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Premiere of Augmented Harvard: openLAB_04. October 6, 6:00 PM

By Kurt Fendt on October 6, 2011

Check out the premiere of Augmented Harvard by our friends “down the road” at Harvard’s metaLAB. It’s a mystery tour across the Harvard campus, full of curatorial experiments, ranging from an archive of ephemeral Cold War films to a mysterious hanging aluminum tube to a collection of participatory stickers that guide journeys across the campus. Full details can be found here. Have fun!

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humanities + digital Conversations: “Listening Faster”, April 22, 1:00 pm, room E14-633 (new Media Lab)

By Kurt Fendt on April 18, 2011

Please join us for the inaugural event of the new series "humanities + digital conversations", jointly organized by MIT's HyperStudio and metaLAB (at) Harvard.

"Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship" by Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard)

April 22, 2011, 1:00 – 2:30 pm, room E14-633 (New Media Lab building, MIT, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge)

Computers have altered so many aspects of musician's lives, from digital performance, to electronic composition, to how we acquire and share new music, but only recently have they had the potential to transform how we study and analyze music.  Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) introduce the new world of Digital Musicology by showing the techniques and tools that allow scholars to "listen faster": to examine and analyze large repertories of pieces in the time that a human musicologist could only look at and hear a single work.  Through computational analysis, clustering techniques, visualization tools, and data-mining of musical works, the landscape of our understanding of music is being shaken and new ground created for the wired music scholar.

View Event Poster (PDF)

Photo credit: photobucket
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StudioTalk “Learning Through Play”, April 15, 12:00 noon, room E15-335

By Kurt Fendt on April 7, 2011

Please join us for our upcoming StudioTalk by Prof. Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil on "Learning Through Play".

Play has no agenda. Children play for their own reasons, and even though their play can exhibit fierce determination, persistence, and a will to mastery, it does so only in the service of goals that children set for themselves. Even as we celebrate the learning that occurs in children’s play, and specifically in digital games, we must acknowledge that such learning looks dramatically different from the world of school. Though starkly different on the face of it, we nevertheless believe the ecologies of play and school can be successfully integrated, something we have witnessed through our own experience as educators and game designers. We will examine these issues through concrete examples of existing best practices, and speculative designs currently under development at MIT’s Education Arcade, and elsewhere.

Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to hyperstudio@mit.edu

Download StudioTalk Poster

Please also mark your calendar for our next HyperStudio Talk jointly organized with Harvard's metaLAB on April 22, 1:00 pm:
Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) on "Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship"

Image © Andrew Lapara

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Digital Humanities 2.0 event at Harvard, February 10th, 2011

By Anna van Someren on February 2, 2011

The Humanities Center at Harvard is hosting Digital Humanities 2.0: Emerging Paradigms in the Arts and Humanities, a conversation moderated by John Palfrey with the following media theorists and scholars:

  • Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design and Design Editor of Electronic Book Review
  • Johanna Drucker, Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and  author of SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
  • Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, whose books include The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (MIT, 2011) and  Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (MIT, 2000)
  • Jeffrey Schnapp, founder of the Stanford Humanities Lab, prolific author, Berkman Center Fellow, and currently launching a new open source virtual world entitled Sirikata.

Thompson Room, Barker Center 110, 12 Quincy Street Cambridge.  The event is free and open to the public, with limited seating.

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Digital Humanities Faculty Workshop with Brett Bobley (NEH), January 27, 2011

By Kurt Fendt on January 26, 2011

Please join us for an all day Digital Humanities Workshop with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), National Endowment for the Humanities, jointly held on January 27, 2011 at MIT and Harvard University.

Here’s the program for both MIT and Harvard:

MIT
10:00 to 11:45 (Spofford Room: Room 1-236, Building 1, Second Floor)
Talk by Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer and Director, NEH Office of Digital Humanities
“Emerging Trends in the Digital Humanities & the NEH Funding Landscape”
Abstract:  Brett Bobley will talk about emerging trends in the digital humanities in the context of NEH-funded projects.  He will cover a wide variety of projects that cover numerous disciplines and technological methods.  He will also talk a bit about projects that study the impact of technology on scholarship and the academy.

Harvard University
2:30 – 5:00  Three Part Digital Humanities Grant Workshop, Barker Center Room 133

1. MIT Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Jeff Ravel, History: The Comédie-Française Registers Project
Prof. Fox Harrell, Writing/Comparative Media Studies/Computer Science: Gesture, Rhetoric, and Digital Storytelling
Prof. Jim Buzzard, Head of Literature: The Serial Experience Project
Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature: Melville Remix and the Melville Electronic Library

2. Harvard Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Peter K. Bol, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Ben Lewis: World Map
Prof. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

3. Brett Bobley (NEH):
Abstract:  Brett Bobley, Director of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, will highlight funding opportunities at the NEH for digital projects. He will also discuss and highlight some recently funded projects in a variety of humanities disciplines. He will provide examples of successful grant proposals and discuss grant writing strategies for digital humanities projects.

Breakout Groups | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

HyperStudio participates in MIT-Haiti Symposium

By Anna van Someren on November 1, 2010

HyperStudio participated in the MIT-Haiti “Best Practices for Reconstruction: Technology-enhanced and Open Education in Haitian Universities” Symposium (October 21-22), which brought Haitian University professors together with MIT faculty, staff and technologists to discuss rebuilding Haiti’s educational infrastructure. Based on HyperStudio’s experience in developing educational projects for language and culture, Executive Director Kurt Fendt shared a presentation describing an approach which would engage Haitian students in building identity awareness, linguistic, cultural, and global skills. Given the linguistic situation in Haiti – 90% of Haitians are native speakers of Kreyòl for whom French, as the official language in education, is inaccessible – these skills would be developed through two core educational components: documenting heritage by working closely with planned oral history projects in Haiti and strengthening cultural awareness by developing cross-cultural curricula and integrating them in a variety of university courses.

Links of interest:
Read MIT News article “Build Back Better” on the Haiti Symposium.

Michel DeGraff’s Op-Ed “Language Barrier” in the Boston Globe, June 16, 2010.

Browse photos of the Haiti Symposium.

Photo credit: Jeff Merriman.

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Videos from Visual Interpretations Conference Now Available

By mcelish on August 23, 2010

We wanted to let you know that all the talks and presentations from our spring Visual Interpretations conference are now available to watch online!

Check out the keynotes on MITWorld:

Johanna Drucker (UCLA): Humanistic Approaches to the Graphical Expression of Interpretation

Lev Manovich (UC San Diego): How to Read 1,000,000 Manga Pages: Visualizing Patterns in Games, Comics, Art, Cinema, Animation, TV, and Print Media

Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland): Visual Overviews for Cultural Heritage: Interactive Exploration for Scholars in the Humanities, Arts, and Beyond

Martin Wattenberg (Many Eyes/IBM): Numbers, Words and Colors

In addition, all the other conference sessions were documented and you can browse videos of these sessions on TechTV.

Enjoy!

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“Tories, Timid or True Blue?” at AAM TIE

By Whitney Anne Trettien on August 17, 2010

You’re a parishioner at Christ Church in Boston; the year is 1775. Revolution is in the air. Will you side with the tories, the timid, or the true blue patriots?
Several years ago, HyperStudio, in partnership with historian Christine Baron, educators Elisabeth Nevins and Laura Northridge at the Old North Foundation, and the web design team at Myriad, Inc., took on the task of designing a web-based platform for exploring this question. Utilizing the Old North Church’s extensive archive, the project invited students to imagine the decision-making processes of historical figures through the primary source records that track their lives. In some cases, an abundance of documentation provides a rich resource, showing how mythologies are formed and shaped across time. In other cases, as with the black families sitting in the church balconies, few written traces of their presence exist, and students are confronted with the question of doing history without an historical record. The goal of the project was not simply to provide access to these rich materials, but to guide the website user to, as Sam Wineberg puts it, “think historically,” making use of the materials available to construct historical narratives.
HyperStudio stepped in to help transform the incredible wealth of theoretical resources developed by Chris, Elisabeth and Laura — as well as the materials expertly sorted and organized by a team of historians and genealogists — into use-case scenarios or “concepts” that would drive the student user’s experience. The basic design problem is the same one the entire project faces: namely, how to build a flexible, intuitive and fun educational experience from a database of documents which, even visually, would be inaccessible to the average user.
We began with the floor design for the church (with the possibility of this becoming a three-dimension rendition in the “dream versions” to come). This links the physical museum site to the virtual space, as well as the families to their individual pews, which would be clickable “hotspots” in the virtual church space. Clicking on the Byles family pew, for instance — showing them to be in the front, and Mather to be at the pulpit — would bring the user to a biography of the family, written in media res, as if the user were assuming the “role” of a member of the Byles family. The bio would conclude with a dilemma inviting the user to think about how he or she would have aligned themselves if they were in the Byles’ position.
The dilemma then opens into the central exploration space. In the middle is a central document viewer, which includes a primary source document, basic information about this document, a transcription, and guiding questions. Thumbnails of other related documents would populate the space around this central document viewer. These documents are not arbitrary, but rather called up from a database based on the user’s selections. For instance, if the user is following Line of Questioning A, with subquestions B, then documents “tagged” as related to Line of Questioning A and B would populate the edges of the viewer. Some documents also related to Question A may also be tagged as “Question C”, introducing an element of randomness — of “tripping through the archive,” stumbling upon interesting new things. By tying all documents to a central question map, yet allowing the user freedom to make spontaneous choices within this structure, the website negotiates a flexible, unique learning experience with structured educational goals.

We envisioned other ways of visualizing the documents, as well — for instance, a timeline showing both publication date, and the related date of the content. In this way, users could visually identify and distinguish primary source materials from secondary sources, without straying from an overarching “narrative time.” A map also could be used to show how documents are produced in spaces which mark socioeconomic or cultural differences between the families. Family geneaologies, glossaries of terms and an “ask a mentor” feature could help guide users through the archive with more or less freedom, depending on a teacher’s needs.
Finally, users were not only encouraged to view, read and explore documents, but to interact with them to construct their own narrative of events. Thus documents could be “saved” by a user and, in the dream version, annotated either publically or privately. After saving several documents, the user would be taken to a space for creating their own mini-timelines of events — that is, their own unique timeline carved out of the “meta-timeline” — populated with a selection of documents, and augmented with a narrative explaining his or her choices. This user-generated document — an historical narrative, like any other presented in the secondary source documents included in the site — would then be added back into the “pool” of documents to be browsed, shared, commented on, “liked,” and so on, by other users. This social media component generates a community of different individuals, with different interpretations, around a shared set of questions.

This first phase of the project, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, concluded with a prototype version brought to working reality by Myriad, Inc. The site as-is gives merely a taste of what a fuller, database-driven site could achieve, as the team considers options for future development.

Further reading:
  • The above comments are based in part on a presentation I gave along with Elisabeth Nevins and Chris Baron at the American Association of Museums’ recent conference, “Technology, Interpretation and Education.” The session archive is available with a log-in.
  • The prototype version of “Tories, Timid or True Blue?” is available here. 
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HyperStudio at Digital Humanities 2010

By Whitney Anne Trettien on July 24, 2010

At Digital Humanities 2010 this month, Christopher York and I had the privilege of presenting a poster on HyperStudio’s “Emergent Time,” a prototype collaboration tool for humanities working with timeline narratives. As often happens at conferences, the poster itself was less important than the many fascinating conversations it sparked. Here’s a few threads of discussion running through the conference:

  • Digital Humanities is an unusually strong, friendly and supportive scholarly community; but we need to be better at publicly displaying these strengths. Melissa Terras’ keynote, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon,” was a rousing call for DH scholars to more actively argue for their relevance in the academy, both as a way of securing our discipline’s future and as a way of strengthening the bonds between us. While there’s the danger of “over-disciplining” (I worry about this, perhaps futilely, even as I recognize the value of disciplinary status), developing better presentation methods and stronger arguments for our work can only help us.
  • That being said, digital humanities is still a “big tent.” I had the pleasure of meeting archivists, computer scientists, librarians, embroiderers, literary historians, lab directors, philosophers, linguists — the list goes on and on. And, while the field diversity itself was perhaps not novel to most participants, used to crossing borders, the widespread acceptance of this diversity perhaps was. In fact, most participants I talked with came to and stuck with DH for different reasons. Perhaps more interestingly, I met others in London, outside the conference, who were clearly doing DH work but did not identify with the broader community. It’s difficult to reconcile the pressures of consolidation, articulated by Melissa, and the need to remain open to multiple, even conflicting approaches.
  • There are many young and/or emergine scholars and students involved in Digital Humanities. Precisely because the sense of community is so strong in DH, it can be difficult for them to break into the pack. As we think about alternative conferencing formats, it’s also worth thinking of ways to welcome newbies to the community — not so much teaching them the ropes (which arguably don’t exist) so much as inviting them to contribute their own ideas, forming new partnerships and spaces for collaboration. Although I was unable to attend, I imagine the pre-conference THATCamp could (and perhaps did) serve this purpose.
To the many faces I met, both familiar and new, thanks for the great conversation.  I’m looking forward to more in the future!
Resources:
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