2007-2008
Humanities and Technology Lecture Series: Technology, Translation,
and Transformation
Events include:
FALL QUARTER:
Panel on "Serious Play: The Practices of Everyday
Life in Video Games and Virtual Worlds"
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 from 4:00-6:00 PM in 135 Humanities
Instructional Building
HumaniTech® and the UCI Libraries each year 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 from 9:30-11:50 AM in 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 balance the personal, the political, and the
professional in a blogging persona? How do you find a niche in
a crowded marketplace of ideas and build an audience? How do you
capitalize on blogging communities and group blogging? 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.
Watch this panel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ucitltc
Symposium on "The Book, The Brand,
and The Box: Design in an Age of Research and Retail"
Friday, November 2, 2007 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM in 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.
Conference flyer (PDF document).
Lunchtime colloquy on "Mashups*, Google, Powerpoint:
Translation--Teaching History"
Thursday, November 29, 2007 from 12:00-1:30 PM in 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.
WINTER QUARTER:
DIY Texts: Students and the Future of Writing, A Preview
Thursday, January 31, 2008 from 3:00-4:30 PM in 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."
Lecture on "Affective Life of New Media" with
Richard Grusin
Thursday, February 21, 2008 from 4:00-5:30 PM in 135 Humanities
Instructional Building
Richard
Grusin, Professor of English at Wayne State University, will
discuss 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'll be drawing on psychology, philosophy, science studies, and
media theory in looking at, for example, 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 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.
SPRING QUARTER:
Professors Sigi Jottkandt and Gary Hall on The Open
Humanities Press*
Thursday, April 3, 2008 from 3:00-4:30 PM in 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.
Listen to Podcast
Event Webs: Constructs, Connections, Causalities
Friday, May 9, 2008 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM in Calit2 Auditorium
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.
Michael Shellenberger from the Breakthrough Institute
Wednesday, May 28, 2008, Time TBA, 135 Humanities Instructional
Building
Michael Shellenberger will be launching the "Orange Goes
Green" series, co-sponsored by HumaniTech, the Humanities
Center, and the Design Alliance. He is President and co-founder
of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank with
a progressive approach to "green" issues.
