Posts from the ‘news’ Category
One of the first goals of the Critical Digital Humanities (CDH) collective has been to create a space for digital collaboration. This virtual space would provide a buffer between a fully completed work and a digital draft, allowing research and experimentation while allaying fears of creative failure. However, as so often occurs with the creation of space, the first step was one of defining limitations more so than possibilities.
For most members, privacy was the primary concern. The virtual space should shield digital creations in their nascent states from the wider audience of the Internet, for on the Web it is nearly impossible to differentiate a work-in-progress from a finalized project. Such a lack of finality, rather than a weakness of the Internet, is one of its most cherished attributes. Read more
Natalie Bookchin, "Mass Ornament," detail. Single channel HD-video installation. 2009.
The link below provides access to an article about the video/digital art work of Natalie Bookchin.
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/
The next link takes you to her website where you can view images and find links to videos of her installation works. There are also more articles and reviews pertinent to her work.
We will be discussing these articles and works at a workshop prior to Natalie’s visit where she will present on a panel with Alex Juhasz.
Scholar-activist Alex Juhasz, the lead force behind “Learning from Youtube,” and artist Natalie Bookchin, video and installation artist who recently has used youtube.com as a dynamic archive and display material in her work, will be presenting a collaborative talk on campus on November 1 2011. Stay tuned for the location.
The CDH has a new logo! However, it won’t last for long.
One of the most difficult tasks regarding web creation is encapsulating the look and feel of an entire website with a tiny square logo.
Some of these logos are as small as 16 X 16 pixels. Known as “favicons,” these 16X16 squares are the ones residing in the address bar of the web browser. In contrast, the icons for Apple’s touch interface on the iPhone and iPad are only slightly larger at 60 X 60 pixels.
A website’s header is also an important place for fostering a digital identity. While there is relatively more space within the top section of a website (perhaps as much as 250 X 900 pixels), there are always design limitations. Creating an image that is striking, but not obtrusive is difficult. A bright, eye-catching header can also take away from the impact of other content on the webpage.
With this in mind, the CDH’s new logo has been created as a starting point for further analysis–and further design. One of the workshops planned for this year is for each member of the CDH to create a new logo and header for the website. At the heart of this workshop will be the search for digital art. This is not necessarily art created through purely digital means, it’s more so art about the digital.
Workshop designs will not need to start in Adobe Photoshop, they can begin in whatever medium you wish. Feel free to paint, sketch, sculpt, or use whatever medium you feel best allows you to get at the art of the digital. At the workshop we can digitize these creations with cameras or scanners.
While most of the workshop creations can be fit into the confines of static pixels, those that cannot such as video or very large images, will still have a place on the website in the digital artwork portfolio.
Non-Textual Technologies
In the fall quarter CDH will consider the following questions about non-textual technologies. What have been the forms and effects of the digital essay since the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web? What are the critical potentials for digital essays that deploy textual, audiovisual, and interactive elements? How have scholars and activists turned social media sites such as YouTube to the interests of the critical essay? What constitutes a scholarly or critical use of music, digital video, animation, performance or social media such that an essayistic dimension comes to the foreground in an online setting? How does the inclusion of such elements extend or challenge the structural and analytical logics of the traditional academic essay?
Fan Cultures/Communities
For the winter quarter, the Critical Digital Humanities Research Collective will be examining the growing role of fandom and community in the production of digital media. The treatment of both traditional and aesthetic narratives surrounding popular media forms as communally owned and controlled is indicative within fan communities of a personal investment in those narratives that simultaneously relies upon and attempts to undermine the sanctity of “official narratives.”
The Digital Archive
Perhaps no other academic resource has seen greater reassessment in the digital age than archive and in the spring quarter we will look at how those changes are affecting scholarship. Jan-Christopher Horak, director of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, calls “the move to digitality…a paradigm shift of monstrous proportions.” For scholars, the need for the traditional archive has not ceased, while new methods of digitizing, storing and searching archives have changed the way we do academic work. They have also raised new questions about the methods and priorities of digital archiving, exemplified by the debate surrounding the Google Books project. This shift has also raised questions about the effects that the loss of materiality have on scholarship.
We’re happy to announce that CDH has been awarded a Mellon Workshop Grant for the coming academic year.
This grant will allow us to present invited speakers on research topics relevant to our interests.
We’re currently planning events and are hoping members will help us organize events for each quarter.
Get in touch about organizing events this year. We’ll be announcing upcoming events on the site.
Welcome to the new Critical Digital Humanities website.
Over the summer months we’ve worked to upgrade our presence on the Web. The CDH website has a new URL (http://cdh.ucr.edu), but we’ve also retained the old website for the time being.
