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Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) News Summary Administration | Curriculum | Events/Forum | Technology On August 12, 2007, former ISIS Administrative Director Casey Alt was featured in the New York Times for his multimedia “Terrorism on the Rise” in David Rhode and David E. Sanger’s article “How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad”. Courses and cross-listed courses included:
No soft cross-listings were offered during Fall 2007. Also taught was the Virtual Realities: Visualizations, Imagined Worlds, and Games Focus Cluster including:
The Virtual Realities Focus cluster’s course “How They Got Game” made the cover of Duke Magazine for the November-December 2007 issue. The Virtual Realities Focus cluster’s “How They Got Game” was featured again when instructor Tim Lenoir and students Chris Venters and Bernice Ponce de Leon were featured and quoted in the Chronicle on November 29, 2007 in the article “More than just fun and games.” The TechTuesday lunch forum was renamed Tech & New Media Tuesdays to better encompass the ISIS vision. Fall 2007 presenters were: September 4, 2007, Harry Halpin Abstract: In the midst of dizzying technological change that threatens to eradicate the very concept of the historical moment, digital technologies ranging from the personal computer to the Web appear often as alien artifacts beyond our control, while simultaneously as fulfilling our utopian desires. Yet technologies are ideas given flesh, the exteriorization of the ideas of ordinary humans, and so are alien only insofar as their history is unknown. The creation of the digital era did not happen by magic or fiat, but through institutions, ideological projects, and individuals that mobilize the resources, ranging from the social to the financial, that build these artifacts through metal, silicon, and human labor. We trace the line of development of digital technologies from the efforts of J.C.R. Licklider's "Man-Machine Symbiosis" abd Douglas Engelbart's "Human Augmentation Framework" to today, and how these seminal works led to the advent of personal computing at Xerox PARC to the birth of the World Wide Web at CERN, which in turn led digital representations to beomce ubiquitous. Resuscitating Hegel for a digital era, we show how each technology dialectically overcomes divisions of time, space, and collectively and so provides the cognitive scaffolding of collective intelligence, leading to the massive collective editing of Wikipedia being the flagship project of our age, just as Diderot's Encyclopedia characterized the Enlightenment. Far from alien, these digital tecnologies are intimately part of ourselves, extending our very mind and creating productive relationships that make the Web the universalizing social factory of today. This talk will be followed by an optional participatory exploration of the digital archive of interviews, papers, and patents that documents the foundations of the digital era, an archive that can interact with using the Studio and visualized in three-dimensions in DIVE. For more information, see http://vis.duke.edu/Research/interface/index.html. Bio: Harry Halpin, research postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh with Andy Clark and Henry S. Thompson. His interests lie in the intersection of the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. He was recently a visiting researcher at Duke University where he helped organize the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference, for which the archive exlpored in this talk was created. He is also active in web standards as Chair of the GRDDL W3C Working Group and a member of the W3C Semantic Web Co-ordination Group, and previously he has worked in areas as diverse as computational linguistics and collaborative tagging. September 24, 2007, Special ISIS Tech and New Media Monday featuring Bill Seaman Seaman will present an artist talk that will cover differing aspects of his research. He has been exporing generative emergent approaches to meaning production through Recombinant Poetic technological systems. He has articulated an embodied approach to multi-modal sensing and meaning production, and new approaches to interface design that he describes as Pattern Flows. Most recently Seaman and Rössler have been researching the creation of a model for a Neosentient computer/robotic system. Seaman is currently working on a series of poetic installations, scientific research papers and a book in collaboration with the scientist. He is also collaborating with Artist/Computer Scientist Daniel Howe on works exploring AI and creative writing/digital media, as well as on a work that explores intelligent generative/associative multi-media installation - the Bisociation Engine, and The Architecture of Association. Bill Seaman received a PH.D. from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry In Interactive Arts, University of Wales, 1999. He holds a MSvisS degree from MIT, 1985. His work explores an expanded media-oriented poetics through various technological means. Seaman is Department Head and Graduate Program Director of Digital+Media at Rhode Island School of Design. Seaman's works have been in many international shows where he has been awarded two prizes from Ars Electronica in Interactive Art (1992 &1995, Linz, Austria); International Video Art Prize, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Bonn Videonale prize; First Prize, Berlin Film / Video Festival for Multimedia in 1995; and the Awards in the Visual Arts Prize. Seaman was given the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2002. Selected exhibitions include 1996, Mediascape Guggenheim, NYC - the premiere exhibition of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany; 1997, Barbican Centre (London); 1997, C3 - Center for Culture & Communication, Budapest; 1998, Portable Sacred Grounds, NTT-ICC Tokyo; 1999, Body Mechanique, The Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio, ; 2004, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University; 2005, Itau Cultural Center ; 2006, Harris Museum, UK. Seaman contributed a video set for SLEEPERS GUTS by Ballett Frankfurt. He has collaborated with Regina van Berkel on two major dance/performance/installations. October 16, 2007, Kenneth Price What are the implications of the terms we use to describe the electronic scholarship currently being produced? And how do these conceptions frame and sometimes limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, archive, project, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Drawing on a range of resources including the Walt Whitman Archive, I'll consider how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure the work in progress. In addition, I'll use the final term, thematic research collection, to discuss yet-to-be-developed parts of the Whitman Archive dealing with place-based cultural analysis and translation studies as a way to illustrate the expansive possibilities of this new model of scholarship. October 23, 2007, Marsha Kinder This talk will feature two of her interactive science projects that deal with the interplay between physical science and culture, “Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California” and “A Tale of Two Genes: Exploring the Biology and Culture of Aggression and Anxiety” (a collaboration with Dr. Jean Chen Shih, a molecular biologist from the USC School of Pharmacy). MARSHA KINDER ON THE LABYRINTH PROJECT - A RESEARCH INITIATIVE FOR EXPANDING THE LANGUAGE OF INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE The Labyrinth Project is an art collective and research initiative on interactive cinema and database narrative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder since 1997, this initiative works at the pressure point between theory and practice, committed to creating a productive dialogue between the immersive language of cinema and the interactive potential and database structures of digital media. All Labyrinth projects are what Kinder calls "database narratives." This term refers to narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language: the selection of particular narrative elements (characters, images, sounds, events, and settings) from a series of categories or databases, and the combination of these chosen elements to generate specific tales. Although a database narrative may have no clear-cut beginning, no narrative closure, no three-act structure, and no coherent chain of causality, it still presents a narrative field full of story elements that are capable of arousing a user’s curiosity and desire. This desire can be mobilized as a search engine to retrieve whatever is needed to spin a particular tale or to provide a rich array of sensory and intellectual pleasures. All Labyrinth projects take a conceptual and collaborative approach to interface design. The design emerges from the material and captures the unique style of the primary artist the project is centered on: the repetition compulsions of Chicano novelist John Rechy, whose network of painful memories and ritualized accounts of the sex hunt turn the world of gay cruising into one vast city of night; the claustrophobic circularity of Nina Menkes’s films of resistance, all featuring her sister as a deeply alienated woman trapped within a series of violent landscapes captured in long takes; the sensory beauty of Pat O'Neill's richly textured, multilayered films with their fluid camera movements and surprising surrealistic jolts; the mesmerizing quality of Péter Forgács's haunting documentaries based on found footage with their shadowy historical figures and melancholy rhythms; the vigorous stream of Norman Klein’s verbal commentaries on history, swirling with vivid details, comic asides, and fascinating digressions; and the rich quilting of Carroll Parrott Blue’s stories, dreams, and voices that interweave the struggles between her and her mother with the cultural history of Houston’s black community. Kinder’s first interactive title (produced in collaboration with Charles Tashiro and Barry Schneider) was a hypertext called Blood Cinema: Exploring Spanish Film and Culture (1994), the first scholarly CD-ROM published in film studies. A companion to her book Blood Cinema (California 1993), it launched the Cine-Discs series of bilingual CD-ROMs on national media cultures (on which Kinder is general editor). The second title in the series, Yuri Tsivian’s Immaterial Bodies: a Cultural Analysis of Early Russian Cinema, won the 2001 British Academy Award for best Interactive Project in the Learning category. Co-sponsored by Art, Art History and Visual Studies, the Film\Video\Digital Program, and the Center For Documentary Studies. Marsha Kinder is also speaking at the Nasher Museum on Monday, October 22, 2007 and 7:00 PM. Please click the thumbnail below for further information. More information on the Labyrinth Project can be found here. October 30, 2007, Mauro Maldonato Essayist and writer, Maldonato’s books have been translated in several languages. He was Visiting Professor in Brazil, at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica - PUC of São Paulo, and at the Universidade de São Paulo - USP, where he also gave postgraduate courses,and at the École Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales of Paris. He also takes part, as lecturer, in different conventions and initiatives of several institutions. At the present time Professor Maldonato is engaged in the field of neurophenomenology research, especially on the topic of consciousness, and has been working to divulge it and to encourage and facilitate contact among Italian academics of that field. The last work published, as editor and writer, is La coscienza: come la biologia inventa la cultura [Consciousnees: how biology invents culture] published by Guida Editore of Naples, in 2007."Embodied Mind and Knowledge: Prolegomena for a neurophenomenology theory" Even though the concept of a “disembodied mind” – according to which, phenomena that go from the conscience to knowledge can be conceived without neurobiological structures – has enjoyed scientific and philosophical success, it is surrounded by relevant empirical and theoretical problems. The concept of a “disembodied mind”, promoted greatly by Descartes, is also the basis for “disembodied knowledge”, according to which knowledge is entirely a mental process: i.e., the process would be exclusively based on representations of the mind; as a matter of fact, it’s object would be those representations. In reality, recent neuroscientific evidence shows that may difficulties arise with this concept. These difficulties, along with others that could be argued, demonstrate how the concept of a “disembodied mind” is not plausible. This must give way to a concept of an “embodied mind”, According to which the mind is simply made up of certain bodily skills, including sensory and motor skills. Since sensory and motor skills are based on unconscious mental processes, it would be absurd to say that everything mental is conscious. The mental, on the other hand, is made up of skills and processes that are in part conscious, but greatly unconscious. The concept of embodied knowledge questions the radically subjectivist character of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Husserl, which conceives knowledge as disembodied knowledge. The methodological proposal in neurophenomenology consists in incorporating experience in the neurodynamic levels explicitly as well as rigorously. The objective is to integrate the phenomenic structure of experience in big scale neural operations. It deals with creating controlled experimental conditions where the subject is involved in identifying and categorizing experience, in order to clarify the neurodynamical properties of the conscience and cerebral activity and to then formulate a strong and predictive model that links the domains of experience and neurons. The neurophenomenologic strategy proposes to fill in the philosophical and scientific explanatory gaps, taking on the epistemological and methodological task of relating accounts of first person phenomenological experience to third person cognitive-neuroscientific ones (Varela, 1996). Neurophenomenology is a methodological way to answer the hard problem (Chalmers, 1996), without filling the gaps through ontological reduction, but by bridging experience and neurocognitive-behavioral phenomena. This event was jointly sponsored by the Program in History and Philosophy of Science Technology and Medicine (HPSTM). November 6, 2007, Matt Kirschenbaum Bio: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland (promotion to Associate Professor with tenure effetive August 2007) and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanites (MITH), an applied thinktank for the digital humanities. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature and creative new media (including games), textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia's Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (where he was the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive). His dissertation was the first electronic dissertation in the English department at Virginia and one of the very first in the nation. Kirschenbaum's first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, will be published by the MIT Press in late 2007. (Taking its cues from textual studies and recent critical interest in writing and inscription technologies, Mechanisms addresses itself to the material and historical particulars of landmark works of new media and electronic literature, applying computer forensics to conduct new kinds of media-specific readings and drawing on significant new archival sources for works like Michael Joyce's Afternoon and William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa.") He is a principal investigator for MONK, a multi-institutional Mellon-funded project to develop advanced analytical and visualization tools for digital text collections. With Amit Kumar, he developed the Virtual Lightbox, an online tool for image comparison. He is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, incuding Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, and MediaCommons. Kirschenbaum's current research interests in new media include serious games and simulations, digital preservation, writing technologies and the conditions of contemporary authorship, text visualization, social software, and cyberinfrastructure. His most recent graduate seminar (spring 2006) was Inscribing Media. He is currently directing or co-directing five dissertations. He blogs at both MGK and Zone of Influence (the latter mainly about games). He is married to Kari Kraus. His other interests include military history and boardgames. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. [source] November 13, 2007, Sara Wood The Web is awash in textual information on every topic imaginable. However, the amount of hard data that can be usefully accessed on the Web remains remarkably small, despite the potential for an Internet of people and their computers to exploit in ways that can improve their health, happiness and bottom line. Swivel is a site where users explore, publish, compare, visualize, share and discuss data. By combining web technologies and user enthusiasm to liberate data from its traditional vaults, Swivel allows people to discover and share insights in that data. We'll discuss how data accessibility, collaboration and Web 2.0 will facilitate better decision-making by both policy makers and the general public. Swivel has established partnerships with UN and governmental agencies, academic institutions and researchers, foundations, and businesses across the secotrs whose goal is to make their data available to the widest audience possible. At the same time, we encourage interested individuals to participate equally in the sharing of data and engaging in debate. Bio: Sara Wood is the Chief Data Officer for Swivel. Sara has spent the better part of the last decade working with some of the world's most important data: the World Health Organization, Harvard School of Public Health, the UN and UNDP. Previous to that she worked for a number of technology companies and research organizations, including web startups such as Salon.com, where she helped to solve emerging issues of content and data management on the web. November 27, 2007, Jason Graves Jason will talk about the creative challenges of composing music for a living and how technology has evolved and influenced my creative process. Bio: As a graduate of the University of Southern California’s prestigious film scoring program, Jason Graves was given the rare opportunity to study under film composers Elmer Bernstein, Christopher Young, and Disney Legend Buddy Baker, as well as Ron Jones, Jack Smalley, and famed Hollywood orchestrator Will Schaefer. Jason has composed music for national and international commercials (Honda, Toyota, Walt Disney, Activision), television shows (CBS, FOX, The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, Spike TV), movie trailers (Hollywood Pictures, Gramercy Pictures), and feature films (Sony Pictures, Paramount Studios). He has composed and conducted for the Hollywood Studio Orchestra at Capitol Records and Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles, as well as the Northwest Sinfonia in Seattle and orchestras in Salt Lake City. With more than one hundred television shows to his credit, Jason has won three Telly’s, an Addy, nine Silver Reels, a Gold Case Award, and more than thirty other state and national communications awards. He wrote music for The Discovery Channel’s Mega Movie Magic, which won a Cable ACE Award. Jason also won 2nd Prize in Turner Classic Movies’ 2005 Young Film Composer Competition, of which there were more than 500 entries. His ties to Los Angeles has allowed Rednote personal connections with top Hollywood film composers when working on film-based video games, including relationships with Elmer Bernstein (Wild Wild West), Hans Zimmer (King Arthur), John Debney (Zathura), and most recently Harry Gregson-Williams (Flushed Away). Jason has composed more than fifty videogame scores, including Blacksite: Area 51, Transformers, Star Trek Legacy, Rayman, The Gauntlet, Price of Persia, Heroes of Might and Magic, Blazing Angels, The Sims, Pac-man, and Jaws Unleashed. ISIS held three Game Nights in the Fall 2007 semester:
ISIS co-sponsored with inDuke the event Tom Perkins: The Technology and Engineering of the Maltese Falcon on November 16, 2007. It was held in Griffith Auditorium in the Bryan Center and was very well attended. Over the summer of 2007, ISIS made additions to its website. ISIS added a page devoted to the ISIS Deep Lagoon (IDL) Mac Lab and updates to the Multimedia Mobile Macintosh Cluster (M3C) information. We also added online news summaries to the News section dating back to Fall 2006. |
