Below are my conference notes from HASTAC 2011. They are by necessity often fragmented, telegraphic, impressional, and rough. I wish I could have attended more sessions. There were so many interesting and intriguing speakers, topics, and objects and archives of study. (Perhaps these will eventually inform a more polished digest, but I wanted to make them available.) My flotsam and jetsam:
HASTAC 2011
December 1-4, 2011
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Thursday, December 1, 2011
7:00-9:00 PM: Pre-Conference Workshop
#alt-ac: Alternative Academic Careers
Fiona Barnett, Korey Jackson
Alt-Ac is not necessarily “new,” there have always been tracks and positions where people with advanced degrees have migrated to
Libraries are really supportive of alt-ac jobs and opportunities
Informational interviews with folks at JSTOR, ProQuest, UMichigan Press
Skill-up in the skills needed for different jobs
Be courageous, be confident in the skills that you have
Get your hands dirty, try some things
You don’t have to be a technologist
Analytical skills, synthesis skills have served the alt-ac job well
Understanding how the university, how these large bureaucratic organizations work is a skill
Alt-Ac jobs are not the same thing as the digital humanities
Offset detail in your letter by hyperlinking to CV, portfolio, website, projects
Speak directly to the institution, to the job, to the particular skills/interventions is the job making
Collaboration, project management, communication, translation / not just tech skills
Friday, December 2, 2011
8:30-9:45 AM: Opening Plenary
“Now You See It: The Future of Learning in a Digital Age”
Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
Opening remarks: “tremendous innovation and a lot of reflection required”
There is a relationship between how we think about cognition / attention and how willing we are to make institutional change
“availability heuristics” – often your own stereotypes and prejudices
History of cognition and attention, missing from some experiments
What the word “digital” does? Is this about digitizing humanities? Digitizing scholarship?
Does the word “digital” transform the humanities?
Take hold of the technologies of this historical moment for institutional change
Every institution to control knowledge and learning in some way
Public education: train people in a certain kind of attention
The 4th Great Information Age: Digital Age: Mosaic browser becomes available (WWW)
What institutions we need now to better serve this new digital age?
Interactive, interconnected, multimodal communication?
What are the three skills college students need to learn in the 21st century?
Part I: why did we do it silently, on our own?
Part II: collaborative, interpersonal, talking/explaining, no brain was damaged
The use of “brain damage” so lightly, so cavalierly is infuriating
The era is somehow “damaging” us, you can only say that if your baseline is nostalgia
Different, yes, damaged, no
“You cannot see what you cannot see” – you learn habits of perception
Learning: shearing the unimportant, making swift pathways to the important
First lesson in institutional change: don’t dismiss the person who sees the gorilla
Second lesson: you will never hear that voice if you don’t build in for difference
Keywords for an industrial age:
Attention, timeliness, standard/ization, hierarchy, specialization, metrics, “two cultures” (science/humanities divide)
William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Adjustment of Wages to Efficiency (1896), Shop Management (1903, 1911), Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
Frederick J. Kelly (1914) invents the bubble multiple choice test
Later abandons the bubble test
Learning for Participation in the World Wide Web
What are the kinds of standards (not standardization) we need for the 21st Century?
Excellence is combinatory, complex, global…
10:15 AM – 11:00 AM: Keynote 2
“Cyberinfrastructure”
Dan Atkins, University of Michigan
Introduction by Margaret Hedstrom, University of Michigan
Cyberinfrastructrure = technology, human, organization support
e-Science, science communities are partaking of cyberinfrastructures in a boom way
e-Humanities & Arts
e-Learning
e-Development
“corpus computing”
Digital is really a technical detail: an aspect of the circuits, doesn’t capture what we’re trying to say, “extreme connectedness” is what we’re really trying to say
The shift to the “cloud” paradigm
Emerging IT environments: social, mobile, cloud, big data, cyber-physical
11:15 AM – 12:45 PM: Concurrent Sessions 1
Session B1 (Roundtables) – North Quad Ehrlicher Room
Communication and Collaboration in International Digital Humanities Projects
Ethan Watrall, Dean Rehberger, Catherine Doley, Scott Pennington, Peter Alegi, Justine Richardson
Matrix @ MSU
Justine Richardson: The Quilt Index
Peter Alegi: Africa Past & Present Podcast
Scott Pennington:
Catherine Foley: Community Video Education Trust
Iterations of Change: How Digital Technology Is Transforming Asian American Studies
Konrad Ng, Lisa Nakamura, Lori Kido Lopez
Lisa Nakamura
What can digital humanities can do for ethnic studies?
Gidra, 1969 publication
Hyphen publication
Digital humanities is still young enough not to ignore things like race, gender, class
The internet has really been a place where AA have been able to broadcast their materials
Ethnic Studies = preservationists, activists, but not necessarily technologists
“Towards an Asian American Digital Humanities”
Asian American Thanksgiving
My Mom is a Fob website
Twitter has really enriched my life as a scholar, hear from lots of people, leveling
Konrad Ng
“Interations of Change: How DT is Transforming AA Studies”
bring critical expertise in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power to DH as it is in formation
Asian Americans are not a model minority for digital technologies
How do you canonize / curate these digital texts, these online lives?
“Online life can tell these alternative stories”
DH: Changed cross-ethnic studies?
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM
New Directions in Communication Studies on the Digital Revolution
Katie Frank, Amanda Cote, Elliot Panek
Amanda Cote
Video games research, not much on video games (from a humanities perspective)
Issues of community, representation, industry
Identity “On Live,” relationship/friendship building on video game networks on consoles
Katie Frank
Ethic studies, chicano/chicana studies, identities in the media
How advances in digital technology/media convergence have impacted the way different media industries operate their logics/decisions they make
Adaptations of comic books/series to live-action film
Literature from ethnic studies, adaptation studies
Racebending.com, not just disgruntled fans
Adaptation of YA comic Runaways, casting of main character
Upcoming adaptations: Bane in the new Batman film, Japanese comic Old Boy, classic Japanime Akira
Elliot Panek
Media choice, why do they select certain media
What are people doing throughout the day? What kinds of media are they using?
Affective variables
Texting
Mechanical turks
2:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Session D2 (Lightning Talks) – Rackham West Conference Room
Digital Adaptation
Monica Williams
Critical Thinking and Digital Literacy
Chuka Onwumechili
Digital Literacies for a Software Culture
Megan Ankerson
Beyond Bricks & Pixels: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of Organizing a Community in the Digital Age
Fiona Barnett
About the HASTAC Scholars program
Myth #1: online community, interdisciplinary interaction is automatic, organic, natural
Rethinking (Through) Comics
Nick Sousanis
5:30 PM – 6:15 PM
Jim Leach, National Endowment for the Humanities
“Digital Technologies in the Civilizing Project of the Global Humanities”
NEH help develop the TEI standards
contributor to the Perseus Project, free online cultural repositories are democratizing
Voyages, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
Chronicling America, 1836-1922 newspaper archive
When people think of research, they think of laboratories and not libraries.
Most of the examples are just about digitizing collections, books, and knowledge (not necessarily about transformation)
Clerisy != clarity
Saturday, December 3, 2011
8:30 AM – 9:45 AM
“The Technocultural Imagination”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia
The technocultural = general, theoretical approach to the role of technology in the world
Inspired by Mills, The Sociological Imagination
Requires a synthetic and ecological approach to technology, reminds us that technology is culture and culture is technology
Not down with Kurzweil
Everyone needs a passing understanding of what happens / how technology works
Google mission statement: “To Organize the World’s Information and Make It Universally Accessible”
“It would be like the Mind of God” – what would a perfect search engine would be like
Blogging
The pressure to write something every day
The problem of just being “reactive,” just commenting on the events of the day
The issue of limiting comment spam
Not book composition
Doctorow: Facebook is like a Skinner box
If you decide to write a “trade-like” book, Thinking Like Your Editor
Influences: Dana Boyd, Helen Nissenbaum, Habermas, Pam Samuelson, Veblen “Engineers in the Price System”
John Batelle, The Search
Algorithms are a distillation of value choices
Don’t pretend you understand what scientists do, how technology works without getting in there and asking “dumb” questions…
10:15 AM – 11:00 AM
“Data, Code, and Research at Scale”
Josh Greenberg, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
From Betamax to Blockbuster
@epistemographer = “Science Studies as Applied Epistemography”
Mapping how we know what we know, the tools and methodologies in how we produce knowledge
Research at Scale
Telescopes let you see far, microscope lets you see small, macroscope lets you see big
Katy Borner, “Plug and Play Macroscopes”
To see the complex
OKCupid: mining data, the best questions for the first dates
Amass a big, really big pile of data (big data)
What is big data? What is it useful for?
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
MoBeDAC = Microbiome of the Built Environment Data Analysis Core
We’re going to be drowing in data, data deluge, data curation, not just archiving, bit preservation
What to throw away when it comes to data is more important than what to keep
Need to deal with code, too, deal with the tools developed to deal with the data
Beans as opposed to the grinder
OCR code > cleanup code > analysis code
Raw data / packaged data (dirty/clean metaphors)
Who does that work?
Zooniverse
oldWeather
NYPL What’s on the Menu?
Data science
John Rauser: A combination of engineering and applied math + writing/narrative
The ability to tell stories with data
Design skills and visualization is also important
What mechanism can be developed to enable the quasi-professional knowledge-making?
Flip Kromer: Epistemology of Big Data?
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery
“Screwmeneutics?” = open ended inquiry, browsing modes (rather than search modes / targeted modes)
Trust in different modes of producing knowledge (other than the dominant modes of epistemology)
Our means of dissemination are out of sync with the methods of scholarly production
What if we wrote scholarship like code?
Version Control
Tagged Release
Bug Tracking
Forking
Dangers: a world of perfect surveillance, how much auditing is appropriate?
Borges “The Map of the World”
Humanities: blogs :: Social Sciences : preprint :: Sciences : rapid publication
11:15 AM – 12:45 PM
Sessions C3 (Lightning Talks) – Rackham East Conference Room
From Zero to Sixty in Two Semesters: Establishing the Digital Humanities in Graduate Curricula
Holly Tucker
Graduate education, graduate mentoring, how are we going to find a place for DH graduate students
To help grad students build a DH understanding, a consistent and coherent web presence
The question of publicness / private
Ojibwe Language Classes at the University of Michigan: Culture, Preservation, and the Pedagogy of the Digital Age
Adam Kriesberg
Digital Literacy and Game–based Learning
Chris Leeder
James Paul Gee
TEDx Robert Torres, Games as Learning Systems
Quest to Learn school
Quest Atlantis, online learning environment
Fold-It
Cathy Davidson, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age”
“From presumed authority to collective credibility”
BiblioBouts
Telecollaboration 2.0 in Language Teacher Education – The Role of the Cross–Cultural Mediator
Shannon Bishop
Architectural Historians and Digital Humanities: Trailblazing for Scholarly Societies
Allison Benedetti
Recovering the Recovered Text: Digital Canon(s) and Lost Texts
Amy Earhart
No comments Log in or register to post comments