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Resources as a post category

April 20th, 2012

Steve Anderson

Rather than have a standalone page for resources, I thought we could use “resources” as a post category. This will help keep the info that was previously listed (posted below), and it will allow for more dynamic content. Rather than having to edit a page, members can just add a new post using the “resources” category. I’ll also make “resources” a dropdown item under “News” in the main navigation.

Here’s the listing of initial resources:

Websites & Organizations

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Advances Collaboratory)
http://www.hastac.org/

ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations)
http://digitalhumanities.org/

Society for Cinema and Media Studies
http://www.cmstudies.org/

The American Studies Association
http://www.theasa.net/

Association of Internet Researchers
http://aoir.org/

DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association)
http://www.digra.org/

Rhizome
http://rhizome.org/

H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online)
http://www.h-net.org/

TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml

ACH (Association for Computers and the Humanities)
http://www.ach.org/

A Few Journals

Covergence
http://con.sagepub.com/

Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ)
http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/

Game Studies
http://gamestudies.org/1001

Games and Culture
http://gac.sagepub.com/

New Media & Society
http://nms.sagepub.com/

Vectors
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/

Historical GIS: David Del Testa

April 11th, 2012

Steve Anderson

Historical GIS and Observations on the Nghe-Tinh Rebellion: Markets, Rice, and Religion

Thurs Apr 19,  12-2 PM
UCR History Department Library | HMNSS 1303

The Nghe-Tinh Soviets of 1930-1931, a rebellion against colonial authority in north-central Vietnam, have received extensive historical analysis but little in terms of geography and spatial relations. Dr. Del Testa uses a historical GIS (geographical information system), blending statistics with digitized maps, to examine correlations between wealth, religion and space to reexamine the Nghe-Tinh Soviets movement on a broader scale. This particular presentation focuses on some preliminary analysis of relationships between protest locations and such factors as proximity to markets, types of rice produced, and the relationship of religious affiliation to revolt.

PDF of the event flier

Sounding it Out with Tanya Clement

March 30th, 2012

Steve Anderson

The Center for Ideas and Society Mellon Workshop

Critical Digital Humanities Research Group

Presents

Sounding it Out: Modeling Aurality for Large-Scale Text Collection Analysis

Wednesday, April 4th           4:30-6:00 PM               HMNSS 1500

 

Dr. Tanya Clement is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in English Literature and Language and an MFA in fiction. Her primary area of research is the role of scholarly information infrastructure as it impacts academic research libraries and digital collections, research tools and (re)sources in the context of future applications, humanities informatics, and humanities data curation. Her research is informed by theories of knowledge representation, information theory, mark-up theory, social text theory, and theories of information visualization. She has published pieces on digital humanities and digital literacies in several books and on digital scholarly editing, text mining and modernist literature in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Workshops in the Humanities. For more information on the event or any other event, please visit the website at ideasandsociety.ucr.edu

 

Tanya Clement event flier (PDF)

 

Values in Design Workshop : March 30 Deadline

March 16th, 2012

April Durham

I heard about this summer workshop that might interest some of us. It’s at UC Irvine and includes travel, lodging, and food costs for the week.

Values in Design Workshop – August 19-26, 2012

Take part in an intensive one-week workshop on values in the design of information systems and technology. Doctoral students at any stage from a variety of disciplines are invited to attend, including – but not restricted to – informatics, computer science, science studies, design, visual arts, and social entrepreneurship. Travel, food, and lodging will be covered, though accepted participants are encouraged to seek support from their home institutions.

The workshop will be restricted to twenty (20) students. Mornings will be devoted to discussing a judicious mix of readings and exercises from the ­fields above, led by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Judith Gregory, and Cory Knobel. In the afternoons, students will work in interdisciplinary groups to produce a project plan incorporating strong social values into information systems and technology, with guest lectures from thought leaders such as Paul Dourish, Helen Nissenbaum, and Carl DiSalvo throughout the week. The workshop will close with project presentations to a panel of academics and entrepreneurs. We will offer support and rewards for projects that continue on to working prototypes and project launch.

Send applications by March 30, 2012 to vid@ics.uci.edu, including a CV, one letter of recommendation, and a two-page description of your interest. Decisions will be made by April 15, 2012.

Huntington Event: Astronomy from Analog to Digital

March 16th, 2012

Steve Anderson

THE HUNTINGTON: LIBRARY, ART COLLECTIONS, AND BOTANICAL GARDEN

Dibner Lecture

“When the Telescope Met the Computer:

The Changing Nature of Doing Modern Astronomy” by W. Patrick McCray

Between the dedication of the 200” Hale Telescope in 1948 and the completion of today’s 10 meter behemoths, new electronic technologies have transformed astronomy’s most iconic symbol—the telescope itself.

W. Patrick McCray, professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Caltech and the Huntington, explores how the “computerization” of astronomy affected how scientists did research as their views of the night sky shifted from analog to digital.

March 27, 2012

7:30 p.m., Friends’ Hall

Free. No reservations required.

Critical Art and the Digital Humanities

March 1st, 2012

Richard Hunt

Bookchin&Juhasz

(This is a re-post from the UC Humanities Forum)

“[I]t’s important to remember that IT has not altered the fundamental mission of the humanities: to preserve, monitor, investigate, and rethink our cultural inheritance, including the various material means by which it has been embodied and transmitted.”—Jerome McGann

 

Like many humanities scholars, I received, not too long ago, a copy of MLA’s Profession 2011, which has a fairly extensive section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship,” and from which I’ve borrowed the above epigraph. Around that same time, I attended an excellent event hosted by UCR’s Critical Digital Humanities research group (and sponsored by The Center for Ideas and Society, with funding through the Andrew W. Mellon Workshops in the Humanities, many thanks). So, in keeping with the idea of “the future of the humanities,” I want to review the event, here, within the digital humanities framework for which McGann’s quote argues. Read more

How to “introduce” the Digital Humanities

February 23rd, 2012

Steve Anderson

Ryan Cordell’s post, “DH, Interdisciplinarity, and Curricular Incursion,” has been receiving some traffic on Twitter lately among the digital humanities crowd, and for good reason. Cordell shared his experience of trying to introduce an “Intro to DH” course at a liberal arts college. The course was initially rejected, but more for language and approach than content.

What, after all, would be a DH introduction course? The term “digital humanities” is itself problematic, as I’ve written about recently. On the one hand, the amorphous qualities of DH point to inclusion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and real-world digital skills. On the other hand, however, lacking a solid foundation in a single discipline is a problem that can foster anxiety and confusion – what many DH’ers see as inclusiveness can also be seen as digital inside-baseball.

What I admire in Cordell’s post is his awareness of limits. Cordell surely appreciates the benefits of the digital humanities, but he also understands and appreciates the confusion and consternation surrounding DH. Cordell sees the need for an anchor, that DH must be rooted somewhere:

I use the term interdisciplinary with a strikethrough not to disavow the cross-field collaborations that underlie and energize digital humanities work, but to highlight the idea that interdisciplinary work, by definition, requires collaborators from distinct disciplines.

I plan on including that last phrase, “requires collaborators from distinct disciplines” in my definition of the digital humanities from this point forward.

 

Media, Self, and Relationships with Patricia Greenfield

February 22nd, 2012

Steve Anderson

The Center for Ideas and Society Mellon Workshop

Critical Digital Humanities Research Group

Presents

Media, Self, and Relationships

With Patricia Greenfield

   Wednesday, February 22,           3:00-5:00 PM               INTS 1113

 

Patricia Greenfield, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and Director of the Children’s Digital Media Center@Los Angeles, is author of Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers (1984), subsequently translated into nine languages; coeditor of Effects of Interactive Entertainment Technologies on Development (1994); coeditor of Children, Adolescents, and the Internet: A New Field of Inquiry in Developmental Psychology (2006); and coeditor of Social Networking on the Internet: Developmental Implications (2008). Her empirical research on the developmental implications of interactive media has included action video games, massive multiplayer online role-playing games, teen chat rooms, and social networking sites.

 

Greenfield has held residential fellowships at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience in Santa Fe. She is a recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Behavioral Science Research. In 2010 she received the Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society from the American Psychological Association.

 

Stereocollision by Ethan Turpin

Project
dryhanger-72black

Ethan Turpin’s newest solo exhibition, Stereocollision will be on display at the California Museum of Photography from January 14, 2012 – April 14, 2012. I attended the opening reception on February 18th and was struck by how the exhibit was asking viewers to think critically about how we see and engage with images.

Turpin worked with the museum’s Keystone-Mast collection of historic stereoscopic images (late 19th and early 20th c. precursors to the 3-D image) and digitally reworked them to reflect very 21st century concerns about globalization, environmental damage, and the consequences of industrialization. In one image he combined a historical birds-eye view of Manhattan and inserted an isolated mountaintop castle into the cityscape. While some of the images made it easy to see the manipulation of the photos, others, such as the cityscape photo, were disconcerting in their believability and this believability forces the viewer to question how images, particularly images presented as “historic,” are read.

Turpin is very overtly playing with the “truth value” that we invest in photographs. He writes, “We are at a time in history when the photograph is easily manipulated while retaining its authority and false promise of truth.  Given that our culture is increasingly visual in its languages, there is a wealth of ways to reflect one’s society by engaging its images.” Most of the images must be viewed through special glasses held to the eyes in order to combine the two images into a single perspective and this duality of reading can prove frustrating because you often have to position yourself at exactly the right height and distance from the photograph in order to create the full 3-D effect. This maneuvering requires work on the part of the viewer and asks you to think about what you are possibly not seeing when you look at the images. You first encounter them side-by-side on a stereo card and you have an idea about the image, but you can’t fully understand it until you see it through the provided glasses. In this way, the images refuse any easy “reading” by requiring the viewer to participate in the process of creation. This reflexive process makes you aware of what you allow yourself to “see” when you look at a photograph.

The exhibit also brings issues of technology to the forefront in both the artistic process and the experience of viewing the stereocards. While the images are very obviously presented as historical, they are also very knowingly brought into conversation with the current 3-D film phenomenon. The exhibit brings to mind the adage, “No media is new media,” and plays very knowingly with our visual vocabulary that has been informed by the recent resurgence of 3-D films. Turpin has anticipated this familiarity and subverts it through his use of the “historical.” By layering historical images, the shock is not the creation of three-dimensional depth, but in thinking through what depth actually means. In one image Turpin layers the surface image of an Arctic crevasse over an image of an industrial steel structure, making it appear as if the steel I-beams were holding up the vast expanses of ice and snow. This image seems to comment directly on the environmental concerns present throughout the exhibit, but it also seems to me to speak to our conception of technology; what we often perceive as natural or untouched is very often undergirded by a deliberate and manipulated structure that determines how and what we see. When dealing with images, we must be concerned with what we perceive to be the surface because there is often a world beneath the surface that, although invisible, has as much to do with our act of seeing as does the visible.

The exhibit is wonderful on its own, but it also creates a really interesting dialogue with the CMP’s other current exhibit dealing with more contemporary images: RENDER. You still have almost two months to view the exhibit and no matter your historical interests, the exhibit speaks powerfully to the concerns of all scholars of digital humanities.

Ethan Turpin’s website can be found at: http://www.ethanturpin.com/

CMP’s website can be found at: http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/

Render Exhibit at California Museum of Photography

Project
Render

RENDER: New Construction in Video Art

February 4-April 14

California Museum of Photography

http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/

RENDER: New Construction in Video Art explores the physical and phenomenological processed of video in contemporary art. It examines the intermingling of the materiality of technology and video in which artists use pixels and particle units from film to produce a new layer of mediated work. Used in computer editing programs, “rendering” is a required process to generate and solidify special effects and transitions. Consequently, the works in the exhibition apply artistic uses of translating visual data from analog to the digital, and vice versa.