
Martin Irvine
Founding Director and Associate Professor
Communication, Culture & Technology Program (CCT)
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Georgetown University
irvinem@georgetown.edu
Welcome to the first and longest running website maintained by a professor at Georgetown University. I am the Founding Director of Georgetown's Communication, Culture & Technology Program (CCT), and have been a professor at Georgetown for 30 years. I set up the first website at Georgetown in 1993, and began developing websites for courses in 1994. When I launched the CCT Program in 1995-96, I began developing custom-designed sites for each course with web syllabi, readings, and lecture notes, and this site has now become my archive of courses, lectures, essays, and presentations for students and those interested in the fields I work in.
My teaching and research interests span several fields and disciplines: theory and philosophy of technology and culture; semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy of language; computation and symbolic cognition; media and communication theory and history; art theory and history; and intersections in art, music, film, and visual culture.
This site provides links to my course syllabi, lectures and presentations, and published work for use by all students and anyone interested in my various projects.
Current Courses and Seminars
- CCTP-711: Computing and the Meaning of Code
- CCTP-820: Leading By Design: Design Principles and Socio-Technical Systems
- CCTP-607: Leading Ideas in Technology: AI to the Cloud
- CCTP-802: Art and Media Interface(d)
Earlier Courses and Seminars
- CCTP-715: Computing and The Meaning of Life
- CCTP 748: Media Theory and Meaning Systems
- CCTP 797: Technology / Theory / Culture
- CCTP-798: Key Concepts in Technology and How to Use Them [Online-only: Information]
Archived Courses
I now maintain Wordpress sites for student seminar work (after years of managing a Seminar Wiki site). This platform enables student discussions and contributions to the real-time knowledge-building purpose of seminars in a peer-dialog context, and allows students to publish rich-content essays and final research projects. Student work is accessible on the Web, indexed by Google and other Web indexing sites. The platform provides a fixed URL for reference and use by students in future professional work.
Recent seminar sites for student work:
- CCTP-820: Leading by Design – Principles of Technical and Social Systems (Fall 2015)
- CCTP-748: Media Theory and Meaning Systems (Spring 2015)
- CCTP-711: Semiotics and Cognitive Technologies (Fall 2014)
- CCTP-748: Media Theory and Cognitive Technologies (Spring 2014)
- CCTP-725: Cultural Hybridity: Remix and Dialogic Culture (Spring 2014)
- CCTP-748: Media Theory and Digital Culture (Spring 2013)
- CCTP-725: Cultural Hybridity: Remix and Dialogic Culture (Fall 2013)
- CCTP-797: Technology / Theory / Culture (Fall 2013)
The earlier Seminar Wiki (2006-2012), alas, is no longer archived.
Recent Articles, Books, Presentations, Work in Progress
Work in Progress
- The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media (book in progress).
- "Semiotics, Computation, and Artificial Intelligence." Chapter in The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics (Bloomsbury Press, 2020). Abstract.
Recent Papers, Articles, and Book Chapters
- "Peirce's 'Logic as Semeiotic' and Semiotic Design Homologies in Computing Systems," Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2019.
- "A Peircean Redescription of Computation: All Computing is Humanistic Computing." Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2018.
- "C. S. Peirce and the Foundations of Computation: Automatable Semiosis." Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2016.
- "The Continuum in the Code Base: Computation as Automated Semiosis," invited paper for Le sujet digital: / The Digital Subject: Codes, University of Paris VIII, November, 2015.
- "Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality" (prepublication version, pdf).
In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15-42. - "The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture" (pre-press pdf). Chapter in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood. London and New York: Berg, 2012, 235-278. See also thumbnail list of images cited (pdf).
- "Extensible Memory, Distributed Cognition, and Artefactual Intelligence: Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine," invited paper for Le sujet digital: l'hypermnésie / The Digital Subject: Questioning Hypermnesia, University of Paris VIII, November 15, 2012.
- Bibliography of publications in Curriculum Vitae [being updated]
For Student Writers: A Rhetoric for the Digital Age
Writing to be Read: A Rhetoric for the Digital Age.
A guide for structuring your argument in essays and theses, and supporting your writing with authoritative sources in any medium, whether writing traditional "papers" or rich media essays on the Web.
Martin Irvine
Communication, Culture, and Technology Program (CCT)
Georgetown University
3520 Prospect St., NW, Suite 311
Washington, DC 20057
email: irvinem@georgetown.edu
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. -- Jorge Luis Borges, from "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. -- Mikhail Bakhtin
The valuable truth is not the detached one, but the one that goes toward enlarging the system of what is already known. -- C. S. Peirce, from "The First Rule of Logic" (1898)