The goal of the Conversations in Digital Humanities speaker series is to engage Cornell's scholars and practitioners whose projects explore the intersections of advanced digital technology and cultural understanding. It targets a broad community of interest at Cornell that reaches across disciplinary and institutional lines. The series includes speakers whose research and practice break new ground in understanding how new media and digital methodologies are changing the landscape of research, teaching, learning, creative expression, and cultural experience.
The series is co-sponsored by the Cornell University Library's Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services, Olin and Uris Libraries, The Society for the Humanities, and The Central New York Humanities Corridor, with additional support from the Cornell Department of Architecture and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We invite proposals for inviting speakers to engage our community in discussions such as:
- Analyzing the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture and its impact on society
- Practicing integrative approaches that acknowledge the increasingly hybrid nature of our environments, blending new with old.
- Developing innovative uses of technology for public programming, publication, and education
- Creating new multimodal and interactive artworks, interfaces, or other digital "texts"
- Designing and developing new digital tools for creating, preserving, analyzing, and providing access to digital resources
- Creatively engaging with "big data"
- Incorporating digital tools and collaborative learning methods into teaching and pedagogy
- Expanding the possibilities of new digital modes of publication that facilitate the dissemination of humanities scholarship
- Exploring issues related to information sustainability, permanence, copyright, and authenticity
POSTER: Conversations2013.pdf
2013 Spring Schedule
March 4 - Ben Fino-Radin
Digital Conservator, Rhizome ArtBase: http://rhizome.org/
"Conservation in Collections of Born-Digital Contemporary Art"
4:30 pm, Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
Fino-Radin will be joined in discussion by internationally-recognized media art curators Richard Rinehart, Director, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, and Timothy Murray, Curator of Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and Director of the Society for the Humanities. This talk is supported in part by a digital preservation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
March 26 - Shannon Mattern
School of Media Studies, The New School, NY http://www.wordsinspace.net
"Infrastructural Intelligence: Thinking About and Through Layered Infrastructures"
4:30 pm, 106 Olin Library
A technical infrastructure is simultaneously a conduit for, and an embodiment of, an intellectual infrastructure: an epistemology, a way of solving problems, and a means of concretizing and spatializing answers to those problems. In this talk I'll address how my students and I have been exploring these interlocking infrastructures by creating new infrastructures for scholarly inquiry -- and how I've "wired" these pedagogical experiments into my own scholarship on media infrastructures. Over the years we've constructed interactive "deep" maps; exhibitions, both online an on-site; and multimedia publications to visualize, sonify, spatialize, and inhabit various infrastructures, ranging from pneumatic tube mail-delivery systems, to archival processing protocols, to the geographies of resource acquisition, manufacture, and distribution that generate our consumer technologies. I'll discuss how a few of my courses "scaffold" our exploration of these topics, and how this teaching generates new infrastructural intelligence for my own work.
April 2 - Yanni Loukissas
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/people/yanni-loukissas.html
"Drawing Data Work"
12:30 pm, Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, astronauts on-board the Apollo 11 lunar module, narrowly completed the first moon landing in the wake of a series of disruptive alarms from their digital guidance computer. We now know that these program alarms were inconsequential. However, the burden of monitoring and interpreting those data distracted the team at critical moments, nearly forcing them to abort the mission or risk a fatal crash. This early event in the development of human-computer relationships foreshadowed widespread public concerns about the integration of digital computing into everyday work.
Since Apollo, issues of distraction, authority, and trust have troubled digital interactions with data. Surgeons struggle with increasing demands on their attention; indeed, they must monitor data in proliferating digital forms while simultaneously executing complex manual tasks and managing an ad hoc team. Architects quarrel over what constitutes an adequate digital model and who has the skills, creative sensibilities, and access to data necessary to construct it. Curators of material collections including libraries, archives, museums and arboreta fear a transformation
or loss of knowledge through digitization. I seek to understand and aid such workers as they endeavor to merge, modify or replace older virtues and norms with the values of an emerging digital culture.
This talk addresses the question of how to study work in the technological moment. Using the historical example of the Apollo 11 landing, I will demonstrate how I have used data visualization as a form of inquiry into the micro-physics of human-computer relationships. My presentation will address a number of issues, including how to integrate qualitative and quantitative sources, animate data through graphics, and allow for multiple interpretations to adhere. This research contributes to a timely and long-term ambition: to bring design methods to bear on the study of knowledge and creativity in digital culture.
April 8 - Neil Fraistat
Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities & Professor of English, University of Maryland
http://mith.umd.edu/people/person/neil-fraistat/
4:30 pm, Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
This event is sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor.
Talks will be free, open to the public, and followed by general discussion.
For more information, contact the series coordinator Mickey Casad (Digital Scholarship & Preservation Services): mir9@cornell.edu