HASTAC Scholars

I'm sure many HASTAC readers have already heard this news, but it's worth repeating: Processing (the fantastic programming language and development environment born in the MIT Media Lab in 2001) finally left beta earlier this week.

I discovered this cool project called “Picturing to Learn” today while talking to a friend who works for Dr. Rachael Brady. (Dr. Brady is the founder and head of the Visualization Technology group as well as the faculty advisor to the interdisciplinary studies and information sciences program at Duke University.) (Read more about it at here.)

I ran across the following news story a couple weeks ago from PC World via washingtonpost.com:

 

 

Oct. 23, 2008: The Center for Cultural Analysis (Rutgers University)

I recently attended the 2008 Watson Conference on "The New Work of Composing."  From that conference, a book having the same name as the conference theme will emerge, and the editors are approaching that book in innovative and exciting ways. 

I interrupt this vlog to bring you a special report...

Yesterday's New York Times profile of the work of James Pennebaker is just the latest evidence of a revival of interest in computational stylistics, and I'd be curious to hear other HASTAC Scholars' thoughts on the topic.

I'd be the first to admit that I have something of a counting fetish, and I'd love to see this kind of thing done well, but I can't help thinking that arguments like the following have a touch of the phrenological about them:

I've noticed that a number of people have mentioned that they use delicious for social bookmarking, and I was wondering if other HASTAC Scholars would find it useful to establish some simple way to flag things that you think might be of interest to other scholars in the group, even if you don't have time for a full blog post at the moment. If we had a shared tag, for example, we could use Yahoo! Pipes (or some similar tool) to aggregate all the content with that tag from delicious, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

This week I'll be participating in a panel at the American Studies Association annual convention that will address digital scholarship, pedagogy, and publication ... and I'd love your input. Comment on my blog or take a quick survey to add your insights to our discussion on Friday, Oct 17.

 

How indie you are may depend on how much time you spend with your PC.

Given financial and time considerations, Linz and Austria are almost impossibly remote from my current home in Berlin.  This is especially unfortunate since I have been looking for good new media art festivals and conferences to attend in Europe ever since last year's exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, V

For those of you in the NY/NJ/PA area, I encourage you to come participate/attend a conference on "Digital Humanities and the Disciplines," which begins the afternoon of Thurs. Oct. 2 and continues for most of the day on Friday, Oct. 3. 

http://cca.rutgers.edu/events/conferences/

I'll be attending and will most likely be posting up some stuff that I gather from it here come this weekend as it seems right up our alley.

A group of geographers have posted a reader on technoscience, called "Locating Technoscience".

From their 'cover':

Ok.  Now that  I have finally gotten settled into my school semester and have my schedule all mapped out, I can begin participating in things that are NOT required by my instructors.

Admittedly, I am not a gamer.  Lacking the patience and attention span, I probably will never be a gamer and am therefore less than qualified to write extensively about the subject.  However, it has captured my attention as of late, particularly due to the social nature of online gaming.  With the popularity and increased accessability of networks such as XBox Live, one can play with individuals across the globe.  This is an exciting way to share diverse cultural nuances through fun and games, right?

This summer, I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the University of Washington's Seventh Annual Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities (SIAH). Now that the SIAH is over, I want to take a minute here to unpack my experiences as they relate, in particular, to emerging forms of collaboration in the arts and humanities, the creative and critical use of technologies, and articulating "expertise" in interdisciplinary contexts. 

Hello! I plan to make some of my contributions to the HASTAC Scholars community in videoblog form. In this installment: What is twitter? What is its appeal? How are people using it? How are people using it creatively? The Battlestar Galactica RPG twittercast and twitter in the classroom.

Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize Winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) came to talk to the Rutgers community about his writing process (HINTS: Lord of the Rings, Science Fiction and why kids these days don't read were ALL discussed!)

I was talking with another University of Illinois grad student today.  It turns out we both put in our undergrad time at Iowa State University.  Midwest, represent.  She mentioned a little project that was completed at the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) of ISU's Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Graduate Program.  

Flickr photo is from mutantlog's stream and shows a small-scale atomic clock from NIST.

Anyone interested in the relationship between art and activism might be interested in this 'group.' I like the metaphor of bees and cross-pollination as a way of visualizing activism in the information age.

Yesterday Dartmouth College announced the appointment of Mary Flanagan as our first chair of Digital Humanities. I’m excited about this announcement and Dartmouth’s commitment to the digital humanities through the impressive endowment available for this position. I first encountered Mary’s work through her edited volume reload (MIT Press, 2002), which we used in a course examining postmodernism and postmodern theory from (among other critical positions) feminism.

The power, or more precisely, pouissance, of media and the arts to respond to injustice and to those in control is well-known, even if it must be continually reaffirmed and re-created due to moves by the establishment.  Tactical responses rely on the unexpected, at least the unexpected as seen by establishment, in order to be effective.  These types of situations proliferate as cheap media technologies enter into formerly repressive situations.  An example of this is Malaysia, where I spent some time this summer.  While the nation profiles itself as a developing place, with a variety