developing and sustaining immersive narrative contexts using natural, human, and/or mechanical sounds. One such project, "What's that sound? :: A Sixties Radio Narrative," was selected for showing at the IDEAS10: Art and Digital Narrative, a juried show at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November 2010. His current work includes "Walking-Talking," a project that envisions a mobile audio narrative experience of discovery and connection throughout a network of site-specific location of historic and/or cultural interest.