Events

Visualizing Interpretation – Workshop & Conversations with Johanna Drucker, April 23 – 28, 2012

Work with Johanna Drucker, Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA and internationally renowned book artist on new visualization techniques and innovative visual interfaces for complex humanities data. This weeklong workshop – intended for humanists, designers, visual artists, software developers – will cover general themes of visualizing interpretation, interpretative visualization methods, and discuss topics such as maps and timelines for both analysis and navigation, large scale corpora, data granularity and scale issues.

Participants will work in small teams and develop storyboard prototypes for the user experience, create technical specifications that analyze the problem, and suggest an approach to back-end development. Limited to 30 participants. Sorry, the workshop sessions are full, registration is no longer possible.

Schedule:

Monday, April 23: 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Intro & Session 1: Legible argument: threaded conversation, documents, and screen space

Tuesday, April 24: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Session 2: Visual interfaces: maps and timelines

Wednesday, April 25: 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Session 3: Large scale corpora: data granularity and scale issues

Thursday, April 26: 1:30 pm to 3:30
Session 4: Integrated Visual Interfaces

Friday, April 27: 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Session 5: Summary and New Challenges

Saturday, April 28: 12:00pm to 3:00 pm
Session 6: Public Presentations of Workshop Results

In addition, Johanna Drucker will offer three informal “humanities + digital conversations”:

Monday, April 23: 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm, room E51-095
Humanities methods: digital challenges

Wednesday, April 25: 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm (brown bag), room E51-095
Visual Narratives (co-sponsored with OpenDocLab)

Friday, April 27: 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm (brown bag)
Rethinking Humanities Education
(Sorry, session is full)

The “humanities + digital conversations” are free and open to the public..

On Thursday, April 26, 5:00 pm, room 2-105, 4-Johanna Drucker will speak about “Designing Digital Humanities” at the CMS Colloquium. Free and open to the public, no registration necessary. More information: http://cms.mit.edu/events/talks.php#042612

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2^nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

MuseScore: Giving your sheet music a social life, Friday, November 4, 3 pm Room 4-153

HyperStudio is sponsoring this Friday's meeting of the Digital Musicoloy Study Group in which Thomas Bonte and Nicolas Froment of MuseScore share their vision for the future of sheet music. The meeting takes place in room 4-153 at MIT. It is free and open to the public. The event has been co-organized by Matthias Röder and MIT’s Hyperstudio.

The life of printed sheet music started in Germany when included in the Mainz psalter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_music#History) in 1457. It has been hooked to paper ever since. Up to now. Sheet music is about to get a new life. A truly digital and social one. With the free and easy to use music notation software MuseScore, everyone can create beautiful sheet music. While this isn't a remarkable fact, it’s really just the prerequisite to move sheet music beyond paper. What about sharing sheet music on Facebook? Or making mashups with your sheet music and any YouTube video? Or holding your complete sheet music collection in the palm of you hand with your smartphone or tablet? This all becomes possible with the open source technology MuseScore.

Thomas Bonte (Belgium) and Nicolas Froment (France) co-founded a startup together with Werner Schweer (Germany) to drive the future of the leading free & open source notation software MuseScore. The three found each other online and share the same passion for software development & music. Having worked together on the MuseScore project for a couple of years, they first gathered in 2009 in Brussels to discuss the future of the open source project. Later that same year, MuseScore tripled it's monthly download rate to more than 100.000 downloads per month, which can be mainly attributed to the elevated interest of music education world wide. Two years later, the three formed a startup to develop a sheet music sharing website for MuseScore users with a freemium based business model. The mission is to make the sheet music experience truly digital across the desktop, web and mobile devices.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

humanities+digital visual interpretations conference 2010

Aesthetics, Methods, and Critiques of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

May 20 – May 22, 2010 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Organized by HyperStudio – Digital Humanities at MIT

Keynote Speakers:

• Johanna Drucker (UCLA)

• Lev Manovich (UC San Diego)

• Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland)

• Fernanda Viégas/Martin Wattenberg (Many Eyes/IBM)

Conference Registration: click here to register.

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as “humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

We welcome submissions from practitioners and theorists of digital humanities as well as such connected disciplines as art, design, visual culture, museum studies, and computer science.

Possible topics include:

Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
Subjectivity and objectivity in information visualization
Dynamic/multidimensional visualizations and user collaboration
Social media and contextualized visualization
Cultural history of visual epistemology
Limits and affordances of the translation from data to visualization
2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
Visualization across media and the archive
Digital visual literacy & accessibility
Relationships between database and interface
Alternative modes of data representation.

Submissions:

We are inviting submissions for the following conference formats:
Papers with 15minutes of presentation and short discussions (12 slots)
Short presentations, so called “6/4s” with 6 minutes of presentation and 4 minutes of discussion (18 slots available)
Mini-Workshops, 30 minutes each (6 slots)
Demos and Posters (30 slots)

Deadline for submissions was April 14, 2010. We no longer accept submissions.

All selected submissions will be made available on the conference web site.

Conference Attendance/Fee:
Attending the humanities + digital “Visual Interpretations” Conference is free, however registration is required.

There is a $30.00 fee for the conference dinner on Friday, May 21, 2010. You can sign up for the dinner at the conference registration page.

Conference Registration: click here to register.

Hotel Reservations:
We have reserved a block of rooms at a special conference rate at the Cambridge Marriott, which is adjacent to the MIT campus. Please click to make your reservation.
You must make your hotel reservation by Friday, April 30, 2010 in order to get the discounted conference rate ($170 per night plus tax). Rooms can be singles or doubles and sharing a room with a colleague helps reduce the cost of attending the conference.

Organizers:
MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities
MIT Communications Forum (co-organizer for opening keynote)

Contact:

HyperStudio Talk: SAHARA

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Wednesday, May 5, 5 – 7 pm
Lecture & Discussion
Room 2-135
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The Society of Architectural Historians is a scholarly society engaged in new digital publishing ventures. The Society’s archive of visual content (SAHARA) launched one year ago. The goals of SAHARA are to change scholarly modes of analyzing architecture; to develop new online publication types that will help to make digital publishing equal to print publishing; and to create new kinds of editorial roles. Ann will discuss the development of SAHARA and the changes this digital publishing venture are aiming to make.
About the speaker:

Ann Whiteside is an architecture and visual images librarian, with a focus on descriptive metadata and digital library collection building and the use of technology to support teaching and research . Her experience includes the development of metadata element sets and guidelines, planning for production and delivery of digital content, and oversight and management of digital image collections and other digital content. Ann is co-editor of “Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Works and their Images” (CCO, a data content standard. She is also a consultant for digital image projects, and is an advisory committee member for projects related to digital imaging and image management. Ann is currently Project Director for SAHARA, a grant funded project of the Society of Architectural Historians. SAHARA.

For more information:
web http://hyperstudio.mit.edu
617-253-4312

HyperStudio Talk: Re-imagining the Archive

Re-imagining the Archive: ACT’s Future Archive Project
Alise Upitis (MIT-ACT) and Madeleine Clare Elish (MIT-CMS and HyperStudio)

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Thursday, April 22, 12:30 – 2 pm
Lecture, lunch and discussion.
Room E15-238 (de Rothschild Room)
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What is the best way to create a living archive? How can we make archiving part of the creative process? How are the processes of artists and scholars similar? And how can digital tools facilitate creative and research processes?

In 2009, the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) began work on its Future Archive Project, an unprecedented archival project encompassing material from the archive of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies–a site for artist fellowships at MIT from 1967 until 2009–together with material from current and future ACT artist-fellows, professors and students. Now in the first stages of a multi-year endeavor, the Future Archive Project seeks to digitize much of this material for access through an online platform that can enable connections between materials from these artists past, present and future and support the active production, preservation, and investigation of artists’ process-related documentation.

This lecture will focus on the institutional and conceptual context of the Future Archive Project. At the beginning of this project, HyperStudio conducted a case study of the Future Archive Project. Madeleine Clare Elish will discuss the research conducted by HyperStudio and its implications for other Digital Humanities projects. Drawing on materials from the archive of CAVS, the context of MIT and the broader framework of arts teaching and production in US higher education since 1960, Alise will offer a historical point of entry to current discussions concerning artistic practice as a mode of research and knowledge production.

During the discussion period following the presentations, members of the MIT community will be encouraged to give feedback on the future development of the project.

About the speakers:

Alise Upitis is currently a visiting scholar in ACT. With the invaluable support and expertise of the MIT Libraries, she is involved in the first stages of the Future Archive Project–which has included great progress in inventorying, preserving and increasing access to materials in the CAVS archive. Alise is also working with ACT courses to introduce materials from the CAVS archive as a means for understanding artists’ varied approaches to creative productions. Alise received her PhD from MIT’s department of architecture in 2008, where her dissertation concerned how an emerging practice of and imagination surrounding computers altered architecture and design theory and pedagogy at MIT and in the context of higher education in the UK and Germany following the Second World War. She has worked as assistant curator at the Las Vegas Art Museum, and recently organized the screening of Cyprien Gaillard’s Pruitt Igoe-Falls for the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Her most recent publication is included in the edited volume Computational Constructs: Architectural Design, Logic and Theory.

Madeleine Clare Elish is currently a research assistant for HyperStudio as well as a second year Master’s student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department, completing her thesis about the construction of personal computers as evocative objects during 1980s. Within the emerging field of Digital Humanities, she is interested in the role of design and visual epistemology in online digital environments. Madeleine graduated with a degree in Art History from Columbia University, and has worked for Whitney Museum of American Art, the contemporary art gallery Gavin Brown’s enterprise and interned at NPR’s On the Media. Next year, she will return to Columbia University as a doctoral candidate in their Anthropology department.

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SAVE THE DATE

Ann Whiteside on SAHARA
Wednesday, May 5, 5 – 7 pm
Lecture and discussion.
Room 2-135
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For more information:
http://hyperstudio.mit.edu
617-253-4312