Welcome to BCNM Spring 2018 Visiting Scholar Michael Stevenson
We are delighted to virtually (and belatedly!) welcome Michael Stevenson, a web historian, and Associate Professor of New Media & Digital Culture in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam, to the Berkeley Center for New Media as our Spring 2018 Visiting Scholar. His work is broadly about the roots and foundations of media practices, genres and forms that are considered ‘web-native’ or otherwise specific to the new media landscape. He is currently working on ’The Web that Was,’ a project funded by the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO), about the Perl programming language and the early web.
One of his earlier projects, the Everything Development Engine, was released in 1999. It was software for building advanced interactive websites. It was written in Perl and had wacky features, and it was part of a larger wave of open-source hype. Everything was weird and subversive, yet it was going to make money. It could only have existed in a specific historical moment.
He has published many academic and conference papers, as well as hosted numerous workshops relating to his research.