News and Updates

On September 1, 2016 the NC Jukebox exhibition at Rubenstein will be officially opening! This exhibit showcases some of the analog source materials being used for the digital archive project. It has been great to work with original media objects on this -all that AURA. Trudi Abel and Meghan O’Neil and I put the pieces ...

We publicly announced the new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge Fellows for 2016 on August 23, 2016. This heterogenous group of grad students from various departments and programs will work with Co-Directors Phil Stern, History, David Bell, ...

From August 19-21st we kicked off the NCCU-Duke Digital Humanities Fellows program. This is supported by Mellon Humanities Futures and was undertaken as an activity connected to the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative.  I co-taught the kickoff workshop with the help of my colleague Hannah Jacobs, who shared some of her tutorials on timelines, maps, and online ...

The Digital Humanities Initiative website at Duke soft-launched on August 18, 2016. We are continuing to develop the project profiles and other resources on the site, but it is exciting to see it in place. Tremendous ...

I hadn’t planned to go this year (after a number of years running volunteering for the conference) because I was doing so much traveling this year, but I got the happy news that I’d ...

I had the fantastic opportunity to attend DH 2016 in Krakow this year. I had never been to Central/Eastern Europe, which, considering my ancestors come from the region, seemed overdue. It was wonderful to ...

I had the opportunity to teach the VV Summer Workshop version 5.0 this year. I was joined by my colleagues from the Wired Lab, Mark Olson, Hannah Jacobs, Ed Triplett along with Ludovica Galeazzo, ...

I’m honored to be joining the HASTAC Steering Committee! HASTAC and Duke have enjoyed a close relationship over the years, as Cathy Davidson, one of the co-founders, was at Duke at the time it was created. HASTAC also partners with the Franklin Humanities Institute on the PhD Lab for Digital Knowledge, founded by ...

Huge achievement this year: we got the interdisciplinary, interdepartmental PhD in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures approved in May by the Board of Trustees. A collaboration between AAHVS, Literature, and the Franklin Humanities Institute, and with the support of the Mellon Foundation, this is a novel and inovative program in many ...

In Fall 2016 I will be teaching two courses at Venice International University, through their Globalization Program. I’ve returned to VIU for the last five years co-teaching the Visualizing Venice summer workshops, and also taught at ...

In Spring 2017 I will be teaching two Capstones – for the Visual and Media Studies Major in Art, Art History & Visual Studies and for the Information Science + Studies Certificate Program. Both courses will meet concurrently, with two sections total.

I will also be consulting on the NC Jukebox course, which ...

Looking forward to sharing the NC Jukebox project at HASTAC in Tempe, AZ and at DH2016 in Krakow!

https://hastac2016.sched.org/event/6DtD/achives-alive-activating-the-north-carolina-jukebox

DH2016

HASTAC is always a great experience, of course.  I’m also exceptionally excited for the ...

More fun at College Art Association! I’m co-chairing a session with my collaborator Joyce Rudinsky on “Procedural Art: Game Platforms for Creative Expression” at CAA in a few weeks. This session is part of the New Media Caucus offerings at the conference:

http://conference.collegeart.org/programs/procedural-art-game-platforms-for-creative-expression/

PROCEDURAL ART: GAME PLATFORMS FOR CREATIVE EXPRESSION

Time: 02/05/2016, 3:00 PM—5:00 PM
Location: Thurgood Marshall ...

In a couple of weeks I will be leading a session called “Digital Cultural Heritage as Public Humanities Collaboration” at the College Art Association’s annual conference in Washington DC. We have a fantastic panel of presenters who will share their projects in a “project fair” and then we will switch over to a ...

The NC Jukebox project was renewed within the Bass Connections Information, Society, and Culture theme. We are also supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute. This means we will be able to develop our exhibitions at the Rubenstein Library and in Western NC further this summer, and to offer another class in Spring 2017. Trudi Abel ...

We are hosting several info sessions for the STEAM Challenge, which is thematized around “Digital Humanities” this year as part of the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. The initial project proposal deadline is February 1, 2016. Members of the STEAM Challenge Advisory Board will be on hand ...

Great news! CLIR funded the Rubenstein Library’s Hidden Collections grant to digitize the rest of the Frank Clyde Brown collection of wax cylinders and aluminum disks. These recordings of western NC singers and songs from the early ...

Just announced that I’m the new co-director, with Robert Calderbank, of the Bass Connections: Information, Society, and Culture theme. This is pretty exciting because it brings together a lot of my interests. Given that the Information Science + Studies Program Certificate is also the Bass ISC Certificate, and that I’m working ...

I will not be teaching courses in Spring 2016 as I will be on leave working on augmented reality research projects and reading upon the latest theories and possibilities for augmenting the public presence of the humanities through digital cultural heritage application development. In addition, I will continue to develop the Bass Connections NC Jukebox ...

In Summer 2016 I’m very pleased to be co-teaching the Visualizing Venice summer workshops again. This year’s theme will be the 500th Anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. I’ll be working on some Venice AR projects in Spring 2016 in anticipation of the workshop, as well as developing the curriculum with our team in ...

Excited to announce the new Duke STEAM Challenge, which is co-sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, the Digital Humanities Initiative at FHI, and Information Science + Information Studies, along with support from Innovation and Entrepreneurship, HASTAC at Duke and more. The STEAM Challenge is a competition for students to bring ...

We had a great start to the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Digital Humanities Initiative launch. Faculty, staff, and graduate students from a wide range of disciplines gave lightning talks on their work. Video coming soon.

DHI ...

I recently wrote a book review for American Studies on Matthew Jockers’ Macroanalysis and on Peter Swirski’s From Literature to Literature. Very interesting juxtaposition of texts that left me simultaneously jazzed and anxious. Not a bad place to be.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2886331

In Fall 2015 I am teaching two classes:

HCVIS 580S/ISIS 580S/VMS 580S: Historical and Cultural Visualization Promseminar 1

This course is the first semester proseminar for the Wired MA in Historical and Cultural Visualization. The whole course is basically about the idea of data in the humanities, and about how “digital humanities” can become multimodal. ...

The ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Special Issue of Leonardo is out! I was the guest editor for Art Papers and it includes six exciting essays chosen by a fantastic team of jurors. SIGGRAPH is always a great experience because it brings together a diverse range of folks from ...

Kristin Lanzoni, Mark Olson and I recently published an article in Artl@s about the Wired! lab projects. This gives a nice overview of the range of approaches we take, in particular how we tie together teaching and research to develop our own brand of digital art history.

http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss1/3/

This Spring we began preparation for the NC Jukebox project, a Bass Connections/Information, Society, and Culture and FHI jointly sponsored project. The project is focused on the Frank Clyde Brown collection of wax cylinder recordings of NC Mountain Music.

In Spring 2015 I am teaching two courses:

ISIS 495S: Information Science + Information Studies Research Capstone, where we create a group project together. The Spring project is Durham Stories, a website and AR app hosted in Layar.

Kristin Lanzoni and I gave a talk, “Wired Approaches to Digital Scholarship” at Temple University on October 21, 2014. We each presented a part of an essay we wrote with Mark Olson about the Visualizing Venice and Wired Lab projects.

I gave a paper called “Augmented Humanities Practice: the Fluid Site of Annotation” at SLSA in Dallas, October 9-12, 2014. It was great to see all those watery metaphors activated across the various panels!

This Fall I’m teaching two fun courses. The first, “Digital Cities and the Cartographic Imagination,” is something I taught last year in Venice. It feels rich and luxurious to have all these local resources at our disposal to make Durham our “lab” once again for the hands-on bits. Venice is fantastic, but so is having ...

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Barcelona and give a two-day workshop and public presentation on digital mapping and augmented reality for the Autonomous University in Barcelona. They have a very interesting and innovative landscape and history MA program.

Visualizing Venice Summer Workshops 2014 June 20, 2014

I spent a couple of days in Padua between sessions of the Visualizing Venice workshops back in June, giving talks with the ever-inspiring Caroline Bruzelius on “The lives of places and cities: New models of representation and their conceptual implications for the past and present.” Saw fantastic colleagues and met students in the crossover architectural ...

This Spring I taught two courses. The first, Media History: Old and New, is a favorite because I get to delve back into all sorts of historic media in the process of talking about cultural resonances between c. 19 exhibition culture and the contemporary digital context. The repeated utopian/dystopian narratives and supernatural reaches are definitely ...

I am at MLA 2014 teaching a workshop on “Digital Mapping and Augmented Reality” for DHCommons. Slides here. I am also convening a workshop for the MLA Committee on Information Technology on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Candidate Success Stories.” This is my last year on the committee but I hope ...

Great news! Our proposed MA in Historical and Cultural Visualization has been approved by the Board of Trustees. I am one of the core faculty members and will be teaching Pro-Seminar II: Duke will begin accepting applications now for Fall 2014 enrollment.

DRAFT COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Historical and Cultural Visualization Proseminar 2
Spring Semesters
By Permission

Theories ...

I am headed to Chicago for a double-header: MLA 2014 and then a visit to the University of Chicago where I’ll join colleagues and graduate students in Art History & English talking about how historical and cultural visualization techniques can enhance research.

I had a great time teaching at Venice International University. Amazing set of colleagues and students from around the world.  Plus, I took Italian!

My courses were called “Digital Cities and the Cartographic Imagination” and “Foundations of Web-Based Multimedia Communications.” Check out the final student project demo video on Vimeo!

Tim Senior, Florian Wiencek and I did a short paper describing our experiences with the Digital Cities course co-located between Duke and Jacobs University in Germany. Tim is going to deliver it for us at the Digital Heritage International Congress 2013 in Marseille. Sadly, I need to be back in the states at that ...

The XYZN: Scale gallery went up at SIGGRAPH 2013 in Anaheim! Catalog is available as a special issue of Leonardo.  The works are also visible online on the SIGGRAPH site for that year. I gave a guided tour video on-site for the press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l26Mx1T2z08

I was pretty proud of the video ...

I organized the XYZN: Scale gallery at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference held in Anaheim CA in July. The catalog is published as part of a special issue of MIT’s Leonardo.

Check out the Promo Video for ...

In June 2013 I co-taught a workshop on historical and cultural visualization techniques for an international set of graduate students interested in art, architectural, and urban history. (We also did a workshop in 2012 on the Waters of Venice.)

Our final projects were presented as video, interactive timelines, websites, and augmented reality installations. Check ...

In Fall 2013 I will be teaching at Venice International University in Venice, Italy. Please see the VIU site for details:

http://www.univiu.org/shss/globalization-program/fall-2013-semester

My little tweet got picked for Google Glass! I will be trying the system out this summer and bringing to Venice in Fall 2013 to experiment with it as an augmented reality device. More soon as I find out what it can do.

Update: putting some observations online at http://glasshappy.net.

The collaborative computer-games driven art project, Psychasthenia 2, will be presented as an installation at the New Media Currents 2013 exhibition in Sante Fe, NM from June 14 – 30, 2013. We have set up a little “treatment room” for our clients to enter when they interact with the project. I am especially proud of ...

After two years, Tim Lenoir, Kate Hayles and I are wrapping up the FHI GreaterThanGames: Transmedia Applications, Virtual Worlds, and Digital Storytelling Lab. This lab was a temporary formation designed to jump-start collaborations across various groups and disciplinary boundaries. Please see our GTG web archive for more info on our work.  Thanks to ...

My collaborator Joyce Rudinsky and I put together an augmented reality experience for the College Art Association conference  in NYC, which took place in February 2013. This project is set in the New York Hilton, and mimics a text adventure in its simple branching structure. It is activated from a image released at the conference ...

ISIS 200: Research Capstone

Senior-level course for students enrolled in the Information Science + Information Studies Undergraduate Certificate. The semester project will be announced soon!

First meeting will be in Smith Warehouse Bay 12, Room 228, on Wednesday, January 11, 2012. Subsequent meetings will take place in 228 and in the GreaterThanGames Lab in Smith Warehouse, ...

AT MLA 2012 I’ll be presenting on a panel I organized called Digital Humanities versus New Media. The topic of my presentation is “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies.” (See also Stanley Fish’s recent NYT Opinionator piece that mentions our session.)

I’ll also be helping with the pre-conference ...

Digital Scholarly Communication – Notes from the Wired! Lab for Digital Historical Visualization, HASTAC V Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, December 02, 2011. Panel presentation with Mark Olson, Elizabeth Baltes, and Erica Sherman in Ann Arbor, MI. My part of the talk is represented by slides 13-16 in the slidedeck from our panel ...

Recent event at UNC-Chapel Hill:

HGIS Carolina Presents:
Historical GIS and the Digital Humanities: A Conversation at the Intersection
Friday, November 18, 2011
2PM, Davis 214 (Davis Library on UNC-CH Campus)

Panelists:
Victoria Szabo (Duke)
Richard Marciano (UNC)
Pam Lach (UNC)

Moderator:
Susanna Lee (NC State)

“This will be the event of the year for historical GIS and digital ...

Wired! at Lunch series presentation on current research projects and future directions. This presentation combined my interest in the affordances of digital media authorship with the potential for specific interventions around an historic exhibition and its associated materials and contexts. Slidedeck PDF.

Deborah Jenson , Victoria Szabo, and the Duke FHI Haiti Humanities Laboratory Student Research Team, Cholera In Haiti and Other Caribbean Regions, 19th Century, edited by Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 17 no. 11 (November, 2011) http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1711.110958.) . I was the second author, and the primary author ...

Gaming the Real: The Convergence of Maps, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds, Society for Literature, Science & the Arts (SLSA), Kitchener, Ontario, September 16, 2011. Slidedeck here as PDF. SLSA Program.

V.E. Szabo, Augmented SIGGRAPH/Vancouver (August, 2011) (Augmented Reality experience juxtaposing Art Gallery work with local Vancouver sights via an augmented reality browser). See the Layar App on iPhone/iPad and search for SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery.

ISIS 140/AMI 167/VMS 120 (R, ALP, QS)
Foundations of Web-Based Multimedia Communication
Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 228

Introduction to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for beginners, along with basic multimedia production. Primarily a hands-on coding course, with additional materials on information and graphic design principles. Individual and group projects culminate in an individual hand-crafted informational website ...

The Kenan Institute asked me to respond to the following question for their “Good Question” series of brochures circulated around campus and online in Spring 2011:

What happens when we blur the line between what is virtual and what is real, and what are the dangers or opportunities in doing so?

My answer: Full Piece

They also ...

“Writing in 3D: Immersive Virtual Writing as Authorship and Critique”, NC Symposium on the Teaching of Writing, February 05, 2011. Slidedeck PDF. Panelist on “Virtual Worlds: Pedagogies of Play” session.

This live-streamed interview aired on October 30, 2009. The news blurb is linked here.

This was fun to do, but also a bit weird to talk to myself, with only HAL for company…