HASTAC Scholars

About the HASTAC Scholars Forum

The HASTAC Scholars fellowship program recognizes graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in innovative work across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. The HASTAC Scholars host regular discussion forums here featuring their own ground-breaking research and interests alongside those of leaders and innovators in the digital humanities, such as social networking pioneer Howard Rheingold, open source scholar Christopher Kelty, and Director of the Office of Digital Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brett Bobley.

Visit the HASTAC Scholars homepage

About the HASTAC Scholars
Meet the HASTAC Scholars

About the HASTAC Scholars

The HASTAC Scholars fellowship program recognizes graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in innovative work across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. This group of select Scholars from institutions across the nation will act as the eyes and ears of HASTAC’s virtual network, bringing the work happening on their campuses and in their region to international attention. The Scholars will spend the year as part of a virtual community of fifty students creating, reporting on, blogging, vlogging, and podcasting events related to digital media and learning for an international audience. The HASTAC Scholars will also orchestrate a regular discussion forum on the HASTAC web site featuring their own ground-breaking research and interests alongside those of leaders and innovators in the digital humanities, such as social networking pioneer Howard Rheingold, open source scholar Christopher Kelty, and Director of the Office of Digital Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brett Bobley.

The HASTAC Scholars logo was designed by Scholar Ana Boa-Ventura, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.

Meet the HASTAC Scholars

Meet the HASTAC Scholars

Meet the HASTAC Scholars

	Lindsey Andrews is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Duke University. She received her B.A. from the University of Southern California, where she was one of the co-founders of Palaver, USC's creative publication. Her current work involves investigating the co-evolution of media technologies and evolutionary theory, through a literary lens, in the long 20th century. She is also a researcher on and blogger for the Virtual Peace project, one of the winners of this year's DML competition, which is developing a game-based learning environment for international disaster relief and conflict resolution efforts.
	Manuel Betancourt is, in words of others (which he usually borrows and makes his own) a lit theory junkie, a pop culture addict, and a film aficionado. But he is also a current Graduate Student at Rutgers (New Brunswick, NJ), a B.A. (English Honours with a Minor in Critical Studies in Sexuality - how's that for a mouthful?) from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC) and just recently became a resident of New York City. His interests range from TV cult-classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer to French Twentieth century thinkers (Monsieur Barthes - The Pleasure of the Text); from comic books released by Dark Horse (The Umbrella Academy) to graphic novels written by Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), from twentieth century theater (Mr Williams, Mr Miller and Mr Stoppard) to queer literature and theory (Hollinghurst, Rechy, Kushner and O'Hara), from...well, you get the idea. But if there is anything that bridges these eclectic tastes is an ever-increasing hunger for exploring the potential of different forms to convey difference (in a deconstructionist vein; in a deviant, sexual meaning; but also in the more literal sense), and with only 5 more words to go, I'll leave it at that.
	Ana Boa-Ventura is a Fulbright doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are many, which is why she has not finished yet... Her dissertation is on virtual communities leveraging social support for smoking cessation. In Portugal, she is working with journalists on digital storytelling (DST) in social intervention, as well as in innovative applications of DST in corporate communication. She is interested in cross-cultural communication across boundaries – whether they are geographic, ideological or disciplinary - and this includes collaboration between scholars in the Arts, Social Sciences, Humanities and Computer Sciences communities. She is interested in understanding who these scholars are, working in the fringes of their own disciplines and promoting the twilight zones that are defining a new type of scholarship.
	Rizvana Braxton is working to develop a variety of critical approaches to contemporary fashion, which entails looking at fashion in its material specificity. She is interested in the expanding ways in which fashion is interrogating traditional organizing principles of existing social structures, the ways in which fashion may introduce new ideas that have a profound engagement with society, urban planning, and ecological policies. (Here she is informed by the work of textile artists such as Lucy Orta, a visual artist at the London college of Fashion.) Her work looks for a critical way of assessing the material changes happening in practices of design, with the aim of evaluating the possible emergence of a political imagination from the material changes in affective labor practices. There are a variety of ways in which fashion, specifically the wearing of clothing, compels a thinking about embodiment, or different embodied experiences. In this respect, she is also interested in developing a phenomenological account of fashion, to develop a critical notion of dwelling. Related to this, fashion provokes an idea of the bodily occupation of space, and how this connects with ideas of the construction of urban identity, as well as a subjectivity sometimes referred to as the urban nomad.
	James Brown is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He is presently working on a dissertation entitled Hospitable Texts that examines the ethical and rhetorical structures underlying Wikipedia and other electronic texts. His work has been published in The Computer Culture Reader and in the journal Leisure Studies. James also teaches courses in Rhetoric and New Media in the University of Texas' Department of Rhetoric and Writing.
	Travis Brown is a PhD student in in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies early nineteenth-century British narrative poetry. His master's report examined contemporary critical discussions of Lord Eldon's copyright decisions in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and his research interests include digital textual scholarship and the application of tools and techniques from computational linguistics in literary analysis. He is the lead developer of eComma, a text and commentary management system designed to allow groups of scholars to engage in collaborative word-level textual annotation online. The eComma project has developed a prototype web application that has been tested in undergraduate classrooms in UT Austin's Computer Writing and Research Lab, and is continuing development in 2008 and 2009 with support from UT's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services and the NEH. Travis is both personally and professionally interested in the culture of the open-source movement, and has designed and taught an undergraduate course on the role of rhetoric in "post-scarcity" communities and online reputation systems.
	Madeleine Casad is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Cornell University
	Daniel Chamberlain is a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies department at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. His research is focused on the cultural impact of television, new media, and film, with an emphasis on the mobility of emergent media technologies and the new types of spatial imaginaries their circulation engenders. His work connects “new media” theory, as practiced in critical media studies, to the broader traditions of cultural studies, the spatial concerns of critical geography, and the historical specificities of urban studies. He is currently completing a dissertation entitled "Emergent Media Technologies and the Production of New Urban Spaces," which examines how emergent media technologies shape the physical and imaginary construction of contemporary urban developments. He previously earned a Master's degree in Critical Studies from USC and a Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of Michigan.
	Ian Chapp is a graduate student in an IMLS Art Librarianship program in Wayne State's Library and Information Science department. His background in Art History has led to research in both the US and abroad on topics ranging from the use of microscopy in the Detroit Murals of Diego Rivera to a Viennese Expressionist's use of a fetish doll. Chapp is a proponent of the democratization of information and is interested in the arcana of material culture and identity and the opening and reframing of collections in light of the digital realm to enable new modes of research, collaboration and teaching.
	Nicole Coleman is a senior in Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She enjoys working with children and is currently employed with the America Reads tutoring program at a local elementary school. Her academic interests include developmental psychology, social welfare, and U.S. minority studies. At UIUC, she is an Educational Psychology Research Assistant working on studies involving race, development, and technology. In her spare time, she enjoys concerts and anything outdoors.
	Mechelle De Craene is a special ed/gifted ed teacher. She has seen the benefits of technology within her classroom. Hence, digital media is a part of the daily curriculum she plans for her classes. Her students blog, play video games, conduct Inspiration and Kispiration Concept Mapping, create digital storyelling projects, make digital comics of reader's theatre projects, Discovery Channel's United Streaming, etc. She has found this has increased the motivation of students with special needs in her classroom as well as their reading and writing levels. It's both fun and inspiring to see the kids' faces light up in front of the computer.
	James E. “Jed” Dobson works for the Brain Imaging Center and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, where he writes and supports brain imaging software and hardware for all manners of cognitive and social neuroscientific interest. In the past he has worked on high-performance distributed computing (“grid”) systems and has written on the application of these technologies for fMRI-based research and the building of databases for MRI data. He returned to Dartmouth in 2008 after finishing an interdisciplinary M.A. in the humanities at the University of Chicago. While at the U of C, he put aside his years of practical experience for the allure of theory, specifically those related to the study of material culture and psychoanalysis. Jed wrote his M.A. thesis on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams and is primarily interested in self-representation, memory, and memorialization in literary texts. He currently lives in Thetford, VT with his partner, the poet and fiction writer Rena J. Mosteirin.
	Working her way up through California's Master Plan of Education, Melissa Fabros is currently a doctoral candidate in English at UC Berkeley. When not personally demonstrating choose-your-own-adventure pedagogy, she works on poetry, intersections between the humanities and the sciences, and on a dissertation that extends the pragmatic tradition into Cold War poetics.
	North Carolina Central University Senior Jovanna Foreman is a Computer Information Systems major. Jovanna has received a degree of Associate in Arts from Queensborough Community College in Bayside, New York. Jovanna is a member of NCCU's Computer Information System club, in which she served as events committee chair in the fall of 2007. Jovanna is currently an intern at Shodor Education Foundation, a non-profit organization specializing in computational science, where Jovanna is developing and enhancing her Java programming skills. Jovanna has received many awards and recognition from Who's Who Among American College Students, The National Dean's List, and North Carolina Central University School of Business Academic Achievement certificate and scholarship.
	Kevin Gallego is currently a senior at National University in San Diego, California. He is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences, with an emphasis on conservation biology. He plans to apply for graduate school in hopes of furthering his studies in these fields. Growing up in San Diego, he has become very passionate about its biodiversity and hopes to one day work in a related field to help preserve its uniqueness for future generations. Currently, Kevin works as a personal trainer and has found it quite rewarding. Its flexibility has allowed him to keep his focus on school, and has kept him in tune with the outdoor life style. This summer he is assisting with research on praying mantids out in Bishop, California. He is responsible for conducting experiments that focus on the pheromones of female praying mantids as a sexual attractant for males. He feels that learning to conduct research is vital to his future plans, and he feels privileged and honored that the HASTAC Scholars Program has helped make this research possible.
	Michael Gavin is a graduate student in English at Rutgers University. His dissertation,"Literary Criticism and the Print Marketplace, 1660-1763," examines transformations in printed criticism in Great Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Looking at a series of case studies from the 1660s to the 1760s, and using a variety of historical methods, Gavin argues that printed criticism was used to provide conceptual frameworks for social structures that were local and explicitly interpersonal. As a study of how the print medium was used to construct new kinds of social networks, his research offers a contribution to the history of media and culture.
	Juli Grigsby comes to us from Los Angeles, though she currently lives in Austin, while pursuing a PhD in African Diaspora Anthropology at the University of Texas. From time to time she considers herself a photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer, blogger, and organizer depending on her mood, project, or deadline. Her research interests include exploring racially motivated soci-economic inequalities, women’s health & holistic healing, state anti-Black violence and grassroots feminist activism. She is currently developing an avid interest in the production and performance of Blackness through gender and sexuality on online dating websites and communities.
	Christopher Hanson is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. His dissertation focuses on replay and repetition in interactive media, television and avant-garde film and is tentatively entitled One More Time. At USC, he assisted in the development and implementation of the online journal Vectors and has been involved in research projects at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and in serious game design for the USC Game Innovation Lab and the Institute for Creative Technologies. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Media Studies at Carleton College and has worked for several years in video game design, software development and public television as well as teaching courses in television studies at the Film and Television School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
	Joey Harding loves video games. He loves them as a burgeoning art form, he loves them as an exciting technical business, he loves them as the ultimate in entertainment, and, he loves creating them. Nowhere else can you find such energy in such great concentrations as among inspired artists, programmers, and designers focused on making a great game. Joey believes that game development is leading a Digital Renaissance and will revolutionize (and already has) entertainment forever. While not working on game development (and not playing games), Joey likes to watch movies, eat out, ride his bike, and read (all in that order and at the same time).
	Stef Hirsch is an aspiring curator of contemporary art who is currently completing a BA in Art History as well as a BFA in sculpture at Cornell University. With the desire to curate since she was 13 years old, Stef has had summer stints working at museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as non-profit galleries such as Artist Space and most recently The Kitchen, all in NYC. At the moment, her research and thesis projects are focused around the importance and/or status of Institutional Critique within the contemporary art world. Focusing on site-specific installation, film and video, and performance works, Stef seeks to hypothesize, plan, and orchestrate exhibitions that reinvent the space of museum. Moreover, she has recently become very interested in the ways in which technological advances can be used to alter, intensify, and in some ways perfect the museumgoer's experience while navigating through isolated 'art' spaces. In the future, she hopes to redefine museum audiences' expectations, comfort-levels, and understandings of the 'organized art exhibition.'
	Lilly Irani is a PhD student in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, working at the intersection of everyday ubiquitous computing and interactive and collaborative technologies, and feminist Science Technology Studies. Her research interests include everyday privacy strategies in collaboration, reconceptualizing "cross-cultural" encounters in computing, and feminist research methodology. Some of her current projects include learning about everyday privacy practice by studying health activist communities and critically examining how "ethnography" has been used and appropriated in design practice. Previously, she designed user experiences at Google, focusing on early stage design research, information architecture, and interaction design. She has an M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Human-Computer Interaction, and a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, both from Stanford University. She also is an editor at Ambidextrous Magazine, Stanford's magazine for and about design thinking.
	Brian Jacobson is a PhD candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. His dissertation examines the origins of the relationship between cinema, architecture, and technology in the world's first film production studios in the US and France. More generally, Brian's research interests include early film history, cinema and architecture, the history and philosophy of technology, medium specificity, and visual studies. These interests (among many others) developed during the completion of his Master's degree in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where his SM thesis focused on theories of space and place in cinematic representations of urban environments.
	Patrick Jagoda is a graduate student in English at Duke University who specializes in post-1945 American literature, new media studies, and critical theory. In addition to his work in English, Patrick has an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies. His work in this area has extended to the study of synthetic worlds, electronic literature, cyberpunk fiction, video game theory, and the politics of new media. His dissertation project, entitled "Network Aesthetics: American Hauntings in an Age of Terror," traces the co-emergence of terror as a dominant political affect and the network as an ascendant political architecture during the Cold War era. Through a reading of contemporary novels, films, television shows, digital games, government documents, and media texts, the dissertation explores the terror of global interconnectivity as well as the networked shape taken by fear in its role as a political strategy. By attending to the contemporary aesthetics of networks, the project attempts to think through (that is, both about and with) these ubiquitous organizational structures as they manifest in everything from terrorist networks to computer networks to global economic markets to emerging infectious disease ecologies.
	John Jones is a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he studies computers, writing, and rhetoric. He enjoys writing and thinking about the ways the internet is altering our communication habits and changing the way we think about the society and the self. Currently, he is an assistant director of UT's Computer Writing and Research Lab where he helped launch viz., a web portal that investigates the connections between visual culture and rhetoric.
	Ga-Young Joung is an undergraduate student at Duke University studying biomedical, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. She is interested in and would like to learn more about robotics, green technology, and neurobiology. She is active in Engineers without Borders, an organization that helps underserved communities with sustainable engineering-based projects, and volunteers at the Duke Children's Hospital. In her spare time, she enjoys playing tennis, baking bread, and watching youtube. In the future, her goals include improving her spanish, learning hip hop dance, and figuring out what she wants to do after undergrad.
	In collaboration with Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, editors of Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Deborah Kimmey coordinates three websites published in tandem with the edited collection: an informational website about the book (keywords.nyupress.org), a blog (keywords.nyupress.org/forums), and a wiki designed to host both classes and independent research groups (depts.washington.edu/keywords/wiki). The wiki is an online resource jointly funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and NYU Press. The Keywords Collaboratory offers a flexible online space for students and other working groups to generate new insights in the fields of American studies and cultural studies using Raymond Williams' keywords-based methodology. The wiki also allows for collaboration across classrooms and institutional sites, with the purpose of expanding the audience for classes and working groups, extending knowledge produced by students beyond a school term, and rethinking the process and production of knowledge within American studies and cultural studies through online collaboration.
	Angela Kinney(née Zielinski) is a Ph.D. student in the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Department of the Classics and the Program in Medieval Studies. She has completed a B.A. in Classical Studies and English Literature (a double concentration) at the University of Chicago, as well as an M.A. in Classics (University of Illinois). She has broad interests, but her specialization is Latin of late antiquity and the early medieval period. She has a special love for palaeography/codicology (manuscript studies), and the transmission of texts from the classical period to modernity. She also enjoys working on ancient perceptions of weather, natural philosophy, historiography, hagiography, archaic Greek poetry, and Old English texts. She is spending the academic year 2008-2009 at the University of Bristol (UK) to work with Professor Gillian Clark on an analysis of the different genres present in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God). Her current research projects include the preparation of an edition and analysis of an anonymous 12th-century encyclopaedic chronicle (preserved in two manuscripts - one at Cambridge and one at Madrid); The Vita Apollinaris Valentiniensis - arguing for 6th-century authorship; and the study of generic textures in Augustine's De Civitate Dei.
	Nick Knouf is a PhD student in information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His research explores the interstitial spaces between information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies. His current projects include a mobile phone messaging application that works independent of a centralized network, and a robotic marionette that provokes non-speech sounds as a means of encouraging the expression of the unspeakable. More info is available on his website and his blog.
	Raeshawn McGuffie is from Los Angeles, California. She is a total bookjunkie. Her first true interest in anything digital occurred when she noticed that her collection of ebooks was getting rather large and her laptop extremely slow. She earned a BA in Psychology from Fisk University in Nashville, TN. She is currently attending North Carolina Central University while earning an MLS degree. She is on the public library track, although she works in an academic library, with her focus on adult reader’s advisory. Since she has been attending NCCU, she has discovered a vast interest in the digitization of special collections, particularly those collections held by the Historically Black Colleges & Universities in North Carolina and Tennessee. She has also developed a facination with the E. Azalia Hackley digitized sheet music collection held at the Detroit Public Library in Michigan. She thinks her journey with HASTAC will allow others to watch her grow in this field because she intends to start as a beginner and work her way up. She also enjoys all music, but something that people never seem to expect of her is that she LOVES classic rock and heavy metal.
	Joshua McVeigh-Schultz is an artist, scholar, and experimental documentary filmmaker whose work plays between the boundaries of documentary and performative genres. In both practice and scholarship he explores the kinds of ruptures that occur when voices of intimacy interject themselves into more public or professional spaces. He received an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley where he researched the Japanese social networking site, mixi. He has been awarded grants for documentary projects from Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies and UCSC's Florence French Fellowship. His work has been shown at Berkeley's PFA theater, the San Francisco World Film Festival, and the Boston International Film Festival.
	Eric Meyers is a doctoral candidate at the Information School at the University of Washington. He holds Masters Degrees in Information Science and Education from the University of Michigan and Stanford University respectively. Formerly a teacher, school librarian and technologist, he consults with a wide range of institutions and professionals on information services, youth programming, learning spaces, and technology-enriched curricula. Eric’s research interests lie at the intersection of information science, the learning sciences, and new media studies. Drawing on work in the emerging area of "New Literacies", as well as sociocultural conceptions of information behavior, his recent work examines how preteens (ages 6-12) interact in shared virtual environments (SVEs) online. His cognitive ethnography of SVEs is guided by questions such as: How do preteens construct meaning, authority, identity, and expertise in virtual space? How do online social networks affect the information seeking and sharing practices of preteens? More broadly, how will growing up in virtual space affect our notions of what it means to be "literate" in the 21st Century? Eric was recently awarded the Jesse H. Shera prize by the American Library Association for distinguished published research. On weekends you will find Eric hiking in the Olympic Mountains, or biking around Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he currently resides.
	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. www.isabelmillan.com
	At the ripe age of 24, the only fear Edward Moses has left is adulthood. As a musician, teaching assistant, graphic designer, radio personality, hip-hop and sneaker addict, Edward chiefly still identifies himself chiefly as a nerd. It is through this lens that he takes a look at the world, one run-on sentence at a time, making the world safe for those who love rare Nike sneakers just as much as they love Star Wars. His blog will serve as an analysis into the outlook on being "educated while black" in a modern context, especially where the modern college environment is concerned.
	Megan Osfar: a) is returning to the University of Illinois for a graduate degree in linguistics after six years in "the real world" of corporate software engineering b) is originally from Wisconsin (State Motto: Forward!), Land of Cows and Cheese (Smell our dairy air.) c) is concentrating in phonetics because she likes to make silly noises and do crazy-fun things with her mouth d) was recently struck by lightning e) all of the above
	Veronica Paredes is a PhD student in the new interdivisional program Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. While at USC, she has worked as a research and teaching assistant for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Her research interests include digital scholarship, transnational online economies and audio culture. Her work explores histories of technology and culture through the topics of gender, labor and race.
	Claudia C. Pederson is a PhD candidate at the History of Art and Visual Studies Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Her areas of interest include digital arts, radical media, and critical theory. Her dissertation research focuses on the intersections between the arts and entertainment, through experimental digital gaming.
	Ryan Platt holds a B.A. in French Studies and Theatre & Dance from Amherst College and an M.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University, where he is presently a Ph.D. candidate. As a 2007-08 DAAD Research Grant recipient, he pursued doctoral research in Germany and will be participating in the HASTAC Scholars program from Berlin. During his stay in Germany, he has become especially invested in work by William Forsythe and Heiner Goebbels, which he intends to integrate into his dissertation’s ongoing articulation of a cinematic mode of performance as exemplified in interdisciplinary female artists of the 1970s.
	Kylie Prymus, a Philosophy graduate student and University Scholar at Duke University teaching at Converse College in South Carolina, whose interests include the cultural impact of social networking sites on moral norms, online identity formation, and video gaming and its impact on broader cultural norms.
	Angela Rounsaville is a graduate student in Language and Rhetoric at the University of Washington.
	Julie Levin Russo is a doctoral candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, working on a dissertation entitled "Indiscrete Media: Television/Internet Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities." In addition to various publications and conferences, her recent projects have included co-editing a special Battlestar Galactica issue of the online journal FlowTV, guest blogging in Henry Jenkins's "Gender and Fan Culture" series, and serving on the editorial team of the new fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Her current obsession is the job market.
	Depending on the day, Jentery Sayers is a computer geek, a music dork, or a literature nerd. His research attempts to mix all three, with an emphasis on the digital humanities and science and technology studies. Specifically, as a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, Seattle (UW), he's interested in sound, and he's working through how a cultural history of sound technologies might help scholars better unpack current trends in digital media and electronic literature. If you boiled his work down to a few keywords, then you would likely use "intermediation," "affect," and "materiality." With Curtis Hisayasu, he recently published "Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University" in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. At the UW, he is also collaborating with Phillip Thurtle (Comparative History of Ideas), Sarah Elwood (Geography), and Matt Wilson (Geography) to design a project-based, digital humanities curriculum, which will be mobilized in a course that he will be teaching in Spring 2009. This work is inspired by his participation in the UW's 2008 Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, entitled "Media and the Senses," which stressed the synthesis of technical competencies with creativity and critical inquiry.
	Suzanne Scott is a doctoral candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. In addition to presenting works on participatory culture, cult media, and video games at various conferences, Scott is working on her dissertation, a study of convergence culture’s redefinition and romanticization of the cultural constructions of authorship, text, and canon, focusing exclusively on Harry Potter fandom. She recently contributed a chapter for the collection "Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica," focusing on the impact of authorial, ancillary content (podcasts, webisodes, vlogs and transmedia comics) on fans' consumption and production. Additionally, she served as the Chair of Programming for Phoenix Rising (a Harry Potter symposium designed as a space for fans and scholars to interact and exchange ideas), and contributed to the gender and fan debates series on Henry Jenkins blog in the Fall of 2007.
	Chalet Seidel is a Ph.D. candidate in English with a concentration in Writing History and Theory at Case Western Reserve University. Her work examines the professionalization of journalism in the late nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how journalists worked with new communication technologies and how they conceptualized their role within a rapidly changing information environment. Digital technologies have created unprecedented opportunities for users to both access information and to create their own content. In an environment in which bloggers compete with traditional news outlet for breaking news, the definitions of what constitutes news and who is a legitimate journalist are in question. By historicizing the practice of journalism, Chalet's work shows how professional boundaries that are being tested today emerged from a nineteenth century mass media environment that was also shaped by rapid advances in communication technology and an explosion in outlets where writers could disseminate their work.
	Staci Shultz was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. She completed her BA in English at UC Berkeley and her MA in English at Boston College. She taught at BC for five years before entering the Joint Program in English & Education at the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest include composition studies, digital literacies and new media, and pop culture. She has recently achieved candidacy, and the tentative and way-too-wordy title of her dissertation is Listening to the 'signals that come through the walls of our classrooms from the world outside': How Fan Fiction Meta-Discourses Might Inform Composition Pedagogy. She is co-editor of Writing Places (2005) and the author of "'anas like me': A Study of the Discursive and Social Practices of Pro-Anorexia Online Communities," a chapter in the forthcoming book Authoring and Authorizing Self, Community and Globalized Society (Hampton Press). In addition to teaching in the English department at U of M, she is assistant editor of the Discourse and Social Processes Series (Hampton Press). In her spare time, she reads online gossip and fashion sites, haunts the coffee shops in downtown A2, walks half-marathons, travels, and roots for the Red Sox.
	Kathleen Smith was born and raised in Colorado, but has also lived in Boston, MA; Austin, TX; Regensburg, Germany; and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois (where she currently lives). She is currently working towards a doctoral degree in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Germanic Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a master’s degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently she is researching the depiction of book collections and the act of collecting in German literature from approximately 1500 to 1850 for her dissertation, and she is particularly interested in how these depictions vary from the historical “reality.” For example, the modern library as presented in today’s popular media is often very different from the actual working environment: in the movie The Librarian with Noah Wylie, for example, the public library where the protagonist works is full of magical and dangerous secret objects, and he travels the world in search of adventure. Other movies depict libraries as staid, boring places: Jimmy Stewart’s wife in It’s A Wonderful Life becomes a lonely and easily startled librarian in her alternate future (horror of horrors!). At the same time, public libraries in the US are now struggling with privacy issues, questions of intellectual property rights, and issues of censorship and free speech. Similar issues existed in the German context of the period she is working with, and she is interested in exploring the implications of this gap between representation and actuality in the literature of early modern to eighteenth-century Germany.
	Hijoo Son is a Ph.D. Candidate in modern Korean history and culture at UCLA, writing her dissertation titled “Casting Diaspora: Cultural Production and Identity Construction.” Her current research interests include largely the history of Asian migration, particularly explored through the visual culture of diasporic artistic activities. Specifically, her dissertation examines comparatively social processes involved in cultural production by Korean artists within globalizing urban centers of the Pacific Rim, including China, Japan, and the U.S. During her fellowship year as UCLA’s Junior Digital Humanities Fellow, she conceived of a methodology for metadata construction and visualizations of a digital archive including art work, oral interviews, and video. Through a collaboration with Software Studies Initiatives at UCSD, she is currently thinking through how to visualize culture by exploring automated pattern recognition of visual images. She is excited to teach on topics in digital humanities and the “meta” implications and possibilities digital methods provides in the examination of components analysis, genetics, mapping, archiving strategies, and public history.
	Janani Subramanian is a fifth year doctoral candidate in Critical Studies, at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She was born and raised in Houston, Texas and went to the University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate degree. Her dissertation is about the intersections of fantasy and race across various media. She procrastinates by reading online celebrity gossip, setting her TiVo, and finding the best french fries in L.A.
	Maggie Tate earned her M.F.A. degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), her M.A. degree in Sociology from the University of Mississippi (2006), and is currently a Ph.D. student in the sociology department of the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in organizational practices of various art worlds, with a focus on race and gender. Her HASTAC interests include new media art and the internet as a site for alternative exhibition spaces. Through her participation in HASTAC, Maggie hopes to combine scholarly and creative methods to explore her interests.
	Ramsey Tesdell is a Palestinian-American who was raised in rural Iowa (keep laughing). Iowa State University kicked him out in May 2006 and then he moved to Amman, Jordan. In Jordan, he studied Arabic and worked for the Jordan Times Newspaper. With several other trouble makers, Ramsey founded 7iber.com, a citizen-media project from Amman, Jordan. Ramsey is rapidly trying to finish his masters from the University of Washington in Seattle, and currently finds himself in Amman conducting research on technology and social change. In Amman, Ramsey enjoys hiking in the Dead Sea Rift, camping in the desert, and drinking tea with anyone who wants to join.
	Chaoting Ting is a research assistant at the National University Community Research Institute. Her research interests include the application of technology in community research, the importance of interdisciplinary approach, asset mapping, and social psychology. She holds a B.A. in Social Work from National Taipei University, Taiwan, and a M.S. in Computer Science from National University in San Diego, CA. Chaoting is enjoying the weather in San Diego as much as her animal friends at the SD Zoo.
	Whitney Trettien is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she works for the HyperStudio Lab for the Digital Humanities. Her academic interests include computational poetry, medieval robots, history of the book, dictionaries, ars combinatoria and systems for organizing information, both digital and analogue. Whitney is also a Truman Scholar and political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom. In her free time, she makes clothing and music.
	Jessica Weber is currently a graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC. Her research interests include information visualization, interaction design, usability, social informatics, and digital preservation and libraries. Among an extensive list of things (and in no particular order), she enjoys globetrotting, tomfoolery, NPR, sleep, French Bulldogs, celebrity schadenfreude, urban adventures, driving over the speed limit, cities by water, film, food, and fashion.
	Michael Widner is a Ph. D. student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the intersections between genre, identity, and representations of the body in late medieval English and French literature (mostly the 12th-14th century, with some dabbling in pre-Conquest works). Though his academic research has nothing to do with modern technology, he has a long-standing fascination with computers; in particular, he is a strong advocate of open source software (Kubuntu ftw) and the increased use of technology in and out of the classroom to make communication with students more effective and memorable. Plus, students think he's slightly hip when he shows them YouTube videos of Mr. Rogers break dancing. Before he entered graduate school, Mike had a lucrative, but soul-crushing and eye-straining career as a UNIX Systems Administrator. But now technology has taken its rightful place in his life as only a tool and hobby. Along with his work as a graduate student, he is also webmaster for the CELJ and part of the Global Middle Ages Project. He is also the father of a son cuter and smarter than any other child.
	Matt Wilson is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. His research is situated across the disciplines of political geography, science studies, and technoculture studies, particularly as these interface with a more specific field called 'critical geographic information systems'. He is interested in how geographic information technologies enable particular neighborhood assessment endeavors, and how these kinds of geocoding activities mobilize notions of 'quality-of-life' and 'sustainability'. Therefore, his dissertation research concentrates at the intersections of several phenomena, namely the energies with which nonprofit and community organizations approach neighborhood quality-of-life issues, the increased role that geographic information technologies have in addressing this kind of indicator work, as well as the increased geocoding of city spaces more generally. On the teaching front, he is participating in the University of Washington Huckabay Teaching Fellowship to develop curriculum that draws together geospatial technical training with critical technology studies. He serves as an instructor with the UW Extension GIS Certificate program, where he lectures on principles of cartography and cartographic critique, and he is the editorial assistant for a journal, Social & Cultural Geography.
	Hye Jin Yang is currently a graduate student who studies 'Teaching English as a Second Language' at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since her major is teaching language, her personal interests focus on how to use and apply computers for effective language learning and teaching. In particular, she is interested in CALL (Computer-assisted language learning) and CMC (Computer-mediated communication). She is planning to apply for the PH.D this year to be a professional in the field. After graduating, she would like to develop effective and creative language learning and teaching contents through the use of computer programs. Additionally, she is also interested in investigating how to use a variety of web-sources such as blogs, wikis, messengers, RSS, etc for successful language learning.
	Erin Gentry Lamb is the Director of the HASTAC Scholars Program. She will complete her PhD in English this fall at Duke University, where she is a University Scholar and teaches classes primarily out of the Women's Studies department on topics such as Aging, Sex & Popular Culture, Feminist Science Studies, and Global Health & Human Rights. Her scholarly interests include aging and critical gerontology, the cultural study of medicine, science and technology, bioethics, social justice, science-fiction, new media and the body, and 19th and 20th century American literature. Her dissertation, The Age of Obsolescence: Senescence and Scientific Rejuvenation in Twentieth Century America, traces the creation and circulation of several contemporary anti-aging cultural narratives (for example, the narrative of aging as a disease that science needs to cure) back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century changes in science, medicine, labor practices, financial policies, national identity and international competition. She argues that during those first decades of the twentieth century, the quest for the fountain of youth shifted from the stuff of legend to a driving motivation behind modern science. In her free time, she loves reading schlocky fiction and watching prime-time tv, is regularly humiliated playing duplicate bridge, and can often be found in the garden, in the kitchen or on the ballroom dance floor alongside her husband, who is a robotics engineer.

Participatory Play: Digital Games From Spacewar! to Virtual Peace

Welcome to the HASTAC Scholars forum on digital games. Your hosts are Patrick Jagoda and Lindsey Andrews: HASTAC Scholars and graduate students in the English department at Duke University.

In recent years, countless pundits have criticized video games for promoting aggressive tendencies, antisocial behavior, and serious addiction among children and teens. While digital games and educational simulations have been linked repeatedly to active learning benefits, fostering skills that range from individual real-time problem-solving to large-group collaboration, critics continue to associate this interactive medium with primarily harmful consequences. In September 2008, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released the first comprehensive survey about teens and video games, which suggests that 97% of youth between the ages of 12 and 17 play digital games. If an overwhelming majority of teens and an increasing number of adults are participating in everything from traditional games to online synthetic worlds then the catastrophic representations of game play seem significantly overstated. And figuring out the actual parameters and potential implications of this medium becomes more urgent than ever.

When gaming is discussed, violent first-person shooters and military-themed titles are often the conversational focal point. Historically, games from the 1962 Cold War era combat game Spacewar! to the ultra-violent Doom series of the 1990s to the United States Army's 2002 public relations and training vehicle America's Army have received a great deal of press. While the genealogy of militaristic and violent games is immensely important, it frequently displaces the focus from more innovative approaches to interactive electronic games and media. For this reason, we would like to center our discussion on game developments that have been pushing the boundaries of digital interactive gameplay and re-imagining the parameters of the medium.

The current MacArthur Foundation sponsored "Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares" project serves as an ideal case study of creative interventions into traditional game production. Virtual Peace transforms video game technology previously used for army training into a humanitarian assistance training tool. Borne of a collaboration among several departments at Duke University, the Duke-UNC Rotary Center, and Virtual Heroes (a Durham, NC-based game developer), Virtual Peace offers a game-environment that combines traditional, in-person role-playing games with interactive media technologies. Participants in the simulation attempt to organize crisis intervention by taking on the roles of heads of international humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF or Doctors without Borders, or of government officials involved in the crises – in this case, modeled on 1998’s devastating Hurricane Mitch. The game expands on the possibilities of traditional in-person role-playing by offering various tracking features that can both score participants’ abilities to reach tangible goals and allow instructors a better opportunity to observe students’ negotiation skills. Virtual Peace also expands the capacities of traditional video-game play by incorporating an after-action review that allows students and teachers to examine together not only the tangible goals reached, but also the processes by which they were achieved.

Beginning with notable exemplars of imaginative game design, such as "Virtual Peace," we would like to encourage thoughtful discussion and debate about electronic games. Following the ethic of gaming, we invite participants to engage in a playful exchange regarding the past, present, and future of gaming. Since the study and production of electronic games takes place across numerous disciplines (from the humanities to the sciences) and in different institutions (from commercial developers to universities), we hope the discussion can be similarly wide-ranging.

To begin the conversation with our guests, the HASTAC community, and other interested readers, we suggest a series of questions that reflect not only pedagogical, but also theoretical, methodological, and creative concerns. While the following questions serve as a starting point, we urge participants to expand on the issues we raise and to introduce their own:

How can digital games make useful social and political interventions? In what ways do single player mini-games (e.g., titles developed by Ian Bogost and Gerard LaFond's Persuasive Games venture) make possible different types of socio-political action than Massively Multiplayer Online games (e.g., Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft)?

Will a greater number of innovative simulations and games break through as mainstream titles or will socially and politically leaning simulations emerge primarily from universities? In other words, are major game publishers turning to less traditional game types or do you foresee this type of software being produced primarily by projects such as Virtual Peace or the USC Game Innovation Lab?

Without reducing the complicated history of electronic game production, how does Virtual Peace depart from multiplayer titles that are predicated on the fulfillment of violent objectives? How do you envision the future of nonviolent game production? Do you see war simulations and games invested in military maneuvers being supplemented with more innovative or educational simulations?

How important is the study of platforms and hardware to the understanding of electronic games and their broader social effects?

How can the study of electronic games influence other areas of research throughout the humanities, social sciences, and sciences? What do you see as the ultimate implications of research into interactive media?

Does the culture of gaming, both at the level of production and play, suggest a useful model for scholarly collaboration?

What kinds of methodological challenges have you faced in working through the history of digital games and other "new" media?

For those of you invested in the study of games, how do you use electronic games in the classroom? How might game theory be incorporated into broader curricula and pedagogy practices in the humanities?

Given the continued development of exciting and visually stimulating – yet highly violent – commercial games (such as the Grand Theft Auto series), how can you theorize or use these types of games in the classroom? How can these games help us better understand violence, transgressive acts, or rebellion in the context of youth culture?

What do you see as the major social, political, and cultural implications of changing online synthetic worlds? What types of benefits and challenges do these spaces (e.g., World of Warcraft, Lineage, and Second Life) introduce?

Please feel free to post your questions, comments, and links. We look forward to a generative and exciting discussion. Thank you to Erin and HASTAC for their generosity in helping us prepare this forum.

Patrick and Lindsey

Featured Scholars Profiles

Name: Lindsey Andrews

Title: Ph.D. Candidate

Institution: Duke University

About: Lindsey Andrews is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Duke University. She received her B.A. from the University of Southern California, where she was one of the co-founders of Palaver, USC's creative publication. Her current work involves investigating the co-evolution of media technologies and evolutionary theory, through a literary lens, in the long 20th century. She is also a researcher on and blogger for the Virtual Peace project, one of the winners of this year's DML competition, which is developing a game-based learning environment for international disaster relief and conflict resolution efforts.

Name: Patrick Jagoda

Title: PhD Candidate

Institution: Duke University

About: Patrick Jagoda is an English PhD candidate at Duke University who specializes in post-1945 literature, new media, and critical theory. His dissertation, "Network Aesthetics: American Hauntings in an Age of Terror," explores American literature, film, and new media that stages affective encounters with network architectures. By turning to structures such as threatening terrorist networks, volatile economic markets, and vulnerable computer systems, the project charts the structural terror that accompanies global interconnectivity. In addition to his work in English, Patrick has an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies. Related to his new media work, he is interested in video game studies, the culture of online synthetic worlds, media theory, speculative literature, electronic fiction, and cyberpunk texts.