Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) News Summary
Spring 2008

Administration | Curriculum | Events/Forum | Technology

Administration

<> Nicholas Gessler and Katherine Hayles, both currently from UCLA, are slated to join the Duke Community in Fall 2008. Nick will have an appointment in ISIS and Katherine in Literature and ISIS.

Curriculum

<> Courses and cross-listed courses offered included:

• ISIS 108.01/ARTSVIS 108.01/FVD 118.01: Virtual Form & Space taught by Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Staff
• ISIS 120S.02/LIT 132S.01: Weapons of Mass Entertainment: Studies in Computer Games taught by Literature Program visiting professor Anne Garreta
  
• ISIS 140: Fundamentals of Web-Based Multimedia Communications taught by Richard Lucic
  
• ISIS 179S.01/ARTHIST 179S.01: Visual Cultures of Medicine taught by Art, Art History, and Visual Studies professor Mark Olson
  
• ISIS 200S.01: Research Capstone taught by Victoria Szabo & Jessica Mitchell
• ISIS 225S.01/AALL 250S.01 Chinese Media and Pop Culture taught by Asian & African Languages and Literature professor Kang Liu
• ISIS 240S.01/ARTHIST 240S.01: Technology and New Media in the University taught by Victoria Szabo
• ISIS 270.01/LIT 262.01/PHIL 270.01: BodyWorks: Medicine, Technology, and the Body in Early 21st Century America taught by Tim Lenoir

<> Spring graduates included:

• Brandon Keith Bailey
• Ryan Houston Link
• Chaitanya Madamanchi
• Matthew Thomas Rinehart
• Rachel Anna Rodriguez

Events/Forum

<> Spring 2008 Tech & New Media Tuesdays presenters were:

January 15, 2008: Special IMPS Room and Gaming Demo
Come out and see the Interactive Multimedia Project Space (IMPS), how to run it, and the games we use in our classes. There were 12 people in attendance.

January 29, 2008: Brett Barney
Digital Humanities, Metadata, and the Need for Control

Digital humanities is a showcase for control freaks. The struggle for control goes much deeper than the well-publicized furor over the Google Books project; it is constitutive of the field of digital humanities itself. The allure of exerting control over more texts (or greater control over a relatively small set of texts) is what has driven scholars to create the major pioneering digital humanities projects. I intend to discuss grant-funded research for one of those projects, the Walt Whitman Archive, and the ways that research highlights the need to acknowledge control as a fundamental component at all stages of a digital editing process—beginning with the creation of the markup standards themselves. With the Whitman Archive's work on the Interoperability of Metadata grant as a backdrop I will offer some words of caution, some words of encouragement, and some speculation about how the best projects might be able to best manage their control issues in the future.

Bio: Brett Barney became interested in digital humanities when he was hired as a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive in 2000. Since joining the staff of the Center's predecessor the following year, he has worked on a variety of projects, including the Willa Cather Archive and the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online. He is Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and project manager and Senior Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive.

He is nearing completion of a digital edition of the interviews of Walt Whitman, and he continues to nurture project ideas for digitizing the work of several lesser-known writers from the colonial and early Federal periods—aspirations that began during a doctoral program focused on postcolonial theory and nationalism in early American literature.

Publications include:

• Critical Histories: Walt Whitman. ProQuest (forthcoming). [editor/compiler]
• "Gwendolyn Brooks" (headnote). The Thomson Anthology of American Literature, Volume 4, Ed. Henry Hart. Boston: Thomson/Gale, 2007. (forthcoming)
• "Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture." A Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Donald Kummings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 233-256.
• "Ordering Chaos: An Integrated Guide and Online Archive of Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 20 (June 2005): 205-217. [co-author with Mary Ellen Ducey, Andrew Jewell, Kenneth M. Price, Brian Pytlik Zillig, and Katherine L. Walter]
• "Whitman and Traditional Literary History: A Recently Recovered Dialogue." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20:1 (Summer 2002). 30-35.
• "'Each Part and Tag of Me Is a Miracle': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass." Walt Whitman Archive

18 people were in attendance.

February 26, 2009: Mark Tribus
"CompanyCommand.com: Online Leadership Development in the United States Army"

Lieutenant Colonel Mark Tribus, Professor of Military Science at Duke, will describe the Peer to Peer Leadership Development program in the United States Army. The online program enables junior officers to share experiences and learn from their peers in a high trust environment with immediate, detailed feedback from peers. This approach contrasts both with more conventionally structured, hierarchical training modalities and purely informal social interactions. Tribus will discuss the program as it presently exists, as well as look ahead to potential areas for expansion and development of this breakthrough training resource. For background on the project, please see pages 56-57 in the Harvard Business Review article entited "Breakthrough Ideas for 2006" posted here.

14 people were in attendance.

April 1, 2008: Marilyn Lombardi
"Introducing the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University"

Abstract:  Marilyn Lombardi is director of the new Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University, which occupies the renovated first floor of the Telecom Building on West Campus.  The RENCI at Duke Center is part of a multi-site virtual organization founded by Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University as a catalyst for innovation. The RENCI organization’s resources include the fastest supercomputers in North Carolina, a staff of ninety focus area specialists, computational scientists, software developers, and engineers, and an Innovations Lab where engineers fabricate new devices, taking them from concept to prototype.  RENCI draws on these resources and the combined intellectual capital of RENCI’s member campuses to tackle problems of broad public concern, from disaster prediction, global climate change, and human health to nanotechnology, national security, and economic development. 

A dedicated high-speed network connects the Duke Center with the RENCI anchor site at the Europa Center in Chapel Hill and with Duke’s sister sites at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State.  All the RENCI campus sites come equipped with a shared audio and video teleconferencing system with a large display so that multiple groups of collaborators at various locations can see one another simultaneously, while sharing presentations and high-resolution visualizations. The facility also boasts a one-of-a-kind Multi-Touch Visualization Wall.  Similar to the futuristic interface imagined for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, the Multi-Touch Visualization Wall is intended to foster hands-on creativity and inspire new research applications.  Two full-time computer scientists specializing in high-performance data mining and visualization will be on staff to collaborate with Duke researchers on new applications and grant proposals.

How might the Center and its resources advance your research agenda? Are you a biochemist who needs to create thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional molecular models for studying protein design, protein folding and protein-protein interactions? Perhaps you’re a biomedical engineer working on a better cochlear implant for patients suffering from severe hearing loss, or a visual artist planning a multimedia interactive installation? Dr. Lombardi’s talk will focus on the nature of Duke-RENCI engagement and will welcome audience participation.

Bio: Dr. Marilyn Lombardi directs the RENCI Center at Duke University.  In this capacity, she manages the Duke component of the RENCI virtual organization and a facility with state-of-the-art visualization equipment, dedicated high-speed connectivity to the major research universities in the Triangle, and a staff of computing specialists to support Duke faculty in large-scale research collaborations. Lombardi is also a scholar-in-residence for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and she writes the organization’s annual three-part white paper series covering current issues in technology and pedagogy. From 2006-2007, she also served as interim director of The Croquet Consortium, an international not-for-profit alliance of industry and academic institutions to advance and promote the creation and widespread adoption of open source Croquet technologies in research, industry, and education. Lombardi is an invited contributor to the Carnegie Foundation book "Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2007) and a member of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) advisory panel on “Humanities and High Performance Computing.”

17 people in attendance.

April 15, 2008: Darion Rapoza
"The Science of Video Game Design: What does Behavioral Psychology have to Offer?"

To an operant psychologist, video game play represents one of the purest examples of the real-life application of operant theory to the control of human behavior.  Whether they know it or not—and with great success—the designers of the game industry’s hit titles have created “addictive” game play through the application of the basic principles of operant psychology.  With a knowledge and understanding of the principles of operant psychology, designers can move beyond creating compelling game play by mere intuition, experimentation, and accident to easily creating it by the relatively simple application of established scientific principles.  Better still, as the industry can boast very few examples of the application of advanced behavioral programming techniques to game design, designers who understand advanced behavioral principles will have the capacity to take game design to the next level.

This talk will begin with an intense, rapid-fire review of basic principles of behavioral programming that must be understood before a discussion of the more advanced topics can take place.  Examples drawn from animal behavior studies will be compared to hit game titles to illustrate the application of these principles to create addictive game play. 

Next, the science of creating effective real-life behavior change video games will be discussed.  A review of some effective behavior change videogames will be presented, as well as some thoughts on what types of behavior portrayed in videogames might not be expected to affect real-life behavior.  Scientific evidence of how different personalities respond differently to different types of message presentation will be covered, and the implications for serious game design discussed.  Finally, pilot data from the speaker’s own R & D on using video games to prevent or treat drug abuse will be presented.

Bio: Darion Rapoza: President, Entertainment Science, Inc., Senior Research Scholar, ISIS. Darion Rapoza founded Entertainment Science, Inc. in 1997 with the mission of studying the real-life behavioral impact of videogames and of developing videogames with empirically demonstrable positive behavioral impact.   He is currently working in collaboration with Virtual Heroes on a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse for development of a 3D “Virtual Brain” museum exhibit to educate the public about the impact of drug use on the brain. Past funded projects include development of a videogame for neurocognitive rehabilitation of drug-induced deficits in inhibitory control (aka “impulsivity”), and development of video games designed to prevent drug use. He has been issued a US patent on his videogame-based method for drug abuse prevention.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Biopsychology, where he studied the behavioral pharmacology of drugs of abuse.

21 people were in attendance.

April 22, 2008: Patrick Herron
"We Generate Our Self"

The effects of the internet challenge recent American poetic mainstream and counter-streams alike to generate a different form of self that is at once both ancient and decidedly modern. From Walt Whitman's call to the poet to be the great equalizer, to Richard Rorty's Heideggerian demand for the rise of poets who, in his vision, are not necessarily writing poetry, and the ascent of the American creative writing industry in between, the singular identity of the poet has been for years the hub around which American poetry has spun. The call of the poet is to liberate experience, as the poet-centric story goes. The recent American avant-gardist movement of Language poetry, in an effort to challenge such assumptions, moved towards the liberation not of experience but of the poet herself, a liberation from older poetic forms and political values, again helping to center the poet's identity in the poetic realm. In this quintessentially individualist American process of "making it new" the American poet has seemingly disposed entirely of the ancient oracular role of the poet as the conduit, as someone secondary to the poetry itself. In insisting on the poet's self-expression and self-liberation the American poet has oddly shed himself of the responsibility to actually compose poetry for reasons other than to liberate the poet and share his singular experience, thus approaching the realization of Rorty's vision of the poet.

While concerns about mainstream confessionalism and poet-centric poetics have been voiced for over a century and while such broad generalizations as the ones I am making often occlude counterexamples and complexities, positive examples of alternatives to the poet-centric traditional and avant-garde American poetic streams have been scarce until recently. Despite the long-standing articulation of skepticism about a unified 'I' dating at least as far back as David Hume's bundle theory concerns about the centralized self have only just begun to converge with the central flows of American poetics.

Some poets, particularly as they began interacting with computers and the internet, began working with text in such a material way as to challenge some core assumptions about the self held by the American poetic tradition and counter-traditions alike, oddly reconnecting with aspects of the ancient oracle in a most modern, technological and internationalist way. In this modern reversioning of the ancient oracle, the poetic self as the 'I' fades before the generation of a larger collective self, directly and materially assembling, shaping and recreating the disparate but converging voices of the multitude into poetry. Treating internet-scraped text as material and lending that text to rule-based and irrational processes allows for an immediate conjuring of a collective identity that pushes the singular poet's identity and intentionality towards irrelevance. Such methods appear to foreground the material (the text) and the shared-phenomenal (the poetic) while backgrounding the poetic self to the point that singular identity begins to appear to be nothing more than the materials from which it is constructed.  While such methods do not allow for the poet to serve as some Whitmanesque representative of the multitude or Emersonian objective correlative of the whole, they do reinvigorate poetry itself, a poetry born of both the ancient past and the ever-immanent now, a poetry both bundling and giving birth to our collective voice.

About Patrick Herron: Patrick Herron is a poet, musician, artist and information scientist living in Chapel Hill, NC, USA.  His doll Lester is the author of the book Be Somebody forthcoming in March 2008 from Effing Press (a 2003 review from Ron Silliman here).  Patrick's web art has appeared in venues such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the New Museum for Contemporary Art (NYC) and is the author of several books of poetry including The American Godwar Complex (2004, BlazeVox, downloadable here).  Pitchfork recently reviewed a recording of his electronic music composed under the moniker of "Blindfolder".  You may find some of Patrick's poems and essays in journals such as The Exquisite Corpse, Jacket, Fulcrum, A Chide's Alphabet, and Talisman. He is the founder of the Carrboro International Poetry Festival, a member of the board of Carolina Wren Press, winner of the 2005 Triangle Arts Award from The Independent, and a former Carrboro NC Poet Laureate.  At Duke University Patrick serves as Research Analyst and Technologist for the Jenkins Chair where he studies innovation networks via the analysis of large document collections and teaches new media studies.

27 people were in attendance.

<> ISIS held two Game Nights during the Spring semester:

• Wednesday, January 16, 2008 in IMPS with 8 people in attendance
• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, in Bostock 023. This Game Night was sponsored by ISIS, Duke Libraries, and the Dean of Students Office. Over 30 people were in attendance.

<> On January 28, 2008 ISIS brought speaker Ge Wang to present "ChucK: Teaching Programming with Music (and vice versa); Laptop Orchestras as Classrooms" with Ge Wang

Abstract: We present the ChucK computer music programming language as a pedagogical tool for teaching programming and music at the same time (and letting the two subjects motivate and reinforce each other).  We demonstrate aspects of the language suitable for teaching in both Computer Science and Music Technology classrooms, pointing features, ideas, and approaches we've taken in courses at Princeton University and Stanford University.

In this context, we describe our adventures with the "laptop orchestra": a new type of large-scale, computer-mediated music ensemble and classroom.  The laptop orchestra consists of 12 or more sets of laptops, humans, special hemispherical speakers, sensors, and software, and presents new challenges in music technology, instrument design, composition, performance, and pedagogy.  We present our ongoing experiences with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and soon, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk?) and discuss the laptop orchestra's potential to serve as a unique and truly integrated platform for teaching music through technology, and computing through music.

Bio: Ge Wang received his B.S. in Computer Science in 2000 from Duke University, PhD (soon) in Computer Science (advisor Perry Cook) in 2007 from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). His research interests include interactive software systems for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestras) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect of the ChucK audio programming language and the Audicle environment. He is a founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and is currently establishing a Stanford Laptop Orchestra.  Ge is also a co-creator of the TAPESTREA sound design environment and of various audio visulization tools. Ge composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and computer-mediated means.

15 people were in attendance.

Ge also presented at the Visualization Friday Forum on Friday, January 25, 2008.

<> ISIS co-sponsored the Early American Mediascapes: a symposium on February 15 and 16, 2008

Friday, February 15th schedule:
-Session One: 2:00-3:30 PM, John Hope Franklin Center, 240
-Break: 3:30-3:50 PM, John Hope Franklin Center, 240
-Session 2: 3:50-5:20 PM, John Hope Franklin Center, 240
-Reception: 5:30-6:30 PM, Rare Book Room, Perkins Library

Saturday, February 16th schedule:
-Session 3: 9:00-10:20 AM, John Hope Franklin Center, 240
-Session 4: 10:40-12:00 PM, John Hope Franklin Center, 240
-Lunch 12:00-1:30 PM, John Hope Franklin Center, Cafe

Germaine Warkentin ~ Peter Charles Hoffer ~ Ralph Bauer ~ Birgit Brander Rasmussen ~ Paul Chaat Smith ~ Richard Cullen Rath ~ Heidi Bohaker ~ Gonzalo Lamana ~ Sarah Rivett ~ Andrew Newman ~ Jeffrey Glover ~ Matt Cohen ~ Elizabeth Fenn ~ Orin Starn ~ John David Mile ~ Walter Mignolo

"Early American Mediascapes" is organized around key methodological shifts resulting from the turn toward media in early American studies, bringing together scholars from Native American and colonial studies; literary scholars and historians; cultural anthropologists and historians of the book. The European settlement of indigenous-dominated territories was driven by struggles over information circulation as much as by ideologies of conquest and colonization. Colonial spaces were sites of an extraordinary proliferation of communications technologies. Settlers improvised and developed a variety of means of communicating with Native people, from participating in Native rituals and sign-systems to composing language guides and translating European books into New World languages. At the same time, Native people made strategic interventions in the information channels of early European settlements, appropriating, mastering, and deploying communicative techniques imported by colonists. Such a relay is not merely a relic; the contents of the colonial archive iteself have been a product of a struggle over media and access to it that continues to this day. Who gets to tell the story of colonization and what counts as evidence for that story?

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Arts & Sciences Research Council; Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS); John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; The Department of History; The Department of Cultural Anthropology; The Program in Literature; Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections at Duke Libraries.

For more information email John David Miller or visit the event website.

25 people were in attendance.

<> ISIS held a special event "Come Walk With Me" with Patrick O'Sullivan on February 19, 2008 with a 5:30 PM reception and 6:00-8:00 PM talk in the F-CIEMAS Auditorium.

Patrick O'Sullivan, founder of Build African Schools, discussed his program for constructing small 5-room primary and secondary schools in the remote Maasai Mara region of Kenya.  Each school includes a solar power system and a computer lab donated by Hewlett-Packard Co.

A reception preceded the talk at 5:30-6:00 PM in the F-CIEMAS Lobby.

51 people were in attendance.

Related Event: Patrick and Sherryl Broverman (Chair of Women's Institute for Secondary Education and Research (WISER)-Kenya; Associate Professor of the Practice of Biology and Director of the Global Health Certificate Program, Duke University) will be delivering "Building Schools in Kenya: Two Perspectives" as part of Wednesdays at the Center on February 20, 2008 at 12:00-1:00 PM in John Hope Franklin Center, 240.

<> On Friday, February 22, 2008, ISIS Program Director Victoria Szabo participated the Friday Visualization Forum.

"Creating and Sharing Digital Media in Second Life and Croquet: Current Projects and Future Directions"

Last summer the ISIS Program bought an island in Second Life in order to explore how a well developed virtual world environment could benefit digital project-based undergraduate education. At the same time as we have explored Second Life, we have also continued to explore other opportunities for virtual world building and archive development in the Croquet platform. This talk demonstrates projects underway in the Duke ISIS Oasis in Second Life, touch the surface of what Croquet might offer to extend functionality, and looks ahead to possible directions for virtual world building activities within the ISIS curriculum and beyond.

<> ISIS held a lunchtime event A Conversation about Global Culture Industry with Scott Lash & Celia Lury on February 29, 2008, 12:00-1:30 PM

Scott Lash is a professor and the director of the Center for Cultural Studies
at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Celia Lury is a professor and the head of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. They have co-authored "Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things" (Polity Press 2007).

Excerpted Chapters for discussion -- Introduction; Chapter 4," Art as Concept/Art as Media/Art as Life" and Chapter 5, "The Thingification of Media: Animism and Animation." (Duke Community download only.)

The event was co-sponsored by the Jenkins Chair of New Technologies.

ISIS co-sponsored this lunch before the main event brought to you by the Program in Literature.

The Program in Literature held a mini-symposium "Global Industry and New Media" which included lectures "China Culture Industry: In Search of the Universal" by Scott Lash and "Thinking Topologically About Culture" by Celia Lury. It was held in the Upper East Side, East Union Building, East Campus at 4 PM.

The lectures were co-sponsored by the Department of Cultural Anthropology, the Center for International Studies, the Jenkins Chair of New Technologies, and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

27 people were in attendance.

<> Finally, ISIS held a commencement ceremony for the Spring 2008 certificate graduates on May 10, 2008, 6:00-7:30 PM. The graduating students included: Brandon Keith Bailey, Ryan Houston Link, Chaitanya Madamanchi, Matthew Thomas Rinehart, Rachel Anna Rodriguez. They presented their Capstone project to the attendants.

Technology

<> In February 2008 the ISIS program was awarded a new grant to explore innovative touch-screen technology as part of the ISIS 200: Research Capstone course experience. Students will create an interactive multimedia kiosk for the John Hope Franklin Center using the same Content Interface software used by news organization and major media outlets around the world. This project will serve as a model for similar projects on campus. The kiosk launched in April 2008.

<> In February 2008, an ISIS affiliated team won the MacArthur Foundation Innovation Grant for Digital Media and Learning.

Tim Lenoir, Jerry Heneghan of Virtual Heroes, Kacie Wallace of ISIS and Film\Video\Digital, and Natalia Mirovitskaya, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke-UNC Rotary Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution lead a team to win an award for Virtual Conflict Resolution: Turning Swords to Ploughshares.

Projector Collaborators:
Richard Lucic, Associate Chair, Computer Science, Duke University
Robert Duvall, Lecturer, Computer Science, Duke University
Patrick Herron, Research Analyst & Technologist, Jenkins Collaboratory, Duke University

Project Description:
Virtual Conflict Resolution is a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations. The game will be developed by repurposing an existing military simulation into a tool for humanitarian training. Learning within the game will focus on leadership skills, cultural awareness, problem solving, and adaptive thinking--all of which are necessary to coordinate international humanitarian assistance for natural disaster relief.

Details can be found here.