Posts from the ‘CFP’ Category
Call For Papers: Digital Geo-Humanities
Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers
Chicago, Ill. / April 21-25, 2015
Session Description:
The umbrella of the Digital Humanities has enabled the proliferation of a variety of sub-disciplines within: digital history, digital media studies, spatial humanities, distant reading, text mining, and information visualization being some of the more prominent. In each of these cases the real work happens when questions and sensibilities from a background in traditional humanities meet the power of computer processing. Geographers – through the practice of map making and spatial analysis – have been wielding digital, cartographic methods to address scientific as well as humanistic questions for a longer period than many of the disciplines that now comprise the Digital Humanities. However, because of the insights and advances made by those in the DH community, “doing digital geography” is gathering a new set of approaches, methods, questions, and possibilities to address human geographical issues beyond cartographic representation. While (interactive) cartography remains the most common way to express geographic thought digitally, other modes of communication (e.g. websites) and types of products (e.g. photographs) are becoming possible objects of concern as digital geography joins the broader discussion that DH has opened. Presentations of projects that offer examples of these new types of products, and papers that offer insight into the burgeoning sub-discipline of Digital Geo-Humanities are welcomed. Collectively, presentations in this session will seek common ground in defining a Digital Geo-Humanities, both as a tool and as a medium of communication for advancing geographical thought and practice. Presenters should be able to answer how the use of digital tools has generated new questions for human geography, or how it has addressed problems in novel ways.
If you are interested in presenting a paper, or a project demonstration in this session, please submit an abstract (no more than 250 words, including images if you like) to Nicholas Bauch <nbbauch@stanford.edu> by October 22, 2014.
Session Organizer:
Nicholas Bauch
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and the
Bill Lane Center for the American West
Stanford University
nbbauch@stanford.edu
CFP – Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities
August 19th, 2014
Steve Anderson
Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities
April 30 – May 2, 2015
University of California, Los Angeles
Keynote speaker: Kiri Miller
CFP deadline: September 15
Co-hosted by Echo: a music-centered journal and the Digital Humanities Working Group at UCLA
As both material artifacts and cultural processes, sound objects and musical media invoke the Einsteinian mantra, “nothing happens until something moves.” Music studies have dealt with this concept through the veins of teleology, codification, and rupture, while the Digital Humanities extends this challenge to forms of inertia old and new. This conference appeals to the curator who recognizes the creator in herself; the writer who transitions from word processor to image processing; the composer as user-experience designer; the archaeologist turned 3D installation artist; the scholar as performer.
Grown from a tree with many branches, the landscape of the Digital Humanities has evolved into a transdisciplinary network that has tackled topics ranging from the curation of “radiant” texts and the interrogation of multimedia modes of argumentation, to the 3D modeling of historical space and the large-scale mapping of cultural data. Yet the soundscape of the Digital Humanities remains rather quiet, as scholar-practitioners and digital pedagogues have yet to embrace fully the ways in which sound and music can enhance the multimodal forms of teaching and research that the field has championed thus far.
This conference welcomes submissions on a broad range of topics related to sound, music, and multimedia. We are particularly interested in alternative format presentations, including workshops, lecture-demonstrations, roundtable discussions, performances, and other collaborative activities. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Sounding texts and the textuality of sound: manuscripts, notation, software, and code for sound design, curation, and production
- Soundscapes and virtual worlds in architecture, archaeology, and beyond
- Open source, copyright, and the politics of information architecture
- Digital pedagogy: technology in the classroom; problems and approaches
- Analog(ue): histories of sound and music within and without the digital
- Theory and practice in production cultures, from musical performance to multimedia composition and editing
- Visualization and sonification: listening through “big data”
- Sonic warfare and digital ethics: surveillance, torture, noise, and silence
- Musical networks, old and new
- Sound play, games, and the ludohumanities
- GIS, locative media, and musical geographies
Please send 300-word proposals via Word document [last name_first name.docx] to inertiaconference@gmail.com by 15 September 2014. Along with your name, affiliation, and email address, indicate any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=213785
RECONSTRUCTION:
Studies in Contemporary Culture,
[http://reconstruction.eserver.org/]
Volume 16.1 (2016)
ARCHIVES ON FIRE:
Artifacts & Works, Communities & Fields
Archives today are on fire–energized and endangered, mobile and mutable, ubiquitous and unique–as the library’s form and function in society undergo significant changes. Digital tools, open-access platforms, and social networks are transforming the fields of artistic creation, research, and knowledge production, sparking new interest in hand-made artifacts and ephemera, visual and audio cultures, manuscripts and printed texts, micro-histories and intentional communities. Dynamic channels for communication and production become possible within and across the disciplines. Hybrid forms of discourse challenge aesthetic, generic, and methodological standards, reconfiguring frameworks for authorship and audience, content and copyright, personae and politics within and beyond academia. Archives are vital forces of and for change.
This volume of RECONSTRUCTION, guest-edited by W. Scott Howard (University of Denver), invites proposals for articles, essays, and hybrid works addressing a range of creative and critical engagements, including, for example: archives, curation & museum studies; book arts, typography & design; collection development & access; crowdsourcing & DIY research; documentary poetics; emergent digital practices; game studies; image & text studies; information ethics & hacktivism; interdisciplinary & multimodal studies; literary & cultural studies; small press & open-access publishing; trans-discursive critical theory.
Proposals (November 30, 2014 deadline): send 300-word abstract and 2-page CV to showard[at]du.edu
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes three Themed Issues and one Open Issue per year.
Send Open Issue submissions (year round) to: reconstruction.submissions_at_gmail.com and submissions for Themed Issues to the appropriate editors listed on the site at www.reconstruction.eserver.org
Reconstruction also accepts proposal for special issue editors and topics. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
Art Historians of Southern California: http://www.arthistsocal.org/
The tele-electronic digital world is transforming the ways we teach, the types of research we pursue, the subjects we teach about, the methodologies we employ, as well as how we archive and preserve. The Getty has pledge to spend millions on digital tools and USC used its 1.9 million Mellon Grant for Digital Humanities to announce a larger pledge for the University to spend a billion in the next ten years on digital knowledge and informatics. Institutional leverage and enticement with monetary support is sure to create disruption and change for academics. What does this mean for scholars and professionals and how is it going to affect our disciplines? The College Art Association published their Samuel Kress Foundation study on Changing Research in Art History in their May 7th newsletter which highlighted the need for academics of visual culture to respond to the changing needs of the discipline.
This symposium seeks submissions which engage and theorize the ways the study of art history and visual culture are changing and the ways scholars are adapting and innovating to meet these new challenges and opportunities. We encourage inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary and uni-disciplinary approaches. Diverse topics are welcome and we imagine receiving proposals on: digital pedagogy, archival practices, digital humanities, database as research, visual scholarship, virtual humanities, digital/virtual/database art among others.
250 Word abstracts should be submitted to meyer_walter@smc.edu & arthistsocal@gmail.com by August 15th. Participants will be notified by September 1st.
The conference will take place on Saturday, October 18th at Santa Monica College. Lev Manovich, pioneer in theorizing cultural analytics and new media history, will be the keynote speaker.
A conference sponsored by The Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures
May 15-16, 2014 at the University of California, Davis
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2014
Send submissions to algorithmiclife@gmail.com
As algorithms permeate our lived experience, the boundaries and
borderlands of what can and cannot be adapted, translated, or
incorporated into algorithmic thinking become a space of contention.
The principle of the algorithm, or the specification of the potential
space of action, creates the notion of a universal mode of
specification of all life, leading to discourses on empowerment,
efficiency, openness, and inclusivity. But algorithms are ultimately
only able to make intelligible and valuable that which can be
discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and
gamified, and this limited domain makes algorithms necessarily
exclusive.
Algorithms increasingly shape our world, our thought, our economy, our
political life, and our bodies. The algorithmic response of NSA
networks to threatening network activity increasingly brings privacy
and political surveillance under algorithmic control. At least 30% of
stock trading is now algorithmic and automatic, having already lead to
several otherwise inexplicable collapses and booms. Devices such as
the Fitbit and the NikeFuel suggest that the body is incomplete
without a technological supplement, treating ‘health’ as a
quantifiable output dependent on quantifiable inputs. The logic of
gamification, which finds increasing traction in educational and
pedagogical contexts, asserts that the world is not only renderable as
winnable or losable, but is in fact better–i.e. more effective–this
way. The increased proliferation of how-to guides, from HGTV and DIY
television to the LifeHack website, demonstrate a growing demand for
approaching tasks with discrete algorithmic instructions.
This conference seeks to explore both the specific uses of algorithms
and algorithmic culture more broadly, including topics such as:
gamification, the computational self, data mining and visualization,
the politics of algorithms, surveillance, mobile and locative
technology, and games for health. While virtually any discipline could
have something productive to say about the matter, we are especially
seeking contributions from software studies, critical code studies,
performance studies, cultural and media studies, anthropology, the
humanities, and social sciences, as well as visual art, music, sound
studies and performance. Proposals for experimental/hybrid
performance-papers and multimedia artworks are especially welcome.
Areas open for exploration include but are not limited to: daily life
in algorithmic culture; gamification of education, health, politics,
arts, and other social arenas; the life and death of big data and data
visualization; identity politics and the quantification of selves,
bodies, and populations; algorithm and affect; visual culture of
algorithms; algorithmic materiality; governance, regulation, and
ethics of algorithms, procedures, and protocols; algorithmic
imaginaries in fiction, film, video games, and other media;
algorithmic culture and (dis)ability; habit and addiction as
biological algorithms; the unrule-able/unruly in the (post)digital
age; limits and possibilities of emergence; algorithmic and
proto-algorithmic compositional methods (e.g., serialism, Baroque
fugue); algorithms and (il)legibility; and the unalgorithmic.
For more information, especially on updates regarding featured keynote
speakers and performers, check out the conference website at:
algorithmiclife.ucdavis.edu
Please send proposals to algorithmiclife@gmail.com by March 1, 2014.
Call for papers: Papers are invited for a special issue entitled “New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture.” Ed. Maya Zalbidea Paniagua (Universidad La Salle Madrid), Mark Marino (University of Southern California), and Asunción López Varela-Azcárate (Universidad Complutense Madrid). CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014):http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/
by Ian Ross
The pedagogical implementations of digital technology have been widely hailed, but are frequently implemented in the form of making traditional pedagogical procedures more conveniently accessible (online classrooms, digital office hours, etc.). However, there is a largely ignored degree to which digital production by students is helpful to composition, comprehension, and critical thinking in the classroom. Unfortunately, the primary roadblock to pedagogical digital production in curriculum centering around this production is the inaccessibility of coding as a means of that writing. However, if this process can be made more accessible, the constructed nature of binary code, as well as its inability to work with logical fallacy, has the potential to illustrate much clearer narratological and argumentative skills to novice writers.
In an attempt to work around this problem, I have enacted a classroom project based around the free and universally available program Inform7, an interactive text based video game production space designed to use English language “coding” to create digital spaces with which the audience can interact. The first attempt at this project involved individual students building games using a peer produced message board for guidance, produced limited results, and ended with most students circulating around an “expert” with previous experience. However, the second attempt was designed as a group project and guided by a greater amount of classroom instruction. Students in groups of four posted their games along with the code, and were asked to play the games designed by the three other groups before looking at the code that Inform7 translated into gameplay.
This structure created an identifiable divide between author and audience, and allowed for a direct discussion of narrative production, symbol, icon, and metaphor. The program uses binary logic (i.e. one thing cannot be two things) within an English language code to produce games. Giving “objects” (which are defined by description, portability, and/or their ability to contain other objects) names helped students understand the arbitrary nature of language and concepts like simulacra. For instance, a container is given size by the decoding audience: there is no difference between a “wallet” and a “bucket” unless the programmer provides a difference. Using language to define meaning, and illustrating the degree to which this takes place in everyday life is a central benefit to this project.
Putting the student in the position of the creator allows the student to more clearly understand how creation takes place as well. In my second attempt with this project, students worked around coding limitations in ways that were not apparent to their intended audience when playing. One group built a door called “the laptop”, locked it with “the flashdrive” and then named each attached room a different URL address. This created a user experience of interacting with a spatially static computer, while the translating program understood what was happening as geographical movement and location. Once students outside of the group both looked at the code designed to create this world and had played the game itself, they began to comprehend the degree to which
narrative can potentially step outside of perceived media limitations. Additionally, students who either built or played this specific game were then able to more clearly engage in close reading and authorship when they were confronted with the digital illusion of reality, as well as understand the benefits and meaning production of metaphor.
These were only a few of the ways integrating this process into classroom activity allowed for a deeper and more apparent discussion of the abilities one has access to as a writer as well as the methods of readership which take place invisibly around various socially constructed symbols. Allowing for programs like Inform7, and for the creation of more specialized programming in the classroom like it, is the first important step to bridging the digital divide in a way that will provide students with clear pedagogical connections to necessary comprehension and critical thinking skills.
For those curious, the links to Inform7 (the program used to build these games) and Frotz (the program used to play them) are below. Think of Inform7 as the software (i.e. videogame disc) and Frotz as the hardware (Console system) if the process seems confusing:
CFP: “New Media and Surveillance” Teaching Media Quarterly 2(1): 2013
September 30th, 2013
April Durham
Call for Proposals:
In recent years, there has been a continued proliferation of social media platforms (like Facebook and Twitter), recording and video-streaming devices (like TiVo and Apple TV), and online “deal-of-the-day” services (like Groupon and Living Social). As individuals participate in these platforms and services, we open ourselves up to new forms of surveillance and monitoring, not only by state authorities but also by private marketers. A whole new industry of social media analysis has been created that aims to perfect algorithms in order to turn personal user data into profit. While some may welcome “customized advertising,” the data mining processes that have emerged over the past few years have far-reaching implications for our everyday lives. Teaching Media Quarterly is seeking materials that critically explore the relationship between surveillance and new media.
Potential topics engaging with new media surveillance might include, but are not limited to, assignments and lessons that address any of the following:
– political economy of social media platforms
– data mining, collection, storage, and the use of this data by a range of actors
– use of social media by law enforcement agencies
– customized/targeted advertising
– tracking software/cookies that monitor consumer behavior/patterns
– critical interrogations of consumer power and new media
– user/student perspectives on data mining and privacy issues
– social classification and discrimination through data mining
– ethics of data mining
– policy and regulation of data mining
Teaching Media Quarterly Submission Guidelines & Review Policy
Teaching Media Quarterly seeks innovative assignments and lessons that can be used to critically engage with “new media and surveillance” in the undergraduate classroom. All submissions must include: 1) a title, 2) an overview and comprehensive rationale (250-500 words), 3) a detailed lesson plan or assignment instructions, 4) teaching materials (handouts, rubrics, discussion prompts, viewing guides, etc.), 5) a full bibliography of readings, links, and/or media examples, and 6) a short biography (100-150).
Please email all submissions in ONE Microsoft Word document to teachingmedia.contact@gmail.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 31, 2013
Submissions will be reviewed by each member of the editorial board. Editors will make acceptance decisions based on their vision for the issue and an assessment of contributions. It is the goal of Teaching Media Quarterly to notify submitters of the editors’ decisions within two weeks of submission receipt.
Teaching Media Quarterly is dedicated to circulating practical and timely approaches to media concepts and topics from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Our goal is to promote collaborative exchange of undergraduate teaching resources between media educators at higher education institutions. As we hope for continuing discussions and exchange as well as contributions to Teaching Media Quarterly we encourage you to visit our website athttp://www.teachingmedia.org/
Call for Papers: The European Journal of Cultural Studies
Special issue on Data Mining / Analytics
Editors: Mark Andrejevic, University of Queensland, Australia; Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario, Canada; Helen Kennedy, University of Leeds, UK.
The widespread use of social media has given rise to new forms of monitoring, mining and aggregation strategies designed to monetize the huge volumes of data such usage produces. Social media monitoring and analysis industries, experts and consultancies have emerged offering a broad range of social media intelligence and reputation management services. Such services typically involve a range of analytical methods (sentiment analysis, opinion mining, social network analysis, machine learning, natural language processing), often offered in black-boxed proprietary form, in order to gain insights into public opinion, mood, networks and relationships and identify potential word-of-mouth influencers. Ostensibly, these various forms of data mining, analytics and machine learning also are paving the way for the development of a more intelligent or ‘semantic’ Web 3.0, offering a more ‘productive and intuitive’ user experience. As commercial and non-commercial organisations alike seek to monitor, influence, manage and direct social media conversations, and as global usage of social media expands, questions surface that challenge celebratory accounts of the democratizing, participatory possibilities of social media. Remembering that Web 2.0 was always intended as a business manifesto – O’Reilly’s early maxims included, after all, ‘data is the next Intel inside’, ‘users add value’ and ‘collaboration as data collection’ – we need to interrogate social media not only as communication tools, but also as techno-economic constructs with important implications for the management of populations and the formation of subjects. Data mining and analytics are about much more than targeted advertising: they envision new strategies for forecasting, targeting, and decision making in a growing range of social realms (employment, education, health care, policing, urban planning, epidemiology, etc.) with the potential to usher in new, unaccountable, and opaque forms of discrimination, sorting, inclusion and exclusion. As Web 3.0 and the ‘big data’ it generates moves inexorably toward predictive analytics and the overt technocratic management of human sociality, urgent questions arise about how such data are gathered, constructed and sold, to what ends they are deployed, who gets access to them, and how their analysis is regulated (boyd and Crawford 2012).
This special issue aims to bring together scholars who interrogate social media intelligence work undertaken in the name of big data, big business and big government. It aims to draw together empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed analyses of the key issues in contemporary forms of data mining and analytics from across disparate fields and methodologies. . Contributions are invited that address a range of related issues. Areas for consideration could include, but are not limited to:
• Political economy of social media platforms
• Algorithmic culture
• User perspectives on data mining
• The politics of data visualisation
• Big data and the cultural industries
• Data journalism
• The social life of big data methods
• Inequalities and exclusions in data mining
• Affective prediction and control
• Data mining and new subjectivities
• Ethics, regulation and data mining
• Conceptualising big/data/mining
• Social media intelligence at work
• Social media and surveillance
• Critical histories of data mining, sorting, and surveillance.
Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 500-700 words to the issue editors by 9th December 2013 (to h.kennedy@leeds.ac.uk). Full articles should be submitted to Helen Kennedy (h.kennedy@leeds.ac.uk) by 12th May 2014. Manuscripts must be no longer than 7,000 words. Articles should meet with The European Journal of Cultural Studies’ aim to promote empirically based, theoretically informed cultural studies; essayist discussion papers are not normally accepted by this journal. All articles will be refereed: invitation to submit a paper to the special issue in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; this is dependent on the review process.
CFP :Computer Culture area 35th Annual Southwest Popular / American Culture Association Conference
August 18th, 2013
April Durham
Computer Culture area
35th Annual Southwest Popular / American Culture Association Conference
February 19-22, 2014
Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque, NM
We are accepting papers and forming panels for the area of Computer Culture, as one of the many areas within the 35th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA).
The conference was formerly named the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association (SW/TX PCA/ACA).
Computer is broadly defined as any computational device, whether smartphone or abacus, and any form of information technology, including the origins of concepts of interactive text which may predate computational devices as traditionally conceived.
Culture is rooted in the concept of cultural meaning. We ask not just operational questions such as, “How do people communicate using computers?” but questions of meaning such as, “What does it mean when people communicate using computers instead of using pre-computer approaches to communication?”
“Computer Culture” can be understood in a variety of ways:
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the culture of the computer, that is, as computers interact with each other, what culture do they have of their own?
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the culture around the computer, that is, (sub)cultures associated with the production, maintenance, use, and destruction of computers
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the culture through the computer, that is, explicit treatment of how computer mediation influences cultural phenomena that exist or has existed in forms that did not involve computer mediation, and what these influences mean
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the culture by the computer, that is, the ways in which new (sub)cultures or (sub)cultural phenomena have arisen because of computers and understandings of these given awareness of the nature and/or workings of computers
Example questions associated with Computer Culture would include, but not be limited to:
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What implications are there because of the powerfulness of (computer/information) technology ___ and are these implications beneficial, detrimental, inevitable, or avoidable?
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What are the cultural origins of computers, computer/information technologies, and practices (such as ____) associated with them? What is the descriptive and prescriptive outlook for the conditions of those cultural forces associated with those cultural origins?
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How do cultural forces (such as changes from one generation to the next, trends in education or society, or other cultural phenomena) impact (and are impacted by) computer/information technologies/market-forces, and what do these impacts (in either direction or both) mean?
Paper topics might include (but are not limited to) those that address:
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issues of (re)presentation through computers (Web site analysis and design),
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methods of discourse involving computers (blogging, Twitter, social networks, viral video, live feeds),
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theories focused on the relationship between computers and culture,
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uses of computers in particular contexts and the impacts thereof (computers and pedagogy, online literary journals),
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the relationship between computers and cultural forces (such as news, politics, and terrorism),
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security/privacy/fraud and computers (online security issues, spam, scams, and hoaxes),
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and others.
While we will consider any relevant paper, we have a preference for those that involve transferable methodological approaches. This is an interdisciplinary conference, and other conference attendees would benefit from being able to adapt your research methods to their future research.
Scholars, teachers, professionals, artists, and others interested in computer culture are encouraged to participate.
Graduate students are also particularly welcome with award opportunities for the best graduate papers. More information about awards can be found at
http://southwestpca.org/
Specifically, we would like to highlight the following award opportunities:
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The “Computer Culture and Game Studies Award”
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The “Heldrich-Dvorak Travel Fellowships”
Given how papers may often fall into multiple categories, there may be other award opportunities listed athttp://southwestpca.org/
If you wish to form your own panel, we would be glad to facilitate your needs.
This conference is a presentation opportunity. For a publication opportunity, we encourage you to consider submitting your paper to the Southwest PCA/ACA’s new journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at
http://journaldialogue.org/
Please pass along this call to friends and colleagues.
For consideration, submit 100-200 word abstracts and proposals for panels before
Friday, November 1, 2013
to the conference’s electronic submission system which can be found at:
http://conference2014.
If you have any questions, contact the Computer Culture area co-chairs,
Andrew Chen (andrewsw@gmail.com) and Joseph Chaney (jchaney@iusb.edu).
