darren wershler-henry's home page.
Welcome to my home page. In brief, this is what I do:
writing
My most recent nonfiction book is The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, but I've written or cowritten five other books about technology and culture, including the Canadian bestseller Internet Directory 2000 (with Scott Mitchell); Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community (with Mark Surman); and FREE as in speech and beer. I'm also the author of three books of poetry, NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs, the first book printed by the newly revived Coach House Books in 1997; the tapeworm foundry, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Prize in 2000; and apostrophe (with Bill Kennedy), the first book ever written with a search engine. And, just to keep ourselves amused, Hal Niedzviecki and I wrote The Original Canadian City Dweller’s Almanac. If you're interested in any of my books, there's more detailed information here.My essays, articles and poems have appeared in many books and periodicals, including Boundary 2, The Boston Review, Brick, Gone to Croatan: Origins of American Dropout Culture, Grain, Matrix, Open Letter, Postmodern Apocalypse, Prairie Fire, Quarry, Quill & Quire, Rampike, Semiotext(e) Canada(s) and Sulfur.
teaching
I am an Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University. I teach courses on media history and new media, with a particular focus on the relationship between media forms and 20th and 21st-century poetry and art. My courses currently include Introduction to Communication Studies (CS100), Digital Media and Culture (CS325) and Free Culture (CS400). The syllabi for these courses are available through my teaching page. You might also want to look at the department's current course offerings and outlines.
research
For the last three years, along with Professor Rosemary Coombe, I've been planning, designing and project managing the pilot phase of Artmob, a multisectoral online initiative. Artmob's purpose is to build large, accessible online archives of publically licensed Canadian art, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws. It's an exciting project, and when it succeeds, it'll help to break open the financial, technical and legal bottleneck that's currently stalling the appearance of high-quality Canadian online arts archives.