GENEALOGIES The many dimensions of Myriam Diocaretz's personality —reflected in a wide range of activities that she has carried out in a parallel way— make it somehow a reductionist gesture on our part to attempt a linear narrative of her life. Still, rather than a biographical sketch, this is a general context of Myriam's professional experiences. Following one of her philosophies, we present here some selected events as "they make a difference." Geographies, Culture/s Born in Chile, educated according to the values and principles of French culture, later influenced by her years in the United States, Myriam Diocaretz adopted the Dutch nationality a few years ago. The different places where she has chosen to live have left vital traits in her work and visions, and she, in turn, has sought to make a contribution wherever she has lived, as a "part of the balancing acts in the world of livelihood." Starting in the South of Chile, she then spent some years in California, first in the San Francisco Bay area —Palo Alto and Stanford— then in Laguna Beach, and Corona del Mar, Irvine. When she was studying at the School of Critical Theory at Irvine, she took the second big "destiny leap" and transferred to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in Long Island, and established her home in Manhattan —New York City— before the next leap to the Netherlands —first in Amsterdam and then in Maastricht. She began her academic career at the age of nineteen, teaching literary criticism and English and American Literature at the University of Concepcion (Chile), where she soon became Associate Professor of Literature. She was the first scholar to hold a graduate degree as "Licenciada en Letras", an M.A. in English, at the Institute of Languages. Until 1973 she held a very productive life in her home-town, writing theatre reviews and literary articles for the main newspaper, attending the University Theatre School, producing and directing a number of plays at her Institute, giving lectures and poetry readings. In that period, in addition to teaching English and American literature, she was the coordinator cultural events at her Institute, and for several years developed the "cycles" series to link the university community with the city, by organising activities around different periods, such as the Romantic, or the Baroque, and combining the many art and culture resources at the university (Art Gallery, Symphony orchestra, theatre groups, lecturers, writers) to produce multi-artistic events. She also created "Cultural Images", a program broadcast by the University of Concepcion Radio Station, which has continued over the years. In the USA she participated in several editorial ventures collaborating in literary journals, leading writing workshops, giving poetry readings, and participating, for instance, in the programs of the now historical New York "Woman's Salon." For a number of years she was a lecturer and visiting Professor in Comparative Studies, Modern Literature, Critical Theory, and Gender Studies at several major universities in Europe and the USA. Her enthusiasm in forming cultural networks continued. Between 1986 and 1990, upon invitation from a group of women academics from Zagreb, and Belgrade she was co-director of the largest international colloquia on Women Studies ever held in Eastern Europe, with venue in Dubrovnik, a city very dear to her heart. She also organised the first international meetings held in Europe around the work of the Russian philosopher M. Bakhtin, and the first international conference on the work of Helene Cixous. While being a researcher at the University of Utrecht, she helped to develop and also coordinated several international summer schools. The Summer Schools dealt with issues of semiotics, language, power and ideology, from multidisciplinary perspectives.
New Paths In the 1990's Myriam Diocaretz begins to rethink her personal and academic goals (a sign of this questioning can be perceived in her essay "The Given and the Created: The Invisible Cities of Language"). It is in this period when she accepts an invitation to become the special tutor for Spanish language and culture of H.R.H. Carlos Prince de Bourbon de Parma—upon request of the family, and during these years she also chooses for a challenging change in her professional life: She abandons her university post, becomes an independent scholar, and reduces her academic lecturing and teaching. She then combines international travel with being a "cosmopolitan hermit". Thus, she organises her enterprise in the world of antiques, establishes an authors' agency and a consultancy for publishing ventures—M. Diocaretz Worldwide Rights & Publishing Consultants— without abandoning her creative writing and her projects as an international editor of academic series, and from time to time jumping out of her "hermit-like" nest to enjoy the company of her friends. In addition to supporting the work of hundreds of authors from all over the world through the academic series that she created in Spanish, French and English respectively in the Netherlands and in Spain, Myriam's own writing continued to be prolific. Moreover, since 1995 M.Diocaretz not only represented the work of French writer Helene Cixous for foreign rights but also acted as strategic advisor to publishers, to selected lawyers representing high profile personalities who were publishing books, and authors on electronic and digital rights agreements. In short, M. Diocaretz Worldwide Rights was one of the pioneering agencies in the emerging knowledge economy, before the year 2000.
The Threshold to Information Society What happens next explains Myriam Diocaretz's current interests in the analysis of the impact of new technologies upon society. In 1995, Fred van der Zee, publisher of two of her academic series, commissions her to write the content of his forthcoming website and to create a title classification by disciplines/fields for his backlist, journals and series; such classification had to be one that would —ideally for him— stand the times, so MDD took the challenge of preparing a "prospective" classification, on the one hand, and of creating the publisher's new image through web presence (see www.rodopi.nl). After this was completed —while having an Art Nouveau and Art Deco gallery in the centre of Amsterdam, across the street from the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk Museums— she became curious about technology and the Internet. In 1997 she joined a multinational company dedicated to the technical support of state-of-the-art digital devices, technologies and Internet providers in all of Europe, where she specialised in digital imaging and scanners. She soon became TrainingCoordinator for the company, and after some time of enjoying this job, in 2000 she accepted an offer to work as Worldwide Training Manager at one of the [then] largest telecommunications companies in the world, where she established the curricula for technical support engineers coordinating Virtual Private Networks, Telecomm, Internet global managed services, Voice over IP, and networked environments across the continents. This is the same company where Vint Cerf worked as well. By then, Myriam learned how the world is connected through satellites, micro-waves, and the somewhat wondrous carrier of light spectrum called optic fibre; how an email travels in split seconds such long distances, and what works and does not work in the latest devices for the "real" people, and much more. Contemporary Technē
In 2001 she joined the International Institute of Infonomics and moved to Maastricht University as a Senior Researcher of the e-Content unit to carry out theoretical and fundamental research, and to lead international projects, including "Towards a digital publishing centre at the University of Maastricht." Some of her work at Infonomics included the report “Internet, Development and Education at Higher Education Institutions in Latin America: Case Studies of Chile and Brazil” (2002). This was part of a project covering Asia, Africa and Latin America, which she coordinated. The field research she had to do took her back to Chile for a month, after 23 years of exile. In 2003 Infonomics evolved rapidly and later disappeared, while the eContent unit became the European Centre for Digital Communication/Infonomics, EC/DC, a Research & Development centre that supported societal organisations in the implementation of digitisation. She led the e-Culture Unit at EC/DC until March 2006, a research strand that with her contribution in the formulation of a new field now includes electronic publishing, cultural heritage, virtual libraries, e-learning, authoring tools. After leaving EC/DC in 2006, the journey to establish further links between societal and humanistic issues in their interaction with state-of-the-art, future and emerging technologies continues, through the Socrates Chair.
