Groups directory

Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy (GELP)

phillin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:00:38 -0400

As advances in genome sciences continue, the challenge for society will be arriving at a thoughtful consensus on how to make use of the innovations to enhance the well-being of individuals and society, while protecting values such as individual rights and distributive justice. The IGSP Center for Genome Ethics, Law, & Policy (GELP) was created to foster ethically responsible and socially beneficial uses of genome science, while addressing the complex ethical, legal, social and policy impacts of the Genome Revolution.

Center for the Study of the Public Domain

phillin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:35:04 -0400

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture. Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school’s wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions. The Center's Faculty Co-Directors are James Boyle, David Lange, Arti Rai and Jerome Reichman. Its Director is Jennifer Jenkins. The Center is supported in its operation by a generous founding gift and by grants from Foundations.

Creative Commons (cc)

phillin — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:16:30 -0400

"Some Rights Reserved": Building a Layer of Reasonable Copyright

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons' current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

Creative Commons' first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works. Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity.

History

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

Fellows and students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society helped get the project off the ground. Creative Commons is now housed at offices in San Francisco. The Board oversees a small administrative staff and technical team, and is advised by a Technical Advisory Board. Creative Commons is sustained by the contributions of a growing group of supporters.

Duke-UCHRI

bwalters — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:22:21 -0400

Hi, You've joined the Duke-UCHRI website setup for the purpose of aiding in collaboration around HASTAC and the grant competition for 2007-2008.

Electronic Techtonics

bwalters — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:24:12 -0400

Welcome to the Electronic Techtonics conference group.

THINKING AT THE INTERFACE
April 19 - 21, 2007
Duke University and Durham, NC

There are two schedules you may view to learn about the conference:

Papers are listed under the panels below. Please contact us if you have any problems accessing them.

Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics

phillin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:23:26 -0400

The Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communications Systems at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering aims to help turn North Carolina into a "photon forest" where research and development in photonics can create the kind of technological advance and economic growth found in California's Silicon Valley. The Center was established at Duke University in December 2000 by a $25,000,000 gift from Michael and Patty Fitzpatrick.

The Fitzpatrick Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences opened on schedule in August, more than doubling the Pratt School of Engineering's teaching and research space. The four-building 322,000-square-foot complex is more than bricks and mortar. It represents a fundamental shift from a traditional academic departmental focus by bringing together faculty from across scientific disciplines working in four research initiatives: biology, photonics, materials and integrated sensors. (read article)

The goals of the Center are to:

1. Train the commercial, technical and academic leaders of next generation broadband technologies.

2. Pioneer the establishment of photonics as an information science. Silicon Valley was established by the transition of semiconductor devices from physics to engineering 40 years ago at Stanford. We hope to seed a similar transition in the Photon Forest today.

3. Pioneer new approaches to industrial, governmental and interacademy collaboration. The strength of the photonics industry arises from the power of free and ubiquitous communications. The Fitzpatrick Center seeks to be a nexus for communications and learning between industry and academic partners in North Carolina, California, and around the world.

Franklin Humanities Institute

phillin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:17:40 -0400

Mission

Founded in 1999, the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University is an interdisciplinary humanities center dedicated to supporting humanities, arts, and social science research and teaching at Duke. We seek to encourage serious humanistic inquiry throughout the entire University and to instill the general public with an awareness of the centrality of the humanities to the quality of human life and social interaction. We also promote scholarship that enhances social equity, especially research on race and ethnicity in their most profound historical and international dimensions. In this ambitious mission, we are inspired by our namesake, John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History.

Located in the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute is built on a fundamentally collaborative model fitting Duke's emphasis on facilitating interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Through an array of innovative programs, we seek to encourage the conversations, partnerships, and collaborations that are continually stimulating creative and fresh humanistic research, writing, and teaching at Duke.

Accomplishments

Our core program, the Franklin Seminars in the Humanities, is a humanities seminar built on a collaborative model of focused year-long inquiry around a broad unifying theme. The Seminar has since 1999 supported 87 research projects, including those by 49 faculty, 27 graduate students, 7 postdoctoral fellows, and 4 librarians. An additional 10 projects will be brought into the Seminar in 2005-06. To date, we have organized Seminars around two general areas: "race" (1999-2003) and "information" (2004-08). In 2006-07 our Franklin Seminar will overlap with a Mellon Sawyer Seminar that we will host that engages humanists in dialogue with the sciences and medicine.

We also sponsor numerous high-level, engaging, often collaboratively-sponsored public programs. These events include our popular lunchtime conversation series Wednesdays at The Center, co-organized with humanities departments and other Franklin Center consortium members. Since 2002, numerous Duke faculty members and other scholars, leaders, artists, and journalists have presented their work to interdisciplinary audiences through this series. Speakers have included Duke University Vice Provost for International Affairs Gilbert Merkx, Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Duke Violinist (and Ciompi Quartet member) Hsiao-mei Ku, Radio France Internationale Correspondent Dominique Roch, Duke Professor of Romance Studies Alice Kaplan, and Duke Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

In 2003, we experimented with using an annual theme to draw together and bring visibility to select interrelated humanities events around the Duke campus. The first Institute Theme, "Dissent: Past and Present,” was built around anniversary of the 1903 John Spencer Bassett affair in which Duke defended a professor's academic freedom. The "Dissent" series included twenty-three events in a variety of formats: lectures, performances, and films. It engaged members of twenty humanities departments, centers and programs at Duke. The 2004-05 theme, "Risky Knowledge," related to that year's Seminar focus on "Knowledge and Its Institutions." This series, comprised of more than thirty events, kicked off with a conference collaboratively sponsored with the Scholars at Risk Network, which Duke has since joined.

Each year we have also organized a visible public year-end symposium annually to build on our annual Seminar theme to address a large historical question in an interdisciplinary way for a public and scholarly audience. In 2003, our "Reparations in Perspective" panel, featuring John Hope Franklin and several other scholars, reached nearly 350 people in person and via webcast. In 2004, a panel discussion on the politics of archaeology featured eight Duke and UNC scholars in dialogue with historian Romila Thapar.

Thapar was visiting Duke as part of our Mellon Annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, started in 2003 with generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Annual Lecture has to date featured literary scholar Emory Elliott, historian of India Romila Thapar, and literary theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal.

Because we seek to enhance connections among those who produce scholarship and those who collect and disseminate it, we have developed several programs that bring Duke humanists together with colleagues in the libraries and in scholarly publishing. Through our Scholarly Publishing Events Series, planned in collaboration with Duke University Press on “The Role and Future of Scholarly Publishing in American Intellectual Life," we have held or planned nine events that highlight issues in scholarly publishing. In collaboration with the Library we have sponsored a workshop on “Careers in Research Libraries: Opportunities for Humanities Graduate Students and PhDs.” Additionally, through the support of the Mellon Foundation, we have sponsored year-long publishing internships at Duke University Press for several graduate and undergraduate students. Finally, we have provided crucial support for three library fellows in Franklin Seminar since 2002.

Again, thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation, we have offered support both to graduate and undergraduate students in the humanities. Our Graduate Careers workshop series and Mellon Dissertation Working Groups have underwritten graduate research and professional development. Our Interdisciplinary Teaching Workshop, held in 2004, encouraged participants to "teach outside the lines" by offering practical tips on such matters as team teaching and engaging the intellectual rationale for teaching that crosses disciplinary boundaries.

Finally, we have worked to build a meaningful and integrated humanities community at Duke. Through a number of communications mechanisms we have set up, the Institute has become a clearinghouse and publicizer of humanities happenings all across the campus. In 2005, we inaugurated the "FC-Humanities" announcement listserv and the regular "Humanities at Duke" events newsletter. To subscribe, please contact us.

HASTAC Scholars

Mark Olson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:21:24 -0400

The HASTAC Scholars Program was created (in conjunction with the website upgrade) to help HASTAC develop into a more dynamic and interactive virtual institution. As HASTAC itself was created to look toward the future of higher education in a digital age, it is in keeping with that vision that we turn to students today -- those who are most engaged in participatory learning -- to be our eyes and ears, our national "citizen journalists" on matters digital. HASTAC Scholars are students, both graduate and undergraduate, working across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. They are nominated by those at institutions who have contributed to the leadership of HASTAC, and receive a minimal monetary award from their home institutions (since HASTAC itself has no centralized funding structures). Participating alongside dozens of their peers from institutions across the U.S. (and with some scholars reporting in from abroad), the Scholars will bring the work that is happening in their centers, campuses and beyond to the attention of the larger HASTAC community -- that is, to you -- by posting to this blog and by listing events on Needle. The Scholars will also be leading a weekly discussion forum; this might be on their own HASTAC-related work, or perhaps a virtual book discussion of something like Chris Kelty's Two Bits or the most recent issue of Vectors.

HASTAC TECH GROUP

phillin — Tue, 02 May 2006 22:28:46 -0400

Welcome to the HASTAC Tech Group. We are involved with the planning of the technology infrastucture for the InFormation Year.

Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS)

phillin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:29:46 -0400

Our mission is to study and create new information technologies and to analyze their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society, and the environment.

Institute for the Future of the Book

phillin — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:26:02 -0400

THE MISSION
Starting with the assumption that the locus of intellectual discourse is shifting from printed page to networked screen, the primary goal of the Institute for the Future of the Book is to explore, understand and influence this shift. The institute is a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Jenkins Collaboratory

phillin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:15:04 -0400

The Jenkins Collaboratory researches developing technologies in contemporary science, engineering, and medicine, and their social and ethical implications. Our work focuses particularly on the current fusion of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technologies, and the transformative possibilities of this fusion for biomedicine, humanmachine engineering, cultural production, and civic engagement.

The areas we choose to investigate are highly interdisciplinary and increasingly distributed in global modes of transnational production. Collaboration is crucial to the scientists and engineers whose work we document and engage. Collaboration is equally crucial to our mission of investigating their work. By adapting open source and off the shelf web based technologies to facilitate collaborative documentation of the history of contemporary science and technology fields that are born digital we develop technologies to support working partnerships among scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanities scholars. To contribute to the construction of archives for the history of contemporary fields in biomedicine, such as bioinformatics and genomics, we design interactive timelines and web based genealogy tools allowing scientists and engineers to partner with us in documenting the history of their own work. In order to facilitate public engagement with the social and ethical implications of these sciences in the making before they acquire momentum and become difficult to critique or modify, we develop tools for live video annotation and commentary as well as podcasting environments for audioblogging.

In addition to documenting contemporary scientific work and providing venues for scholarly collaboration and public engagement, we create resources for critical scholarly analyses relevant to science and technology policy. Foremost among these are tools for visualizing flows of innovation in techno-scientific networks based on interfacing semantic content and citation analysis of scientific documents and patents, as well as data on author, inventor, and organizational profiles. We investigate the role of university based research in regional economies, and the relative contributions of federal and private funding to the growth of contemporary science and technology.

Meeting: University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), April 20-22, 2006

phillin — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:25:19 -0400

Welcome to the group page for the NSF sponsored Expanding Cyber-Communities Workshop at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), Irvine on April 20-22, 2006. You can subscribe to this group to receive messages directed to the participants of this meeting. Click on the links below to access images, links, webcasts, presentations, and other documents from the meeting.

Nasher Museum of Art

phillin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:35:33 -0400

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University opened its new building designed by architect Rafael Viñoly on October 2, 2005, creating a major new center for the arts on campus. The $24 million museum fosters multidisciplinary learning and serves the Research Triangle area. The former Duke University Museum of Art (DUMA) closed in May 2004. The new museum inaugurated its two new special exhibition galleries with The Evolution of the Nasher Collection and The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice, reflecting the museum’s increased focus on modern and contemporary art. It is located at Duke University Road and Anderson Street, adjacent to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Mark Olson — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 14:08:41 -0400

Participants in the 2006 Seminar will explore new ways of thinking about and with technology. The Seminar will include paired conversations between cutting edge technological innovators and experimental humanists, artists and social scientists, around the many issues that engage the human and the technological. The Seminar will also include demonstrations of new technological devices, their applications and scholarly practices. Participants will have opportunities to engage with new digital applications in the context of small-group workshops, large-group social networking exercises and art/technology installations.

For more information, visit the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory website at UCHRI.