Submitted by Staci Shultz on Feb 15, 2009-09:10pm
Sun, 02/15/2009 - 21:10
In our recent HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum on ?The Future of the Digital Humanities,? it became apparent that the present of the digital humanities remains an only partially mapped out reality. In that discussion, Willard McCarty of King?s College London suggested we should ask ?What?s going on?? as a way of exploring ?how differently humanities computing is playing out across the various digital humanities.? In that spirit, we put to you the question: What?s going on in the digital humanities today?
Last semester, Deborah Kimmey invited the HASTAC Scholars to complete a survey in an effort, as she explained on her blog, ?to diagnose and respond to some of the institutional and ideological difficulties facing digital forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and publication.? Respondents were asked to discuss how their departments recognized their work in digital technologies and whether or not their departments considered training in digital technologies to be an essential part of professionalization in the digital age. For many, such recognition, training, and general support are routine. For others, however, recognition, training, and general support are hard to find ? if they exist at all. Thus, as a way of helping this ?survey of the digital humanities? to not only inspire new projects and collaborations but to also offer very practical suggestions, we also raise the questions:
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What?s going on at your campus or in your organization? What
projects, programs or initiatives have you witnessed or worked on? - What might a digital media project look like on your campus or in
your organization? within your discipline or field of practice?
across multiple disciplines or in collaborative ventures? - What constraints or challenges have you run into? Given your experience, what might you have done differently?
- What advice do you have for others interested in starting a similar project, program, or initiative?
Please tell us about your projects, collaborations, pedagogical ventures, institutional structures, training opportunities, etc., and help us see ?what?s going on in the digital humanities? today.
Staci Shultz is a PhD
student in the Joint Program in English & Education at the University of Michigan. She has a bachelor?s degree in English from UC Berkeley and a
master?s degree in English from Boston College. Her dissertation focuses on college students? participation in online
fandoms and the ways in particular that fan fiction sites sponsor literacy
practices. Research on emerging spaces and discourses, she argues, can lead to
more innovative, relevant, and engaging composition pedagogy that taps into
students? experiences in the extracurriculum.
Isabel A. Millan is a
doctoral student in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She received her master?s degree in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and her bachelor?s degree in both
Anthropology and Women?s Studies from the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Her
current research interests include new media/digital technologies and
globalization; children?s literature and multimedia; transnational feminist,
queer and critical race theories. She is especially interested in the
responsible development and usage of technology, and is also a strong advocate
of technology?s role in education and community networking/mobilization.
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Comments
Posted on Feb 15, 2009-10:01pm by Isabel_Millan
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One of the greatest challenges for those of us working on digital media within the humanities at my institution (University of Michigan) has been locating others with similar interests, and finding institutional support to cultivate conversations around these issues. Within my department (American Culture) I am currently the only graduate student (to my knowledge) who positions their work within a digital media framework or theoretical lens. It was also difficult finding faculty interested in digital media. Knowing there must be others who share my interests, and almost serendipitously, Staci and I met and began our initial discussions about the need for a graduate working group on digital media.
Recently, we (Staci and Isabel) submitted a proposal to launch an interdisciplinary graduate student group, the Digital Media Studies Group, in an effort to create a more visible and accessible space for students, faculty, and staff to come together to exchange ideas and support? thereby further positioning the University in essential global conversations centered on digital media and the digital humanities. Pending approval, we are excited about the possibilities of such a group?much needed at our institution. Already we can anticipate a number of challenges, from scope to competing interdisciplinary agendas to participants? previous knowledge/engagement with digital technology. We wonder what suggestions or advice others might have, given their own experiences at their respective institutions.
Our proposed graduate group will consist of a reading group, panel discussions and guest lectures, and will span across the 2009 ? 2010 academic year. As of this moment, our group is limited to participants within the humanities and social sciences. I?m not sure how much of this is a challenge, or simply something unique to this group; however, it will undoubtedly limit how we engage with the new media scholarship, and the types of questions we will ask.
In imagining possible directions for this forum, I?m also interested in the institutional models already set in place, and how we might work within these. Our graduate student group for example, was partly conceived of based on a preexisting institutional model. Our group (if approved) will be financed by our University?s Interdisciplinary Initiative. In a response to Staci?s post on "The Future of Digital Humanities" forum, Cathy Davidson provided another model. I look forward to learning about what others are doing or have done!
-Isabel
Posted on Feb 16, 2009-03:49pm by Jentery Sayers
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First off, thank you, Staci and Isabel, for coordinating and facilitating this conversation.
I'm a PhD student in English at the University of Washington, Seattle. There, the Simpson Center for the Humanities was recently awarded a Challenge Grant by the NEH to, per the Simpson Center's website, "support inventive forms of scholarship inspired by new and emerging digital technologies."
That said, in the past few years, I've seen a number of exciting projects and events emerge at the UW, including a TEI workshop, UW faculty participating in Project Bamboo, a visit from Alan Liu this coming May, the Keywords for American Cultural Studies project, and the programs and projects at the top of this page.
At the graduate level, Matt Wilson (UW Geography, HASTAC Scholar) and I have been developing a digital humanities curriculum (for undergraduates), which I blogged about a few weeks ago.
To respond to the questions you pose, Staci and Isabel, these are few things Matt and I have been considering:
As a fifth-year Phd student who has been working at the intersection of technology and literature for about six years now, one bit of advice --- and this probably obvious --- is to maintain conversations with faculty, staff, and undergraduates about what people are doing with, say, new technologies and emergent media. The UW is such a large campus that often times people are conducting similar projects, asking similar questions, and facing similar obstacles without even knowing about each other's work.
Another --- again perhaps obvious --- is not to undervalue what might at first seem like a straightfoward question about technology and the humanities. All of the productive collaborations and projects I have participated in have expanded upon a rather simple line of inquiry.
Thanks again. I am looking forward to hearing from everyone about their work, and I appreciate your time here.
Posted on Feb 21, 2009-01:46pm by julietklein
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Excellent and important questions. To take two -- The value of project-based curricula in digital humanities calls to mind larger changes in the nature of work that defy the traditional academic model of a single line of sustained line of investigation over a period of four decades. Rapid changes intechnology speed up the fluidity even more and make a thematic portfolio of related though evolving and shifting projects more constitutive of a career. As for the field of digital humanities in cross-disciplinary learning climates, insights from the literature on interdisciplinary research evaluation and learning assessment could be applied in your course, especially the relationship between ?adequacy? of disciplinary/professional knowledge and the ?quality? of integration and collaboration. And ? Jentery, I want to take your course!
Posted on Feb 28, 2009-05:58pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
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Hi Jentery,
Great points! I'm a bit late here, but I wanted to add some comments to your question above about project-based curricula.
There seems to be a kind of tragic irony in the way that the spatial and temporal compartmentalization of learning forces students to abandon the knowledge-production-objects (usually papers) as they move in and out of the classroom or from one classroom to the next.
As a TA, I often struggle with the challenge of getting students to "re-learn" how to write for the humanities. Students who come from other disciplines can sometimes have trouble grasping the idea that "good" writing is not an absolute set of criteria but rather a more situated and shifting set of relationships to audience. Students who bring theoretical concepts from other courses they've taken outside the discipline often struggle in their efforts to "translate" their knowledge from one discursive mode to another. I often find myself using the metaphor of a 'conversation' to describe the way that discourse in a particular disciplines develops its own normative codes and assumptions. I try to get students to imagine how awkward it would be if they interjected into a conversation midway through without paying attention to what had already been said.
But in fact, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that students need to learn how to accommodate the specific norms of these various "conversations." While I do want students to recognize, and be sensitive to, the implications of various audiences, I'd also hope that students can push us to re-evaluate the way we think about how audiences (and disciplines) are partitioned.
By making their work public in various arenas, students complicate the assumptions behind the conversational metaphor by introducing much less stable relationship between what happens inside, outside, and between various classrooms.
Digital tools seem well poised to address these issues of contextual indeterminacy. That's why I love the idea that students could draw from other classes and develop digital versions of this work. There is potentially a huge payoff here, not only in the sense of students gaining new skills and critical modalities, but in the sense of the discipline itself having to account for larger conversations happening outside the classroom.
I'd love to hear examples of how students are making digital "versions" of the work they've produced in other classes.
Posted on Feb 17, 2009-10:25pm by sramsay
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My name is Stephen Ramsay. I'm an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a permanent Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. My area of specialty--the reason I was hired and my main obligation as a teacher and researcher--is digital humanities.
And that, if I may be so bold, is one thing that's "going on." I started in DH in the mid-nineties as a graduate student at the University of Virginia (and later, as a software engineer for the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities). It was a very exciting time to be starting out in the field, but there was never any thought that anyone could go on to become a professor of digital humanities. It was assumed that if we managed to find jobs, it would be in some more conventional area in history or literature. The digital stuff would have to be a side thing.
Now, I became so obsessed with this side thing, that I went and wrote an entire dissertation solely focused on DH (full of code, math, visualizations, etc.). It was considered a very risky thing to do at the time, and it probably was. But to my amazement, I went on to a professorship where the advertised specialty was DH. I was then recruited into my present job -- a targeted hire focused on DH.
I'm telling my own story, but it's a story that's been repeated over and over in the last few years. There's now a whole big group of us out there -- and most of us are either tenured or about to be (not to jinx myself, here).
Now, what do "professors of digital humanities" do? Well, they teach courses that really take the digital future of the humanities seriously in a way that would have been unthinkinable in 1995. Right now, I'm teaching a course that combines detailed instruction in programming and software engineering with seminar-style reading of Heidegger. I've taught courses on games, relational databases, markup technologies -- and not just thinking about these things, but actually learning to build them. Or rather, building them as a way of thinking about them. And these are not CS courses. They're English courses full of English majors.
I remember back at the turn of century hearing lots of debates over whether DH (or HC) was a discipline. I don't mean to re-open that discussion, but I do remember someone (maybe Geoff Rockwell?) saying that disciplines are born when they gain the ability to reproduce themselves. For so many of us, that moment is right now.
What a wonderful time to be working in this area.
Posted on Feb 21, 2009-05:14pm by julietklein
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My apologies, Isabel, for failing to notice your earlier post on the Digital Media Studies Group at UM, then commenting only on Staci?s posting. I admire what both of you are doing so much because I?m engaged in the same process. In the midst of widespread talk about the academic world being ?increasingly interdisciplinary,? the gap between institutional rhetoric and the reality of faculty and graduate students? daily lives can be formidable. Cultivating conversations, your wonderful phrase, is part of a larger process of making people and their projects more visible, reducing isolation while enhancing legitimacy, leveraging existing resources, and scaffolding up to higher levels of capacity. All solutions must have a local signature, but fortunately there is also a large literature that captures the wisdom of practice. Like Jentery, I?m looking for ways to bridge the local/regional/global. I have all my digits crossed for approval of your proposal. We?ll do an e-toast on the HASTAC site.
Posted on Sep 20, 2009-08:16pm by Amanda Visconti
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Isabel, what is the status of the Digital Media Studies Group? I'd love to see something like this at UM.
Posted on Feb 15, 2009-10:38pm by Michael Widner
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There is a web journal at UT, among others, that deals with digital humanities issues called Currents in Electronic Literacy. Each year, a group of grad students teaching rhetoric and working in the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) put out a CFP, edit the submissions, design the website, etc. Last year's issue and previous years can be seen at http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu. We're currently redesigning the look for the upcoming and future issues so that it has a consistent, recognizable look and easily navigable layout. There is also the eComma project, which aims to provide a tool to allow collaboration while commenting on or editing texts. The CWRL is, as far as I know, the center of digital humanities issues at UT.
There's also the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) where the organization is remaking its online presence as a result of asking questions about how the digital humanities plays out in the academic journal world. We're in the planning stages for a Wiki where editors from numerous journals come together to amass knowledge and think out new best practices. There's a newly launched blog, as well, where Jo Guldi has kicked off a similar discussion. Folks here are, of course, invited to stop over and join in. Eventually, the CELJ will move to Drupal and integrate the Wiki, blog, etc. into a single site.
It seems like many different groups are working through these sorts of questions, how we should approach the problems they raise, and the practices they suggest. I just like having a media console and projector in my classrooms. Mr. Rogers is good for teaching rhetoric. As part of my own practice, I'm holding virtual office hours as I write this. So far, I've had one email exchange and one on IM that, according to the students, helped. We'll see once I get their papers.
Posted on Feb 16, 2009-09:40am by Staci Shultz
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Hi Michael! Thanks so much for telling us about the journals and blog -- these are exactly the kinds of resources and conversations we want to spotlight in this Forum! And as a composition scholar, I am thrilled to hear that graduate students in this field are producing journals like Currents in Electronic Literacy.
Like Isabel, I am one of few students in my departments/schools (I'm in English and the School of Ed) whose scholarship falls into the general realm of digital humanities. During my time at Michigan, I have also been searching for faculty, staff, and students who are interested in digital humanities, and then searching for institutional support to cultivate conversations about these issues. My sense is that these conversations are indeed occurring -- they are just not as visible or accessible as they could be. Just recently, in the process of preparing for this Forum, I have discovered that the Jonathan Freedman, editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and a faculty member in the English department, is hosting a symposium here in May on the fate of reading in the digital age. My hope is that by establishing the Digital Media Studies Group -- a more official space for people across campus to come together to talk about their work -- that we will hear more about these conversations and opportunities and create a much-needed sense of community.
And, like Isabel, I am concerned about the potential unwieldiness of this endeavor, and I am excited to hear how others have managed these conversations and activities.
Posted on Feb 21, 2009-01:48pm by julietklein
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Could you give us a link, Staci, for that symposium on the date of reading in the digital age? Thanks.
Posted on Feb 16, 2009-12:02pm by manuelb
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Posted on Feb 16, 2009-03:40pm by Patrick Jagoda
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One of the challenges faced by the "Digital Humanities" is integration across the different disciplines that belong to the humanities. As an English graduate student at Duke University, who also holds a certificate in Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS), I frequently register an implementation gap between different departments. While courses and programs that are explicitly interested in media and technologies make digital initiatives a core aspect of their mission, less technologically oriented departments (or particular scholars within them) are sometimes slower to adopt new techniques due to disciplinary habit. I suspect this will change as we continue to share ideas about applications of new media in both pedagogy and scholarship.
At Duke, the ISIS program represents one of the university's key contributions to the "Digital Humanities." This collaborative and interdisciplinary formation combines hands-on exploration of technology with a series of theoretical courses that raise critical questions about media and information technologies. The program also hosts weekly events and talks (by scholars such as Tim Lenoir, Katherine Hayles, and Nick Gessler) that seek to promote technological research across various segments of the Duke community. In my experience, this combination of a core curriculum (offering both undergraduate and graduate certificates), constant outreach to the Duke community (through lectures and forums), and inter-organizational partnering (with HASTAC, Croquet, etc.) serves as a solid institutional model for promoting and reshaping the Digital Humanities.
Posted on Feb 17, 2009-11:33am by Cathy Davidson
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Once again, you HASTAC SCHOLARS are leading us on an interesting conversation, asking all the right questions. Although I'm posting this long response to Patrick's comment, it is really addressing Stacy's question of how one makes interdisciplinarity happen and how digital humanities can be intrinsic and structural to all the new ways of learning and doing research in a digital age. The ISIS program here at Duke was actually a predecessor and forerunner, locally, to HASTAC, where we decided to put digital humanities, digital science, digital social science, and digital media and arts all together intellectually and structurally from the beginning. This ONLY works with a collaborative intellectual model, where you believe that everyone contributes something. I'm going to paste in this semester's course offerings as an example---you can see how wide-ranging all of the courses are. There is also something called ISIS Tech Tuesdays which bring together people for lunch once a week to hear a speaker, discuss some new program, or in other ways communicate not only across disciplines but across divides of students and faculty,theorists and practitioners, academics and technologists. Because it is a floater program it always courts administrative annoyance (where? who? what?) and that is another big issue for us. But, in the meantime, the fertile intellectual ground is pretty neat. Check out these courses! What traditional department could they possible fit in?
ISIS 72.001 & .01L / COMPSCI 72.001 & .01L / VISUALST 72A.001 & .01L: Artificial Life, Culture, and Evolution Nicholas Gessler Lecture: TTh 10:05-11:20 AM and Lab: TTh 11:40 AM-12:55 PM, Location: LINK Theory, practice and epistemology of computing and simulation. Creation of artificial models of life, culture, and evolution for prediction and exploration. Social processes embedded in simulation. Hands-on introduction to C++ to create and modify highly visual, sims with color and sound. Critical exploration of state-of-the-art multicausal, multiagent simulations. Topics include: cellular automata and emergence; human and non-human agency; self-organizing cultures. Historical and cultural contextualization through computer artifacts and applications in science and the arts, industry and entertainment, military and intelligence communities. No programmed experience required. (SS, QS, STS)
Nick Gessler was featured in Duke Today. Click here for more information.
ISIS 100.001 / ARTHIST 100.01: Perspectives on Information Science and Information Studies Victoria Szabo TTh 10:05-11:20 AM Location: LINK classroom 5 How have emergent technologies such as Web 2.0, Facebook, podcasting, Google, Social Networks, virtual worlds, and videogames transformed the ways in which we relate to information? ISIS 100 is an engaging course of discovery, in which experts from various fields--including art, music, design, business, law, politics, and the humanities and sciences--discuss how new information technologies are rapidly changing and reshaping our lives and students participate in hands-on activities designed to help them explore these technologies first-hand. A variety of engaging intellectual modules will explore the understanding of information systems from a variety of professional and disciplinary perspectives. Primary course themes for 2008 include: Technology, Culture and Society; Visual Representation and Perception; and Digital Economies. (CZ, STS) Official Duke iPod course. View 2007 syllabus. View Fall 2007 Course Evaluations.
ISIS 120.03 / ARTSVIS 170: Interactive Graphics: Critical Code Casey Alt W 11:40-2:30, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101 Interactive Graphics: Critical Code is an introduction to interactive graphics programming for artists. Students will gain understanding of object-oriented programming via the Processing programming environment as well as historical and theoretical appreciation of interactivity and computer graphics as artistic mediums. Course meetings will combine discussions of key concepts from the readings with hands-on Processing projects and critiques. No previous programming experience or prerequisites required. 4 units. Enrollment limited to 15 students. (ALP) See: ARTSVIS 170.
ISIS 120S.01 / ENGLISH 173S.05: This Is Your Brain On The Internet Cathy Davidson MW 1:15-2:30 PM, Location: IMPS ?This is Your Brain on the Internet? is open to any student fascinated by how we know and how we may or may not know differently in the Information Age. It is conceived as a trans-disciplinary exploration in which we will consider the deep structure of cognition in a digital age. We?ll learn from theoretical and expressive books and articles ranging from neuroscience to travel literature, as well as from a range of non-traditional sources (websites, media art exhibits, forest walks with experts, Virtual Reality tours, etc.) We will also learn from engaged collaboration (what management specialists call ?collaboration by difference?) with others who have complementary skills, strengths, attitudes, and assumptions. ?This is Your Brain on the Internet? is an educational remix that examines the aesthetic, digital, linguistic, psychological, political, philosophical, computational, ethical, and socio-cultural factors influencing how we know ourselves and our worlds. For students proficient in science or technology, ?This is Your Brain on the Internet? will provide insights into the cultural assumptions that shape the quantitative methods and scientific assumptions of our time. For students in the humanities and social sciences, ?This is Your Brain on the Internet? will examine how the computational capacities that make ours one of the great scientific eras also shape global social and cultural flows.
We will meet twice a week in the IMPS (Interactive Multimedia Project Space) at the Franklin Center, with Monday classes devoted to discussion of the core readings and Wednesdays for hands-on, project-based creativity that draws upon the insights and skills of the class members. (If you know how to write code, you might lead us in a session on authoring in 3D environments; if you are English major, you might analyze the narrative forms are at work in that authoring.) We will experiment with online environments, games, virtual worlds, and collaborative multimedia digital publication. The class will include guest speakers as well as labs, performances, technology demos, installations, or whatever else captures our interest.
Course requirements: Students will write weekly blog posts (approximately 300-500 words) on the assigned readings and in-class and out-of-class projects. Some of these posts will be shared with a larger public and at least one must be converted into a public multimedia presentation. Our class will have a dedicated ?This is Your Brain on the Internet? space on the HASTAC website and a group on Facebook, Ning, or another social networking site. Students will also be expected to contribute to public knowledge through editing Wikipedia entries or by contributing to online collaborative book projects such as Daniel Levitin?s This Is Your Brain on Music, Jean-Dominique Bauby?s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Christopher Kelty?s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet or Siva Vaidhyanathan?s The Googlization of Everything. Grades will be based on class participation, the weekly blog posts, an in-class midterm exam, a final portfolio of revised and selected writing from the course, and a final project (either individual or collaborative). (ALP, EI, STS--still awaiting approval)
ISIS 120S.02 / VISUALST 189S: Media Remix: Adaptation in Theory and Practice Bart Keeton TTH 1:15-2:30, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101 This course is about media transformation. Yet rather than focus on adaptation from one specific medium to another, we will study the dialogue between a constantly expanding range of media, such as video games, theme park rides, Web sites, graphic novels, song covers (and remixes), musicals, and movies. We will explore questions such as, what meaningful changes result when a graphic novel is made into a video game? How do the ideological implications of the two texts differ, and why? Does the status of "the original" matter anymore? Broadening adaptation studies to previously neglected genres, media, and intertextual relations, this course will reflect analytically on adaptation as not only a textual process, but also a social and economic one, asking students to think about their own positions as readers, viewers, interpreters, producers, and consumers. We will study several remix/adaptations within their historical and cultural contexts (such as the multiple versions of War of the Worlds: novel, radio play, and films) discussing what these artifacts give up and what they retain, how changes in the work that they perform shifts in their political and economic circumstances, and in what ways do the rhetorics of different media shape what we might problematically call their "meaning." Since one hallmark of new media technologies is that consumers are also creators, students will exercise the critical skills they develop throughout the course as they plan, design, and create their own "remixed" media content. The course will culminate with a final individual or group project where students demonstrate some aspect of their research and creative production to the rest of the class, providing alongside the practical exercise a written meta-critique of their work. (ALP)
ISIS 140.02 / VISUALST 120E.02: Web-Based Multimedia Communications Richard Lucic WF 2:50-4:05 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 228 Multimedia information systems, including presentation media, hypermedia, graphics, animation, sound, video, and integrated authoring techniques; underlying technologies that make them possible. Practice in the design innovation, programming, and assessment of web-based digital multimedia information systems. Intended for students in non-technical disciplines. Engineering or Computer Science students should take Engineering 150 or Computer Science 196. By permission only. (QS, R) Official Duke iPod course. View Spring 2008 course evaluations. View Spring 2007 syllabus.
ISIS 151.01 / MEDREN 151B.01 / SPANISH 151.01: Spanish Literature of the Renaissance and the Baroque: Who Created Don Juan? Margaret R. Greer TTh 2:50-4:05 PM, Location: TBA Selected works of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain with attention to their reflection of social, religious and political currents of the age, including: Pan-European cultural influences in the Renaissance, the effects of the New World encounter, the construction of identity through repression of Judaic and Islamic traditions, the relationship between tightened religious, social and political controls and the Baroque. See: SPANISH 151.01. (ALP)
ISIS 179S.01 / VISUALST 184S.01 / CULANTH 179S.01: Visual Cultures of Medicine Mark Olson MW 11:40-12:55 PM, Location: East Duke 204A Exploration of the visual culture(s) of medicine. The changing role of diagnostic visuality and medical imaging from various philosophical and historical perspectives. The connections between medical ways of seeing and other modes of visuality, photography, cinema, television, computer graphics. The circulation of medical images and images of medicine in popular culture as well as in professional medical cultures. (ALP, STS) See ARTHIST 179S. Visit the Art, Art History & Visual Studies website.
ISIS 185 / VISUALST 185: Digital Perspectives: Navigating the Digital Visual (cross-list pending) Bill Seaman TTh 1:15-2:30pm, Location: East Duke 204A This course will provide a broad approach to discussing digital visuals. Differing intellectual perspectives will provide the student with a broad background to a series of contemporary practices that employ digital media as a means of authorship. This course involves extensive readings and online viewing of digital media. Topics of discussion will include the social and cultural ramifications of particular forms of digital media, the authorship potential of these forms in terms of Art Content, and the potential to develop these forms as a vehicle of personal expression, empirical research, as well as social interaction. The interdisciplinary approach to digital media production will also explore how differing groups of art practitioners, scientists, and digital humanitarians might explore such systems though the definition of bridging languages. (ALP, STS) See: VISUALST 185.
ISIS 200S.01: Research Capstone Victoria Szabo MW 2:50-4:05 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 228 on M and Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101 on W Course limited to ISIS certificate students. Group project course. Students research, plan, and create a new technology project designed to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborative research. Class meets weekly to discuss project goals and progress with course instructor. Prerequisite: ISIS 100. (R, SS) Spring 2007 Final Project: CampusView
ISIS 225S.01 / AMES 250S.01: Chinese Media and Pop Culture Kang Liu T 4:25-6:55 PM, Location: TBA Current issues of comteporary Chinese media and popular culture within the context of globalization. Cultural politics, ideological discourse, and intellectual debates since gaige kaifang (reform and opening up); aspects of Chinese media and popular culture: cinema, television, newspapers and magazines, the Internet, popular music, comics, cell phone text messages, and fashion. (ALP, CCI, R) See AMES 250S.01. View the Asian & Middle Eastern Studies website. Syllabus (PDF), View course website. View Fall 2007 Course Evaluations.-->
ISIS 265S / VISUALST 265S: Emergent Interface Design (cross-list pending) Bill Seaman T 2:50-5:20 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 228 This class will explore a number of issues surrounding embodied approaches to interface design. The class will articulate a methodology for generating new forms of human/computer interface. The course will include workshops, discussions, student presentations, critiques and group brainstorming sessions. Content related to biomimetics; haptic body knowledge; multi-modal sensing; physical computing; physical | digital relationships; networked relations; the potentials of virtual space and different qualities of space, both visual and sonic; as well as datatbase potentials will be discussed and explored in the service of developing new approaches to interface. The class covers: 1) Multimodal sensing discussions both human and machinic 2) Sketched catalogue of current potential interface relations 3) Associative textual/visual drawings related to exploring individual approaches 4) Emergent / Generative working problem growing out of the associative diagrams/drawings 5) Team based and/or individual assignment on new embodied interface potentials 6) The development of a branching diagram explaining interaction 7) Final physical / digital interface plan based on emergent outcomes of the course
(ALP, STS) See: VISUALST 265S.
ISIS 291.02 / LIT 281.02: Weapons of Mass Entertainment Anne Garreta Th 4:25-6:55 PM, Location: Friedl Building 107 How do computer games, be they 1st person shooters, strategy games, MMORPG's reinvest and reconfigure older forms of entertainment and art (literature, cinema, painting, architecture?)? Where and how is the playing subject made to fit in the form? Is the player the simple conjunction of a spectator and an actor? Are the machines (computers and networks) on which we play games, mere transparent tools, or do they subtly shape the forms of our pleasure and in the process reconfigure our perceptual, cognitive and social dispositions? What does the apparatus require of its player? What passions is (s)he led to invest in the operation? What behavior and strategies does it compel, allow, sanction? Athenian attendance at the theater was a ritual of citizenship. Tragedy had a political function. Computer games are used today by the military as recruitment tools. How political is play? How lethal can fiction be? How do forms of mimetic fiction converging with advanced technologies developed initially in view of warfare contribute to new disciplining configurations of self, subectivity, body and community? Videogames started their popular careers both in arcades and on private, individual machines (Atari). Their latest evolution, hooking them to the Internet, has spawned a new form of practice: delocalized communities of online players (most strikingly in MMORPGs). What is the ethos of such sociability? A competitive market? A virtual Polis? A virtual state of nature? A Leviathan? Prior practice of computer gaming is not a requirement for this class; an interest in critical theory is. Students will be expected to read and discuss in depth theoretical material drawn from fields such as cultural criticism, political theory, aesthetics? The exploration and the testing of games, online universes, machinima with a view to furthering their analysis will be part of students' homework and research. The class will meet twice a week in a fully equipped lab (computers, consoles, video capture devices etc.). Access to these ressources will be available for the students' personal research. Both class sessions will be devoted to critical discussions of the readings and of the students' reports. This course will be evaluated on the basis of personal research (25%), participation in discussion [this includes attendance] (25%) and a final project (50%). Personal research in the form of: - a bi-weekly posting and presentation (10 minutes), analyzing a particular gameplay sequence, or a specific aspect of a game. This posting should include either game clips, or stills, or machinima relevant to the analysis. - A bi-weekly posting (800 words) critically articulating a reading (not a summary) of a subset of the theoretical material to be discussed in class. A final project to be first presented in class (at the end of the semester) presenting a clearly articulated, theoretically informed and cogently illustrated view of an aspect of the computer game culture. [Examples: the virtual economy of World of Warcraft; the gender politics of Sims; modelling urban architecture in Grand Theft Auto; Zombies, aliens, dwarves; computer driven utopias (ex. Second Life) and dystopias (Half-Life); etc.] Students may team up (teams of 2) to pursue the weekly research. Final projects must be individual. Students will have the possibility to revise their final project after receiving feedback from both the instructor and the seminar participants, before submitting a final version for grading. Enrollment limited to 18. Email the instructor if you have questions about the course. See LIT 132S. Visit the Program in Literature's website. (ALP)
ISIS 291S.01 / LIT 255S.04: New Media Theory Katherine Hayles M 3:05-5:25 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101 More information can be found with the Literature Program. See: LIT 255S.04.
Electronic literature and digital textuality challenge traditional reading and writing practices in a number of ways. When code underlies the screen display, the location of the "text" is a matter of debate: should one focus on the screen, the code, the interface functionalities, or the user's embodied actions? Are close reading practices still viable with algorithmic art? How must traditional reading practices change with multimodal works? When the dissemination mechanisms for networked and programmable media are networks, how does this affect the political implications of the works, the social contexts in which works are created and read, and the metaphors used to characterize the works? These and other issues will be explored through a wide spectrum of theoretical texts, including essays by Friedrich Kittler, Rita Raley, John Cayley, Lev Manovich, and books such as Matthew Fuller's "Media Ecologies," Mark Hansen's "New Philosophy for New Media," Thacker and Galloway's "The Exploit," and selections from "The New Media Reader," among others. Participants will be asked to make blog postings discussing the works, identify web sites they want the seminar to discuss, and create a final project that must have an electronic component. Collaboration on the project is encouraged.
Katherine Hayles was featured in Duke Today. Click here for more information.
Posted on Feb 17, 2009-10:19pm by Isabel_Millan
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Cathy,
That is an amazing list of courses! I am particularly impressed by your class, This is Your Brain on the Internet. While I am a strong proponent of "collaboration by difference," I haven't had an opportunity to adequately incorporate this into my teaching. Your course requirements provide a viable model. Although I can easily envision this as potentially difficult to orchestrate, the project-based Wednesday sessions show great potential! I'm sure you've given this much thought, and it encapsulates a point you made earlier: "This ONLY works with a collaborative intellectual model, where you believe that everyone contributes something." Although your initial comment referenced the ISIS program, there is something to be said about students, and their collective knowledge.
On another note, earlier today I had a conversation with a faculty member in my department about Wikipedia, and how one transitions into, or becomes, a Wikipedian. Have you previously required that students edit Wikipedia? This immediately invokes questions about authorship, readership, and collaborative scholarship--forcing students to grapple with all of these as they consider which entries they will edit, the information they will post, and the roles they will play within the larger Wikipedia community. I've incorporated blogs and websites into my teaching; however I imagine that students might be a bit more anxious about editing Wikipedia only because it assumes a higher level of legitimacy, as opposed to a personal blog, for example. I'm making this assumption mostly because many of my students had no prior experience with blogs or websites, and expressed concern over having their thoughts published online.
-Isabel
Posted on Feb 18, 2009-09:22am by Cathy Davidson
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Hi, Isabel, Because I've been in the central administration and then on my first leave since 1994 or something, this is my first time teaching in the 21st century(I chuckle whenever I say it like that). So it is my first time requiring the Wikipedia edits. I want people to see what credibility looks like from the inside. I also want people to stop complaining about the world's most monumental compendium of knowledge if they are not willing to contribute to make it better. I do this even in my early American novels class where the entries aren't bad they are just cursory and inadequate. This is part of my Humanists' Complaint (in parallel to Berlant's Female Complaint) idea: that humanists both love to complain complain complain how the world is unfair to us but then we don't want to do what it takes to intervene in that circumstance but, instead, accept our status as underdogs. I don't! If the entries in our field our bad, we need to improve them. I'll report back at the end of the class and let you know how it goes. So far, fabulous.
Posted on Feb 21, 2009-02:12pm by julietklein
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Isabel?s comment is timely for me, since I?ve embarked on a new campaign to incorporate internet critical literacy into every class I teach from now on? doesn?t matter what. At present, in a course on historiography called ?Approaches to the Study of the Past,? students are working through a semester-long sequence of exercises aimed at comparing web-based tools and sites. I grouped students into online collaboratives for postings and dialogue. Reading their postings has become my new guilty pleasure. They are zooming -- engaging directly and actively questions aboutauthorship and credibility. I was inspired in part by Cathy?s Wiki-exercise, though expanded it into an extended engagement of how we know the past in the digital age. I?m struck particularly by students? appreciation of the wealth of resources out there they didn?t know about coupled with their sharpening skills of evaluation. Lots of fun for all of us and, like any good assignment, will improve in the next version as a result of students? critique. Jentery comes back to mind as well. My campus does not have a digital humanities program, but the exercise is a great example of digital humanities across the curriculum at the assignment level. Making such approaches in other courses by other faculty widely visible is one of the goals of the Digital Humanities Collaboratory I?ve been building on campus since we participated in the HASTAC In/Formation Year series -- making me nod in agreement too with Staci?s description of the Digital Media Studies group she?s building.
Posted on Feb 28, 2009-06:14pm by Cassie G
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Thanks to all who have posted for sharing your great teaching ideas; they're extremely helpful for me as a beginner in college teaching. Juliet, I'm particularly curious about what exercises you have your history students do since I'm a TA doing the US history survey right now. This past week we had a good discussion about Huey Long after they read a speech of his and then I showed a YouTube clip of him from an old film reel. But this still isn't getting the students to engage directly with the technology, and I've been struggling how to do that in a 50-minute class period in which I also have to help them think through a lot of reading.
Cathy, your course sounds fascinating; what fields are your students majoring in, and how does Duke count courses like this and others you mentioned towards Core requirements? It seems increasingly likely that the sort of "internet critical literacy" Juliet identified will need to be integrated into the course requirements for a liberal arts degree in order for students to be fully prepared to engage critically with new media and to have the skills they need for the work world.
One final question for Cathy, and perhaps Staci and Isabel: since most graduate humanities programs don't offer opportunities to learn digital humanities skills, could there be a possibility of an online course for grad students across the country that could culiminate in a conference? Eventually I hope more universities will offer courses on-site for grad students, but in the next few years an online course could fill this gap for interested students.
Posted on Feb 18, 2009-09:06am by Michael Widner
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Cathy, I've been meaning to ask. How well does the requirement that students blog regularly work? I've experimented with similar assignments, but the students almost all treated it as a chore rather than the sort of fun exercise I envisioned it to be. One or two would throw him/herself into it with relish, but the rest would do the bare minimum. Does teaching a course specifically geared toward that sort of work mean the students self-select and, thus, engage more energetically, or does it turn into a weekly grind no different from a more traditional writing assignment? Do they post comments on each other's entries, for example?
Sorry to bombard you with questions, but since my (failed) experiments with student blogging, I haven't tried again. I'd like to hear about successful models and topics.
Posted on Feb 18, 2009-09:29am by Cathy Davidson
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Posted on Feb 18, 2009-02:55pm by jenniferhk
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Hi Michael! I'm actually a student in Cathy's class, so it's a little daunting to respond after her, but I'll try to give you the real low down on class blogging requirements.
Honestly, it usually doesn't work. It is a chore and students stop blogging or care about what they're blogging when:
1) Blogs fall into a black hole - teachers make no indication that they have read them; TAs make no indication that they have read them; and student discussion leaders make no indication that they have read them.
2) blogs are not relevant to class - we are encouraged to just write something for the sake of fulfilling the assignment
3) there are ridiculous expections- treat blogs like blog posts, informal writing and a good outlet to just get ideas and thoughts out
I am surprised that a lot of people are reading the blogs for Cathy's class though, and that in turn makes us want to write. Personally, I think these are the reasons why...
1) Provide an easy mechanism - As Professor Davidson said, Blackboard is hard to navigate and even more difficult to respond to. Students won't put in the extra effort to do something so make it easy - it is kind of like campus recycling. Most students will recycle if the bin is next to the trash can, but if they have to carry it to another building, chances are many will not.
2) There is proper incentive - Unfortunately, all students live by class requirements and grading schemes, so if it is not worth anything, students will probably pass.
3) People involved RESPOND! - I think this is KEY! When Professor Davidson made the effort to respond to everyone's first entries, it set a good precedent which made everyone (me, at the least) feel as if I should try to post something timely and significant.
I've actually been trying to test this... once when I invited people to give me their opinions, I got 4 comments on my post (including one from Professor Davidson). Next post, I inserted a question at the end and asked for responses. Although no one left a comment, the next three posts all referenced my question. This type of feedback is really encouraging. I am going to continue experimenting... my next "response request" will probably be in the middle of a body paragraph with a random question like - if you read this sentence, please comment with your favorite color - just to see student response. Also, I want to test if student response is different depending on post time from class - I suspect that the first posts all get read whereas fewer get read closer to class. Either way, I will post my findings at the end of the semester.
Overall, I've really enjoyed the blogging aspect of the class. I think it has been highly successful, unlike for many classes in the past. I hope my student feedback has been helpful :)
Posted on Feb 18, 2009-06:18pm by Cathy Davidson
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Posted on Feb 22, 2009-11:24am by Michael Widner
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Thanks for writing up your experience, Jennifer. You highlight what seem to be a lot of important differences between effective and ineffective use of blogs for the classroom. I've always liked the idea of blogs, but had yet to see them work. Now it's clear why.
This conversation also has me thinking that HASTAC needs a Wiki to describe best practices for using technology in the classroom. We have so many people experimenting in different ways and discussing their pedagogy, but no truly central resource to outline the results. Wouldn't it be great if others who wanted to incorporate more technology into their classrooms, but aren't necessarily tech savvy or willing to do the experimentation could benefit from the collective wisdom HASTAC represents? I know I would love to have the ability to browse what others are doing without having to search through hundreds of blog posts and comments.
Posted on Apr 20, 2009-01:19am by hwharlan
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Hi, I too am in Cathy's class, and agree with what Kim has already said, and think that she accurately described how things work behind the scenes from the student's point of view regarding this whole classroom blogging issue. Personally I think that blogging is can be pretty fun, although at the same time sometimes I may not quite be able to muster the motivation to participate. Cathy instituted a rating (0 to 10 stars) for each blog, so that others in the classroom could express their opinion of the given blog's quality. I really think this is a good idea, and before this have never actually been able to get other's opinions on my thoughts or arguments in such a fashion (usually its just the professor's input or evaluation). To tell you the truth, it felt really good when I posted my first blog that got a really high rating.
This adds an almost competitive facet to the blogging, which really made me want to work harder and dig deeper into the particular issue at hand to come up with something meaninful and constructive. The only problem was that there were so many blog posts and so often, that it wasn't really that fun to read and compare and rate them all. For this reason, I think that limiting the number of blogs would be good, but to focus more on them in class discussions, and in online reading and evaluation. Maybe five blogs per semester would be a little more manageable for a 10-person seminar, so that everyone really gets a chance to read each others' posts, and give some thoughtful opinions. Additionally, for each "round" of blog posts (organized by topic) devote a class to it; if you are truly trying to teach a seminar that highlights student discussion and interaction then taking a whole class to address that topic's student blog posts, and the merits and quality of each, may really make blogging a more pertinent and fun experience. Incentives for say, the top three voted posts per topic could also boost student performance and participation...
If on the other hand the professor wanted to keep a higher number of (required or not) blog posts so as to keep continual conversation, then taking away a minimum word requirement may also stimulate discussion. Turning the blogs into more of a conversational (i.e. shorter entries) tool is something that I think encourages more of a frequent student involvement.
Anyway, these were just some thoughts from the competitive and succinct type!
Posted on Feb 19, 2009-09:09pm by negar
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Posted on Feb 20, 2009-11:41am by mlmcgill
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Posted on Feb 20, 2009-12:26pm by Cathy Davidson
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I'm at the really amazing MacArthur Digital Media and Learning grantee's meeting in Irvine and attended a terrific session by Akhili Lee, of the Digital Youth Project in Chicago. He talked about how his students blog, have mentors who "critique" their blog posts, and then the students respond. Critique, as a methodology, is what these high school kids learn, about their writing, the writing in the world, and the world. The key part is they read one another, interact, and the blogging is integral to their learning and self-definition. So it works. It's not just the "journal" (remember those?) of the 21st century.
Here's the url for the Digital Youth Network: http://iremix.org/
Posted on Feb 17, 2009-10:39am by Staci Shultz
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Posted on Feb 19, 2009-07:53am by Ryan Platt
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I. Library 101
I should preface my comment by noting that I have been abroad for the last year and a half pursuing dissertation research in Germany, so I may be a bit out of the loop regarding Cornell's latest digital contributions. I am most definitely up-to-date on the library's latest efforts-- its willingness to send .pdfs at no charge to graduate students and faculty in absentia has significantly catalyzed my research efforts. Likewise-- and I am sure Cornell is no exception in this regard-- the improving selection of books available digitally has been invaluable, a fact that I recently discussed with a Cornell professor who spends half his time in Bremen.
II. Conceptual Digitality at the Society for the Humanities
Certainly, one exciting development is the digital focus Tim Murray's appointment as director of Cornell's Society for the Humanities will bring to the university's central interdisciplinary research organ. This will begin in earnest next year when the Society's annual theme addresses "Networks/Mobilities," and will host Keller Easterling and Brian Massumi as visiting scholars. As its theme suggests, the Society's research is especially interesting since it does not limit its areas of investigation to the technological as such, but rather explores a wide variety of interrelated phenomena. I think that this approach is invaluable, especially as it emphasizes a historical and conceptual approach that seeks to surpass an instrumental notion of technology that often dominates discussions of the digital. Society for the Humanities: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
III. Faculty Innovation Grants for Digital Initiatives
Of course, this is not to say that great new gear is not practical and important... The most evident progress in creative use of new technical capabilities at Cornell has been facilitated by the yearly award of faculty innovation grants, which provide financial and programming assistance to the grantee. Recent awards have been quite diverse and include anthropology, theatre, and chinese art:
1) Anthropology: http://isbellandes.library.cornell.edu/
The Vicos Virtual Tour presents a rich-media history of Cornell's efforts in the post-war period to assist development in Peru. Still strongly influenced by traditional Western ideas of progress, the project's results have come to be seen as uncertain, and the Virtual Tour provides a point of contact for contemporary members of these two cultures:
2) Theatre and German Studies: http://muller-kluge.library.cornell.edu/en/
The Mller-Kluge collection holds a digitally accessible body of interviews held by the West German writer and filmmaker, Alexander Kluge and the East German playwright Heiner Mller. Mller is one the most important figures of 20th century theatre-- a subtle ironist and a showman. The interviews were originally held on German television and subtitles and transcripts in English have been provided.
3) Art History and Asian Studies:http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/special/wen.php
As head curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Tim Murray has assembled a large database documenting the rise of experimental Chinese art following the wake of the Cold War. Three hundred and sixty hours from the Dongtai Academy of Art have been digitized, a portion of which is available to general users on the Internet.
Although all of these projects are interesting, I was only aware of them through personal contact with the faculty members in question, which was sometimes quite incidental. There is no question that-- even as a Heiner Mller devotee-- I would have not have found them...
Posted on Feb 19, 2009-09:43am by Cathy Davidson
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Posted on Feb 24, 2009-02:06am by ichapp
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I will include in this post a press release that I have recently worked on with Julie Klein, who has posted above and is meant to promote some of the work that has been going on in the Digital Humanities at Wayne State University.
At Wayne, ever attentive to the notion of inclusiveness, we have been using the notion of "Digital Humanities" rather loosely, as much of the work that has been featured by "The Digital Humanities Collaboratory," as the group championing digital initiatives across campus has been termed, might more accurately be described as "the use of digital in the humanities." The Collaboratory has served to showcase individuals across campus that have been doing innovative work in the humanities and has attracted attendees who are sympathetic to the cause in attempt to build a community of those seeking non-traditional modes of teaching and learning on campus and to encourage interactions that would not have occurred otherwise on such a large campus.
There has been a core of initial "advisory board" members and attendees have been solicited for email addresses for possible future inclusion or a speaking slot in somewhat informal presentation of work in a comfortable space with plenty of sweets and caffeine. Our initial concept was that we would create a social network on ning.com and it would be a vibrant community with rich interaction? The reality has been that while attendance has been quite good, the notion that faculty and students would line up to create yet another identity on yet another social network, and to keep up with its activities was a bit ambitious, and we have retreated back to a more traditional model of bulk emails with links to the Office of Teaching and Learning site and specific pages featuring the upcoming events and an archive of past events.
The integration of various social networks is not yet to the point, I where the use of such tools with the potential for seamless personal and professional interaction has become particularly feasible, I think. At least that has proven to be the case on our Detroit campus, where the incentive is not particularly high. I sympathize with the comment that Michael made earlier about being happy to have access to a digital projector in the classroom. Often, the simple realities of access to technology in the classroom are an issue that is overlooked on some campuses and particularly in certain disciplines.
With this in mind, I will post further after our March event on the implementation of certain tools, particularly Digital Asset Management Systems that are replacing the now obsolete, and beloved, Ektagraphic slide projectors for use in heavily image-driven fields like art history, and the issues of achieving a critical mass of dogmatic images for instruction.
Below is a survey of some of what we have been up to in recent months here in Detroit.
Digital Humanities Collaboratory:
An OTL Faculty Learning Community
Julie Thompson Klein, Professor of Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies/English and Faculty Fellow in the OTL
Ian Chapp, Systems Integrator, Department of Art History, and 2008-2009 Wayne State University HASTAC Scholar (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Collaboratory)
The Digital Humanities Collaboratory is a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) hosted by the Office for Teaching and Learning with co-sponsorship of the Humanities Center. FLCs provide faculty, graduate students, and professional staff with a home for common interests. The Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at Miami University defines two types of FLCs: cohort-based and topic-based. Cohorts address the teaching and learning needs of particular groups, such as the OTL's informal New Faculty Learning Community. Topic communities, such as the Digital Humanities Collaboratory, address particular areas or themes while also building cohorts. The work of FLCs is determined by their members and may include regular meetings and seminars, special events and research projects, online forums for dialogue and resource sharing, and publications and conference presentations.
The Digital Humanities Collaboratory (DHC) is an outgrowth of a Digital Humanities Working Group, funded in 2007-2008 by the Humanities Center. The Group, which met bi-monthly to discuss readings and topics in the rapidly growing field of digital humanities, included faculty from the Departments of English, History, Political Science, and Communications, as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. At the end of the year, the Group decided to expand into a wider campus forum now known as the DHC. The Collaboratory is devoted to teaching and research at the intersections of computing and the disciplines and fields of arts and humanities, media and communication studies, and information science. The aim is to create greater visibility for dispersed projects on campus and to foster mutual learning and resource sharing
During the 2008-2009 academic year, the Collaboratory has been conducting monthly open meetings described below. Faculty, graduate students, and staff from across campus have presented their innovative work in a wide variety of contexts. Most presentations take place in the Simons Room of the Purdy/Kresge Library, though the DHC sometimes ventures to other locations to take advantage of customized venues such as the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Foreign Languages Lab. Work has also begun on building an electronic home for the Collaboratory on the OTL's redesigned website. The DHC's new web home will feature material from monthly presentations, a campus-wide directory of people and projects, and a library of national resources for digital teaching and research. Planning is also underway for the 2009-10 monthly series.
2008-2009 Digital Humanities Collaboratory Presentation SeriesUpcoming Events
THE MARCH EVENT
"Premiering Wayne State's New LUNA Image Software Tool." March 27, 2009. 1:30-3:00. Simons Room in P/K Library). The LUNA team from Art History and the Technology Resource Center of the University Libraries (Adrienne Aluzzo, Ian Chapp, Matt Decker, Terry Kerby, and Jon McGlone). LUNA is a software tool that allows faculty and students to manage and share digital collections of art, architecture, maps, and images from history, science, and medicine. The LUNA team will demonstrate the tool and its searching features, possibilities for use in a variety of disciplines and fields, and how to create presentations and export to Power Point, embed within Blackboard, and integrate audio and text files as well as content from Flickr. With the development of these newer technologies, the move from slides can be well justified, as it comes with the ability to zoom, display metadata, and move seamlessly between media types.
The APRIL FINALE FOR THE 2008-2009 DHC Series
? "Copyright--it may not be a good idea, but it's the law." April 10, 2009. 23:30-2:00. Simons Room in P/K Library. Geoff Nathan, Faculty Liaison to C&IT and Associate Professor of Linguistics in English, will outline everything you need to know about how copyright affects what you do in classes, both live and online -- whether you want to read a poem, show a movie, or visit a website. He will also comment on political and moral aspects of copyright law.
? "The Detroit/Turino Urban Project: A Synesthesia of Jazz and Photographic Imagery." Chris Collins, Associate Professor and Director of Jazz Studies in Department of Music, and the Detroit-Turino Jazz ensemble with Emanuele Cisi. A collaborative exploration of the challenges and successes of two urban cities in the U.S. and Italy with common links to the auto industry and jazz music, in a multi-dimensional performance/presentation that also features the Project website, video surround sound DVD, and web streaming of concerts
PAST EVENTS
Anne-Marie Armstrong (Instructional Designer, OTL) and Julie Thompson Klein. Armstrong and Klein traced the historical development of the field while highlighting key projects and sites. They also sampled diverse viewpoints from the UCLA Mellon seminar on "What Is[n't] Digital Humanities?" and the current forum on the "The Future of Digital Humanities" at the HASTAC website. They also offered resources for further reading and browsing.
Wikidelica: Open-Author Technologies And Just-In-Time Pedagogies (January 30, 2009)
Jeff Pruchnic (Assistant Professor) and Laura Estill, Jared Grogan, and Michael McGinnis?(Ph.D. Candidates and GTA), all from the English Department. Simons Room. The team discussed their experience using and teaching with wikis ? online interfaces based on open-source software that allows users to collaboratively compose and edit content. Topics included the conceptual and practical dimensions of wikis as a pedagogical technology and the English Department's participation in Wikidelic, a project networking wiki-enhanced courses at Research Universities nationwide. A lively discussion followed with the large audience who filled the Simons Room.
Social Networks for Service Learning: Creating the Detroit Network for Engaged Service Learning (DESL) (December 5, 2008).
Kevin Deegan Krause, Associate Professor, Political Science and Students in his Honors 4200 seminar on "Citizenship and New Technologies." Simons Room. The panel discussed their MacArthur/HASTAC grant proposal for a social network to improve the quality of service learning at Wayne State and the broader community, with examples from their own personal projects. See also documents from the November 2007 symposium on "Virtual Citizenship," focused on the intersection of new technologies with social justice and civic engagement, see http://www.lib.wayne.edu/virship/.
An Evolutionary Approach to Teaching Language and Culture with Technology (November 14, 2008).
Sangeeta Gopalakrishnan (Director, Foreign Language Technology Center), Sandra Hobbs (Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) and Lisa Hock (Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures). Location: Foreign Languages Lab, Manoogian. The team demonstrated how the use of instructional technology has reshaped their teaching of foreign languages over the past few years and discussed how the use of technology is likely to impact the future of language teaching.The use of streaming multimedia, providing virtual access to native speakers, and exposure to primary source foreign language materials were featured prominently as key to providing students with the greatest opportunities for success. A very lively discussion followed with the large audience who filled the Lab.
InterDIGITALdisciplinarity: Why It's Right for Everyone (October 31, 2008)
Karen McDevitt, Department of Communication's Media Arts and Studies Program, with graduate students Arata Miyazaki, Jane Fader, Dale Compton Anderson, and Kimberly ??... Simons Room. McDevitt and her students illustrated their interDIGITALdisciplinary learning experiences. They began with an overview of the current state of digital technologies in higher education and showed innovative uses on other campus. The focus then turned to their integrations of digital technologies at Wayne State and demonstrations of approaches that promote a participatory culture through user-generated content (student- and instructor-designed websites, podcasts, blogs, and Second Life) and how these tools are finding their way in to the upcoming curriculum of general education Speech courses at Wayne State.
New Paradigms for Teaching and Learning in Museums (September 19, 2008)
? Nancy Jones, Executive Director of Learning and Interpretation and, and Jennifer Czajkowski, Director of Interpretative Programs, Detroit Institute of Arts. Location: Lecture Hall and Galleries of The DIA. Find more photos like this on WSU Digital Humanities Collaboratory The "New DIA" promotes new ways of looking at and thinking about art and, more broadly, the people, histories, and cultures of the world. Jones and Czajkowski oriented participants to the new visitor-centered approach to the museum, followed by enjoyable visits to galleries featuring interactive exhibits. The reinstallation of the museum, which applies research on cognition and learner-centered practice in art, incorporates multiple technologies and media, and interrogative and thematic interdisciplinary approaches to meet the new DIA mission of providing a "personal connection to art".
Posted on Feb 25, 2009-06:57pm by Cathy Davidson
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Posted on Feb 24, 2009-11:12pm by ddchamberlain
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As a number of previous posters have noted, scholars interested in questions that fit under the rubric of the digital humanities can be found in a number of places across any given campus. As some have also noted, the take up of these questions tends to be on a piecemeal basis, with one or two people in any given department directly expressing their interest. A recent effort has been launched at USC to regularly bring together scholars from across the university who, even though they might not self identify as digital humanities scholars, are interested in related issues.
The USC Center for Transformative Scholarship is still in its first year soft-launch phase, and has already brought together seminars dedicated to The Future of Academic Publishing and a seminar demonstrating how GIS techniques can reframe and make archival data more available.. The Center's mission has been conceived broadly, as it expects to facilitate, explore, test, and advance new media and networked scholarship for scholarly research, analysis, and publication. The CTS is a university-wide resource, hosted by USC Libraries, USC College, and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Even as the Center looks to host regular events and expand the scope of new media scholarship it also provides an umbrella organization that serves to highlight existing campus efforts, related projects, and new publishing efforts. In this sense the center aims to serve as both a physical (face-to-face at seminars and events) and virtual (publicity and partnership) home for new forms of scholarship at USC. The Center was launched by Tara McPherson and Phil Ethington, and works with an advisory board drawn from many parts of the University.
Of note, I think, is the choice to leave "digital humanities" out of the title of the new organization. I think rather than rhetorically exclude colleagues in parts of the University that don't "do humanities," the decision was to be explicitly open to any scholars hoping to transform familiar modes of scholarship through engagements with new media.
Posted on Feb 25, 2009-06:58pm by Cathy Davidson
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Posted on Feb 26, 2009-09:09am by julietklein
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Posted on Feb 26, 2009-05:08pm by ddchamberlain
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Yes, the name game is a tricky one. Almost all of my research is into what is most often called New Media - though I tend to prefer the concept of emergent media in my writing and teaching - yet my institutional homes never seem to indicate this focus. As a graduate student at USC I am in a Critical Studies Department, inside a School of Cinematic Arts; as a lecturer, I am in the U of Michigan's Screen Arts & Cultures program, which just about covers all bases but doesn't really suggest my area of interest.
I am not sure that the name "Center for Transformative Scholarship" is perfectly clear in this regard, but at least it does indicate an un-disciplined interest in challenging familiar modes of scholarship. That being said, whenever I am called upon to explain my role in the Center for Transformative Scholarship I need to use the term digital humanities in order to get across what the Center is about.
Posted on Feb 26, 2009-07:40pm by Eric Wertheimer
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Posted on Feb 27, 2009-12:21am by ves4
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Hi everyone. I've been meaning to catch up with the conversation here -- what a great array of things are going on! I feel like I want to follow up with you all individually for 8 hours (each!) of coffee/drinks/conversation.
I'm the Program Director for ISIS at Duke, the interdisciplinary certificate program that Cathy founded as the VP for Interdisciplinary Studies (the existence of that office is one of the things that made me want to come to Duke!), and which Patrick also wrote about. As a humanist-by-training who took a long detour into hands-on academic technology consulting and management before landing back in ISIS -- and now, Visual Studies too -- I have mixed feelings about the "digital humanities" name and concept (not that I won't wield the term strategically whenever necessary for funding or institutional maneuvering!).
I hesitate because I believe the future of what we are doing is inherently interdisciplinary, a true melding of fuzzy and techie ways of knowing and producing, and that by making "digital" a modifier of "humanities" we risk leaving out a lot of interesting work that weighs more on the "digital" or "information technology" side than the "humanities" -- at least at first blush.
My question: is the ISIS certificate undergraduate capstone course, which I'm now teaching, a good fit for the "digital humanities" descriptor? Students in the class are exploring the use of gps-tagged multimedia in map environments as a way to support global health and community-development researchers concerned especially about girls' education in a rural region of Kenya. Our students are creating a "toolkit" that includes hardware and software recommendations,layered map interfaces, information visualization templates, a content management system, and a working model of the Duke campus as a testing-ground and set of exemplary practices upon which Kenya-localized researchers can ultimately draw. This summer another set of students involved in a Duke civic engagement project will take the toolkit to Kenya and use it to gather data and multimedia objects to include in the new mapspace. Next fall they'll continue to develop the mapspace and report back on their work. We'll combine top-down satellite imagery of the region with bottom-up media-annotation of the spatial-temporal realm to create a rich mirror-world representation of the area.
So far, not very "humanities" sounding. And yet, as part of the class, students are also talking about new modes of argument represented over space and time, the rhetorics of mapping, non-linear narrative production in virtual and hybrid world spaces, the social and cultural implications of technological interventions into the global infoculture, and the evolving conventions for new media production of "day in the life" mini-biographies of Kenyan girls, and composite creative non-fiction portraiture and self-expression as new interpretive strategies to complement quantitative analyses. All, I would argue, very humanities-oriented questions.
But -- in the end, is a multimedia mapping environment an acceptable work-product for the humanities? When/where/why/why not? Is this an undergraduate experiment only? Or a new way of producing knowledge in its own right? And if the latter, is it one to be valued by the academy? By the humanities in particular?
I know I'll be speaking on and hopefully writing about the project. Maybe that is the moment in which this interdisciplinary project morphs into humanities scholarship? As someone with a very hybrid institutional role I personally (at least for now) can get away with this sort of boundary-crossing, but is it becoming more possible within the disciplines as well? Should it be?
Posted on Feb 27, 2009-05:38am by totosy
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Posted on Feb 27, 2009-10:18am by Asun
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Posted on Feb 28, 2009-08:28pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
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Hi all, Apologies for the late entry. I've been traveling and am just now catching up.
It has been wonderful hearing about what all of you are up to. I'm very impressed with the breadth of research and innovation happening at your respective institutions!
I have a somewhat complicated relationship to the humanities ? primarily because I am in an MFA program (at UC Santa Cruz) and straddle the worlds of art practice and scholarship.
One experience that I can speak to is an open source, collaborative project headed by Alice Yang and Alan Christy called Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War. This project is an archive/multilingual website that links classrooms and institutions across the Pacific and explores the way that memories of WWII are alive and recirculating today. We're building the site to enable scholars and students to learn collaboratively about how "war participants, later generations, and societies remember, forget, and commemorate the Asia-Pacific war" [quoting from a recent abstract here]. Participants work together to produce "collaboratively authored archive media (oral history documentaries, local community exhibits, virtual memorials, testimony translations, etc.)." The project draws together collaborators from History, Engineering, and my own department (Digital Arts and New Media).
One feature of the site that I'm really excited about is its structure. We noticed that existing social media had not yet truly overcome the challenge of collaborative translation. We propose that part of the reason for this failure has to do with an artificial separation between serialized media (think blogs) and enduring collaborative media objects (think wikis). We tried to bridge this gap at the level of the database so that user-contributed archive posts are connected directly to "collaboratively authored multilingual wikis that transcribe, translate, tag, and add context to these original posts." Here is an example of what that will look like. Rather than relying exclusively on mechanical translation, our goal is to "makes transparent the negotiations and contested categories of memory-in-translation....[So that] students learn to negotiate translingual communication in real-world ways and to subtly account for different cultural contexts" [quotations refer to a recent abstract].
I would love to hear feedback. Is anyone working on similar topics around issues of collaborative translation? I noticed that Steven Totosy (above) is using wikis for translation at Perdue, and I'd love to hear more about how that project deals with the structural challenges involved in harnessing collaborative efforts for translation.
Posted on Mar 02, 2009-03:43pm by Cathy Davidson
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I'm so glad you've raised the issue of the arts. As you may have noticed, all our HASTAC gatherings include performances, exhibits, dance, music, video, digital media, interactive media, etc etc. This was quite conscious because back in the long ago time of 2002, when we first decided we needed something like HASTAC to network all of us odd folk, there were still humanities centers and humanists--and artists too--who thought there had to be an "or" between "humanities . . . arts." Some even thought they were oppositional and I have been told that NEA and NEH, although they occupy the same building, can sometimes reinforce that divide funding strategies and objectives. What a shame! If the arts and humanities cannot work together and appreciate one another, what hope is there for technology and arts, humanities, social and natural sciences??
On the other hand, John Seely Brown gave an unforgettably powerful talk at HASTAC II where he noted how often artists and engineers work comfortably together because both operate on a performance-based, exhibit-based, project-based model whereas humanists and natural scientists can sometimes work better together because of an emphasis on abstraction and process.
In any case, it sounds as if at UCSC you've made some good border crossings. Those are the kinds of boundaries that I suspect the HASTAC III organizers at UIUC will again try to traverse too. (And, by the way, I do know that those in the arts can sometimes resent the hegemony of academic humanists in a way almost analogous to the way some academic humanists resent the hegemonies of social and natural sciences. Sigh.)
Posted on Mar 06, 2009-11:26am by rmichaelyoung
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Hi. I'm a computer scientist and co-director of the Digital Games Research Center at NC State University. My research approaches digital humanities from a computational modeling perspective, seeking to build formal models of narrative and interaction within it. Typically, this then means using these models synthetically rather than analytically, since much of what I try to do is to build systems that can create experiences within game and other virtual worlds that are understood as stories. The work I do is informed heavily by cognitive psychologists' models of narrative comprehension and narrative theorists' views on the structure of narrative story and narrative discourse. There are growing a number of folks around doing this kind of work at places like Georgia Tech, UC Santa Cruz, MIT and elsewhere.
The computational models I use are drawn primarily from artificial intelligence. These models have elements that represent a dynamic, character-filled world, for instance, in order to reason about causality, temporality, goals, intentions or conflict. The models also have elements to represent a discourse about the world, for instance, the uses of narrative discourse that is responsible for the manipulation of reader knowledge in the creation of suspense, the selection of camera shots and shot sequences to effectively convey a story's unfolding action. Finally, the models also have elements that represent the interaction of a user within an unfolding story, for instance, the recognition of a player's intentions in pursuit of game-related objectives, the adaptation of a plot line when a player unknowingly violates some constraint needed to make the upcoming plot twist coherent, the identification of knowledge gaps on the part of a player relative to some aspect of the story in which they're embedded.
Rather than making up those parts of the work that fall outside of conventional computer science, I collaborate with film theorists, narratologists, computational linguists, cognitive psychologists and others to try and get the computational models right based on what those other disciplines have been thinking about more deeply and much longer than computer scientists have.
As a computer scientist, I think this work has at least passing relationships with Digital Humanities. At its core are issues like storytelling, cognition, communication, interaction. But my training as a computer scientist also makes me wary of my own use of imprecise definitions. And I admit to having a very imprecise definition of digital humanities. Much of the work I see described under this name appears to me to be analytic and focuses (from the technology side) on the creation of software and systems that enable powerful analysis of a wide range of existing artifacts. Much of the work that I do is targeted at the creation of new artifacts, whether automatic or in a mode where human authors work with intelligent tools to create these experiences. At the technical core of both approaches, though, is some kind of model of the artifacts being worked with. Sometimes these models are implicit, as in the implicit semantics within HTML markup in the pages on a web site. Sometimes these models are explicit, as in part-of-speech data describing a text corpus drawn from, say, The New York Times. In theory, the models are as close to being use-independent as possible, so that they could be used for many different types of analysis or to be the source for data-driven techniques for generation of new artifacts.
So I would hope that the models that those of us working on computational models of narrative are developing would could be used as something like a mark-up structure for existing narrative artifacts. I've done a little of that as part of the process for verifying our particular models, though not with enough scope or rigor to address other research issues.
R. Michael Young, Ph.D.
Director, Liquid Narrative Research Group
http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu
NC State University, Raleigh, NC
Posted on Mar 09, 2009-07:04pm by ves4
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