Victoria Szabo

My primary focus is on the critical and practical affordances of database-driven spatial media such as digital maps, games, exhibitions, and augmented reality for exploratory and narrative use in teaching, research, artistic expression, and public outreach. I'm especially interested in 'digital cities' and immersive experience design as they relate to digital heritage and the production of cultural memory. My current reserach projects focus on AR interventions in Durham, NC and Venice, Italy. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in media history, historical and cultural visualization, computational media, gender and digital culture, and digital humanities theory/practice. In addition to my current leadership roles at Duke, I am a past co-director of the FHI GreaterThanGames: Transmedia Applications, Virtual Worlds, and Digital Storytelling Lab. 

Outside of Duke I also actively involved in the Digital Arts community of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, where I have curated conference exhibitions on "Information Aesthetics" and "XYZN: Scale". I also collaborate on game-based new media art projects with the Psychasthenia Studio. I am a past member of the MLA Committee on Information Technology, and maintain an active interest in expanding scholarly practice within the humanities to include computational, collaborative, and outward-facing elements.

My previous work was as an Academic Technology Specialist and Manager at Stanford University, where I developed digital projects and systems for the humanities. At Stanford I also taught in the Introduction to the Humanities Program (IHUM) and participated in the Stanford Humanities Lab "Temporal Topographies: Berlin." I was also part of the iTunes U pilot project team with Apple. I have also worked 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, where I studied the "sensational authorship" of popular Victorian women writers, and worked on digital archives of medieval and Arthurian texts and images for the Robbins Library and TEAMS.