Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, “The Yellow Line and the Experience of Militarized Vision as Augmented Reality”

In this talk, I examine the media genealogy and cultural ramifications of the virtual yellow first-down line seen on televised U.S. football broadcasts: 1st and Tenâ. The progress and popularity of the 1st and Ten line is inextricable from its developer Sportvision’s commercial roots in military simulation and GPS design. Imbricating technics from military visualization, global positioning systems, and digital mapping, Sportvision’s renovation of televised sport is an urgent, overlooked site for humanities-based analysis. Drawing from theorists Caren Kaplan and Judith Butler, I trace how the yellow-line technology has produced a targeted specular experience of football—a sport with a historical relationship to military education, and an explicit focus on territory and ground measurement—and led to the proliferation of digitally mediated augmented reality in sports televisualization. Extending Butler’s argument that the operation of cameras cannot be comprehended apart from their technicity as “part of the very apparatus of bombing,” I argue that the operation of cameras in targeting a football game is further militarized through the precision targeting of the yellow line. By augmenting the reality of the football field, such that the intelligibility of a multitude of persons, events, and movements are focused around a digital representation, Sportvision’s technology trains viewers to interpret the world of play according to an epistemology of target optics. Although the view of the camera and the broadcast production overdetermines the narrative and plasticity of the field of play, augmented reality supplants even the camera’s authority to direct attention, covertly reshaping the material infrastructure of sports, transfiguring the visualization of football, and militarizing the viewing habits of millions.

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins is an Assistant Professor in Comics Studies at The University of Oregon Department of English. Her work examines comics and visual media as tools for rethinking world literature and remapping transnational media flows. She is interested in decolonial and feminist methodologies for research and teaching. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Media Fields, Studies in Comics, and a number of anthologies. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from UC Santa Barbara.

Presentation Slides (link)

Tamara F. O’Callaghan and Andrea R. Harbin, “AR and the Humanities: Augmenting the Text” (presented by Tamar F. O’Callaghan)

Although the sciences currently incorporate Virtual Reality (VR) and particularly Augmented Reality (AR) for innovative and immersive pedagogy, the humanities have yet to adopt these new technologies as broadly and effectively. Our presentation will explore what AR offers the humanities with particular attention to the teaching of literature using AR-enhanced texts.

Too often, modern readers bring with them assumptions about the literary works they read and the cultures that produced them, and many, if not most, of these assumptions are inaccurate. In teaching these texts, we must consider the transactional nature of the student’s encounter with the text. What does the student know about the text and context, what does she yet need to learn, and how do we help her to engage with these texts in a fruitful manner? AR-enhanced texts offer a mode of engagement with literary works that is at once more student-inquiry driven and more akin to a reading experience culturally attuned to the text. For example, older literature frequently offered a multimodal experience for its contemporary readers. Texts might be read aloud and even illustrated with images that commented upon the narrative itself. With modern print editions, the written word alone is privileged, and the aural and artistic elements elided. AR-enhanced texts offer a recovery of some of these elements, such as sound, material culture, and socio-historical context, thereby providing a student with a deeper understanding of the text and in a way that is driven by the student’s own inclination.

Tamara F. O’Callaghan is a Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University where she teaches medieval literature, history of the English language, introductory linguistics, and the digital humanities. She received a Ph.D. in medieval studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, with a specialization in Middle English and Old French literature and medieval manuscript studies. She has published on John Gower’s poetry, manuscript illuminations in the Confessio Amantis, Old French literature, and the digital humanities.

Currently, she co-directs The Augmented Palimpsest project, a digital humanities tool that explores how the medium of Augmented Reality can be used in teaching medieval literature. Using Chaucer’s General Prologue, the tool delivers digital enhancements that emerge from the printed page via a smart device. This project has been supported by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (2014-16). She has presented on this project at a number of conferences, including the New Chaucer Society Congress (2014 and 2016) and MLA Convention (2016), as well as given an invited talk and workshop at Stanford University (2016). In addition, she has co-authored a peer-reviewed journal article and two peer-reviewed book chapters on the project and the use of Augmented Reality in the humanities.

Andrea R. Harbin is an Associate Professor of English and department chair at the State University of New York, Cortland where she teaches medieval literature, history of English, Shakespeare, and the digital humanities.  She has worked as a digital humanist since 1998 as curator/editor of NetSERF, an Internet Database of Medieval Studies. She received a Ph.D. in Medieval English literature, specializing in medieval drama, from The Catholic University of America and has published articles on the digital humanities and medieval drama.

Currently, she co-directs The Augmented Palimpsest project, a digital humanities tool that explores how the medium of Augmented Reality can be used in teaching medieval literature. Using Chaucer’s General Prologue, the tool delivers digital enhancements that emerge from the printed page via a smart device. This project has been supported by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (2014-16). She has presented on this project at a number of conferences, including the New Chaucer Society Congress (2014), MLA Convention (2016), and Keystone DH (2016), as well as given an invited talk and workshop at Stanford University (2016). In addition, she has co-authored a peer-reviewed journal article and two peer-reviewed book chapters on the project and the use of Augmented Reality in the humanities.

Presentation Slides (PDF)

Amanda Licastro, “Can VR be used to teach empathy?”

This presentation will describe a scalable approach to integrating VR into the undergraduate curriculum in order to gage the level of empathy evoked in participants. As a part of a grant-funded initiative at a regional university, the speaker teaches English courses engaged in project-based, collaborative learning by creating educational VR applications. Throughout the semester students read fictional and theoretical texts focused on the impact of technology on education, the development of virtual identities, and empathy more broadly. Texts include Ready Player One, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, R.U.R, and The Nether, which correspond to the theoretical works of Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Lennard Davis, and Cathy Davidson. Students also experience a range of VR applications and are given pre and post-surveys in order to gauge the impact of the VR content on their learning and their empathetic response. As a final project, students pitch their ideas for socially relevant VR experience intended to both teach their audience a specific set of learning objectives as well as evoke empathy in the viewer. Students consult with experts in the field at all stages of the process, including VR developers, faculty across disciplines, and librarians. The presenter will demonstrate how these final project represent the impact of VR on humanities pedagogy.  Preliminary survey results will be shared, in addition to a discussion of how successfully the approach cultivated empathy.

Amanda Licastro, PhD is the Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Faculty Director of Service-Learning at Stevenson University in Maryland, as well serving on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and the Executive Council of the MLA. Her research explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities. Publications include articles in Kairos, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Communication Design Quarterly, as well as a forthcoming chapter on social annotation in Blurred Lines: Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies published by Routledge. Her current grant-funded project on Virtual Reality was awarded the Paul Fortier Prize at the 2017 Digital Humanities conference, and has been featured in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Magazine.

Presentation Slides (link)

Victoria Szabo, Chair

Victoria Szabo is an Associate Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke University, where she leads the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and directs the graduate program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures.  She currently leads two collaborative, grant-funded Digital Humanities Institutes, the “Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D Geospatial Networks” Institute, sponsored by the Getty Foundation, and the “Virtual and Augmented Reality Digital Humanities Institute (V/AR-DHI),” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both projects are focused on fostering critical engagement with 3D and XR to scholarship, developing theoretical and technical best practices, and building an interdisciplinary community around these topics. Her special interests are in location-based augmented reality experiences in complex environments, immersive non-linear narration systems, and computational media arts. She is the secretary and incoming chair of the Transdisciplinary Connections: Digital Humanities Forum (D046) at the MLA. For more info: http://vszabo.net