Event Archives 07-08

2007-2008 | Humanities and Technology Lecture Series: Technology, Translation, and Transformation

FALL QUARTER 2007:

Panel on "Serious Play: The Practices of Everyday Life in Video Games and Virtual Worlds"

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 | 4:00-6:00 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

Each year, HumaniTech® and the UCI Libraries sponsor a panel that builds on a common theme rooted in technology, the humanities, and new media and communication. This year's panel will explore and critique the gaming and virtual worlds--how they have transformed (or not) the "real" world in our communication, everyday life, and cultural perspectives. Panelists include Ian Bogost, Assistant Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech; Tom Boellstorff, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine, and Jonathan Alexander, Associate Professor of English, UC Irvine. Moderated by Elizabeth Losh, Writing Director of Humanities CORE Course at Irvine. This panel is the first event in HumaniTech's lecture series this year on "Technology, Translation, and Transformation."

Conference flyer (PDF document) | Listen to Panel Podcast

Panel on "Is an 'Academic Blog' an Oxymoron?: A Public Conversation Between Faculty Bloggers and Student Bloggers"

Wednesday, October 31, 2007 | 9:30-11:50 AM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

Come hear five bloggers from the School of Humanities give advice to students, faculty, and members of the general public about designing and maintaining a successful academic blog. Questions include: How do you define the genre of the web log in your own terms? How do you find a niche in a crowded marketplace of ideas and build an audience? What about intelectual property, copyright, and academic labor issues? Participants include Catherine Liu of Higher Yearning, Peter Krapp of Distraction Economy, Scott Kaufman of Acephalous, Julia Lupton of Design Your Life, and Elizabeth Losh of Virtualpolitik. Co-sponsored by SCIWRITER.

Download flyer (PDF document) | View this panel on YouTube

Symposium on "The Book, The Brand, and The Box: Design in an Age of Research and Retail"

Friday, November 2, 2007 | 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

The UCI Design Alliance will present three panels featuring the contact zones between graphic, branding, and product design in order to explore the frontiers between research and retail in the university and in the design world. For more information and a list of participants, visit the symposium web site or contact Julia Lupton.

Download flyer (PDF document)

Lunchtime colloquy on "Mashups*, Google, Powerpoint: Translation--Teaching History"
Thursday, November 29, 2007 | 12:00-1:30 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building
Patricia Seed, Professor of History, will give a presentation on the pedagogical uses of mashups, with an emphasis on Google maps. Professor Seed, who has applied interactive maps and other digital media to her own teaching and work in the history of colonization, slavery, and navigation, sees these media as not only pedagogical tools, but also tools for actual discovery. Mashups can be used in many disciplines: history, literature, social sciences, and the natural sciences among them.
* A web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience. It derives from a pop music term of mixing two or more songs or music genres. A mashup often includes interactive maps as one of its sources.

DIY Texts: Students and the Future of Writing (a preview)
Thursday, January 31, 2008 | 3:00-4:30 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

A discussion of the major trends in student use of multimedia texts--including reading, creating, remixing for dissemination, applying to YouTube, encountering and (re)authoring gamespaces. What are the implications and challenges of these trends? Panelists will include Jonathan Alexander, UCI Campus Writing Director; Liz Losh, Writing Director, Core Course; and Jacqueline Rhodes, Professor of English, California State University, San Bernardino. This panel is a preview of next year's conference on "The Future of Writing."

Thursday, February 21, 2008 | 4:00-5:30 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building | Download flyer

Richard Grusin discusses the affective qualities of our relations with media technologies, the ways in which individual and collective affect are translated and transformed through our interactions with media technologies. He draws from psychology, philosophy, science studies, and media theory in looking at our relations with cellphones, video games, and other screen-based media technologies. Professor Grusin, whose areas are American Studies and Digital Culture, is the Chair and Professor of English at Wayne State University and the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media and Culture Technology and the Creation of America's National Parks.

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SPRING QUARTER 2008:

Professors Sigi Jottkandt and Gary Hall on The Open Humanities Press*

Thursday, April 3, 2008 | 3:00-4:30 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

The Open Humanities Press (OHP) will be launched this year. It is a bold and exciting new initiative, committed to open access and the free exchange of scholarly knowledge, an on-line publisher of contemporary critical and cultural theory that was formed in response to the growing inequality of readers' access to critical materials necessary for research in the humanities. It is a consortium of peer-reviewed open access journals in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism. The editorial board, including Alain Badiou, Wlad Godzich, Stephen Greenblatt, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Hillis Miller, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Gayatri Spivak, among others, has recently completed its review of the first journals to be included in the OHP.
Sigi Jottkandt will speak on "The Open Humanities Press: Free/Libre Scholarship," and Gary Hall will present "Liquid Theory."
Sigi Jottkandt is a Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, The Netherlands; Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, and Co-Editor of www.lineofbeauty.org
Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts, School of Art and Design, Coventry University; Co-editor of Culture Machine; Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive; Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press.

* an editorially-driven, international humanities press that will lend the same imprimatur of quality to humanities e-journals and books as established publishers.
Download flyer | Listen to Podcast

The Web, as we know it today, is based on individual words and objects that are searchable. This one-day event of panels, roundtables, and demonstrations show the exciting potential of a new Web construct, Web 3.0, or the EventWeb, which will be event, rather than object, focused, with the aim of communicating experiences and making spatial and temporal connections. The EventWeb aims to tie together events with a search engine that will focus on the continuity of time and space. It has promise for an impact on the study of history, literature, religion, and the social sciences, as well as for connections for people in developing countries.
Speakers include Bernard Frischer, Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia; Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science, UC Irvine; Lewis Lancaster, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Literature at Berkeley and Founder and Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, UCI Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation; Jack Miles, UCI Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies; Ramesh Jain, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences; and Ryan Shaw, Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's School of Information.

Co-sponsored by HumaniTech, Network and Academic Computing Services, the International Center for Writing and Translation, and the Humanities Center.

Orange Goes Green presents "Energy Revolution" with Michael Shellenberger, President of the Breakthrough Institute

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 | 3:00 PM | 135 Humanities Instructional Building

In this inaugural Orange Goes Green event, presented by the Humanities Center, HumaniTech® and the Design Alliance, Michael Shellenberger spoke about his new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, co-authored with Ted Nordhaus. Break Through argues for a new, positive politics capable of addressing everything from global warming and deforestation to health care and social alienation. Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that the old environmentalist politics of limits is outmoded. What new ecological crises like global warming demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it.