Current Activities and Announcements:
- Fall 2019 Teaching (and other activities)
Great news! I’ve been promoted to Full Research Professor! This semester I’m taking a break from teaching classes to focus on next steps for project work (Digital Durham, Visualizing Cities, Psychasthenia Studio, and a new project, Visualizing Lovecraft!). I’m also writing up some grant reports and getting ready to apply for new ones.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on the development of the interdepartmental major between Computer Science and Visual and Media Studies. We hope to get it in front of the Curriculum Committee this Fall. It is exciting to bring some of the CMAC magic of the PhD and the MA to the undergrad programs! Many students have been doing this ad hoc, but now we can create more accessible pathways into this kind of work.
Meanwhile, the Digital Humanities Initiative is going strong. The PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge will still be continuing this year (with Phil Stern and me at the helm) at the FHI, as well the NCCU-Duke DH Fellows program. And I will continue to work with undergrad and grad students on their theses and dissertations, so I shouldn’t become too out of touch!
Continue reading → - Venice, Padua, Utrecht, Krakow, Warsaw, Grinnell, Pittsburgh, and LA!
Summer 2019 was one of those summers where the timing worked out, but the sanity may have been in question. After teaching year 2 of the DAH Venice/Getty workshop, several of us headed to Padua for a Visualizing Cities Symposium where Cosimo Monteleone and I gave everyone a first glimpse at our plans for Visualizing Lovecraft. I’m very excited to be going back to Padua as a Visiting Scientist in December to continue our work!
We also headed out to Krakow to begin work with Paul Jaskot and other Wired Lab/Visualizing Cities partners. We are thinking about how to visualize the WW2 era Ghetto and Camps, building upon the work we did in Venice around the history of the Ghetto there, but in a very different context and with much more recent materials. A couple of us got further inspiration from the Polin Museum in Warsaw. The question of monuments and memory carries through from Venice but also from the work we have been doing for years with Digital Durham, and which feels a greater sense of urgency given the monument discussions happening in the South.
Next I went to Utrecht where I presented on a VARDHI-related panel with some colleagues from the Institute and other fellow travelers. My talk was about evaluation practices for XR scholarship. Our group will continue to work on this question over the course of the coming year. After that I went to the first ACH conference in Pittsburgh – via Iowa, where I gave a keynote talk on AR at the ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest) Symposium on XR in teaching- and then on to Pittsburgh to talk Psychasthenia! (Great new conference from the ACH folks.)
Then finally off to SIGGRAPH 2019 in Los Angeles, where we showcased the Urgency of Reality in a Hyper-Connected Age online exhibition curated by Dena Eber in partnership with the DAC team. As Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (different ACM! This is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), I work in partnership with our brilliant committee and the wider SIGGRAPH Arts community.
While sometimes it can feel a little like whiplash to go from the DH world to the computational media arts and computer graphics worlds, we all share a deep engagement with how the digital turn is transforming how we study, create, analyze, engage, critique. More to come!
Continue reading → - Spring 2019 Teaching
For Spring 2019 my teaching consists of the ISS Capstone and a series of independent studies with graduate and undergrad students. I am also busy getting reading for year 2 of our summer institute on Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks and the followup on the V/AR-DHI Institute.
Continue reading → - Recap of the Getty/DAH Summer Institute on Iris Blog
Our collective piece for the Getty Blog has appeared!
Lots of info about our summer institute, the projects people have undertaken, and the continuing trajectory of our work together!
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- Decomposing the Disciplines at Jacobs University
On November 9, 2018 I had the distinct pleasure of returning to Jacobs University to present during a colloquium called “Bildung Beyond Boundaries, Part II: Beyond the Discipline. Academic Innovations and the Role of Inter and Trans Disciplinarity.” Duke has had a connection to Jacobs for number of years through the Visual Studies Initiative, and I have had the pleasure of serving on 3 PhD committees for students who were enrolled in the innovative VisComX PhD at Jacobs. My talk was called “How to Decompose Disciplines Best: Project Based Learning with Visualizing Cities.” I really liked the play on “decompose” – which in US English might have a slightly different association than it did for this international audience. As one does, I went back to the dictionary to think about decomposition in the form of a prism, which gave me an excellent opportunity to bring a rainbow into the conversation! I was also interviewed for a podcast about the subject. I really appreciate the international and committed community at Jacobs – a small place doing great things.
Continue reading →
- Executive Committee of the Academic Council
Well, I’ve been elected to ECAC – the Executive Committee of the Academic Council – for a two year term. I’m honored to participate in faculty governance in this way – it is going to be a lot of work, but also quite rewarding and interesting to learn more about how the university operates! A bit of a switch from being on the other side of the presentations for our MA and PhD programs…
Continue reading → - Year 2 of North Carolina Central U-Duke DHI Fellows Program
We just launched year 2 of the North Carolina Central University/Duke University Digital Humanities Fellows program.
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This project is sponsored by the Humanities Writ Large initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and supports the ongoing effort to connect with and support faculty in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The new group of Fellows are interested both in project-based teaching opportunities for undergraduates and in establishing archive-oriented research projects. Digital storytelling was a recurring theme for our introductory workhop on August 16. We provided an overview of various Digital Humanities tools and topics and went into greater depth on Omeka and various web tools for timelines, storymaps etc. NCCU will be launching their own Digital Humanities Lab this Fall; we hope our next meeting will be in their new facility. - Psychasthenia 3 at EVA London
I presented the latest art-game in Joyce Rudinsky and my Psychasthenia 3 series, “Dupes,” at EVA London on July 12, 2017.
This version of the game explores the relationship of contemporary HR practices to an increasingly gamified experience of contemporary culture. For the session I presented a walk through of the current game and talked through some of our underlying themes and challenges. We had a fruitful discussion about how to present it as an installation-based work in the coming months.
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- Ca’ Foscari affiliation
Just got the official word that I’m officially a Visiting Professor at Ca’ Foscari in Venice. This is an honor and a very nice opportunity to connect further with people and resources there.
All of which also reminds me: the Wired Lab etc. really need to create a seal.
Continue reading →
- Talk at the SE Music Librarians Association Conference
Continue reading →On Friday, October 21 I’ll be presenting with Trudi Abel at the Southeast Music Librarians Association (SEMLA) conference held at Duke University. We’ll be talking about NC Jukebox and getting expert advice from this group on how to move forward with the project.Since I’m teaching in Venice I’ll be Skyping in to a conference held at my own institution! Hoping I’ll be able to catch some of the other session from afar too. 
