Victoria Szabo

My primary focus is on the critical and practical affordances of data and archives-driven spatial media. My interests include digital maps, games, exhibitions, and augmented reality and their uses for teaching, research, artistic expression, and public outreach. I'm especially interested in expanding access to research and interpretative material in context and on-site, and in dialogue with lived experience of spaces, places, and objects and in partnership with relevant communities. Current projects include NC Jukebox, Digital Durham, Visualizing Venice, and the Psychasthenia Studio art-game series. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in media history, historical and cultural visualization, computational media, gender and digital culture, and digital humanities theory/practice.  

I'm also very interested in the futures of libraries and of collaborative and lab-based scholarly practices in the humanities. As Director of Graduate Studies for our MA and PhD in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures I also coordinate our interdisciplinary media arts labs community in the historic Smith Warehouse and participate in the ISS and Wired Labs. I am currently PI on two DH Institutes running in 2018-19 and sponsored by our lab community and partners: Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D Geospatial Networks, supported by the Getty Foundation (#DAHVenice2018), and Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities (VARDHI) supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am also a past co-director of the FHI GreaterThanGames: Transmedia Applications, Virtual Worlds, and Digital Storytelling Lab and am currently working on a new multidisciplinary games-based initiative at Duke, which is set to launch in 2019.

Outside of Duke I am the current Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) Digital Arts Community. Before coming to Duke, I worked as an Academic Technology Specialist and Manager at Stanford University and as an Instructional Multimedia Specialist at Grinnell College. I have a PhD in English and Certificate in Gender and Women's Studies from the University of Rochester.