I teach courses listed under Visual and Media Studies with Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS), an interdisciplinary Certificate program and research center. At the core of my teaching is engagement with digital media forms and their affordances, in theory and in practice, with special attention to spatial and database driven forms. As a literary Victorianist by training, I am also deeply interested in the genealogy of “new” media forms and their historical effects, and how those inheritances impact our current information and media landscape.
Most of my courses combine a critical/historical/theoretical component with hands-on digital project work. I also promote a “lab” model of digital media authorship, where individuals contribute to collaborative work as well as their own individual efforts. Sometimes those collaborations extend well beyond a single course or semester (see my Projects links for examples.)
- Spring 2020 Teaching
It is hard to believe the term is flying by so quickly, but Bookbagging will soon be upon us. I’ll be teaching the optional VMS Capstone and the ISS Capstone together, well as teaming up again with the illustrious Trudi Abel for the next stages of Digital Durham, our ongoing post Bass-Connections project. We are excited to continue the conversations around how he presence of the past lives on, and how we can engage with and represent it while working towards a better a future.
Over at FHI we plan to introduce some “DH in the Disciplines” lunchtime panels to keep the conversation going around evaluation standards. We’ll continue with the NCCU Fellows and PhD Lab as well as reconvene our VARDHI team to talk more about evaluation standards, so it should be a busy semester!
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Continue reading → - 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 → - Summer 2019 Teaching – DH in Lahore and Venice
In May 2019 Hannah Jacobs and I got to work with some faculty from Pakistan in partnership with colleagues at NCCU, organized by Matt Cook, who works in Postcolonial and South Asian Studies and was one of the co-organizers of the NCCU-Duke DH Fellows program sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. We did some online tutorials (very very early in the morning!) around timeline and mapping tools, and some in-person visits when the group came to campus later in the month. Our NCCU friends also got to go on site to Pakistan to provide intensive mentorship. It was great having a chance to talk to wider community of scholars about DH for teaching and research. It is very satisfying to see to build these world-wide DH connections, and for all of us to learn from each other what is possible within our own communities and beyond!
Then we headed off for year 2 of the Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks institute. It was great to see everyone again, and we did a lot of mutual sharing and peer instruction, as well as read about the state of the art of the DAH landscape. Plus the Night Tour of San Marco! The group will continue to connect beyond the Getty grant period for future collaborations. Several of us are presenting together at CAA 2020 and we are working on plans for some joint publications too.
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 → - Fall 2018 Teaching
This Fall I will be teaching two courses:
- ISS 240/VMS 288/AMI 325: Web-Based Multimedia Communications, which we are offering in a hybrid online lecture and live section format for the first time. (I will be doing the lecture parts and coordinating the sections). This course fulfills the Practice component of the Visual and Media Studies BA in Art, Art History & Visual Studies as well as for the Information Science + Studies Certificate.
- HCVIS 580S/VMS 580S/CMAC 580S: Proseminar 1: Historical and Cultural Visualization for our MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media.
I will also continue the Digital Durham and NC Jukebox Bass Connections projects, focusing on the updating and development of our archives websites and derivative cultural heritage apps, as well as helping out on the related collaborative Building Duke project with the Wired Lab. I may take on a few students interested in working on these projects as part of an independent study or as volunteers, with an emphasis on archival research and development of digital assets.
Continue reading → - Starting the New Year: Two Summer Institute Deadlines
Lots of excitement as we start the new year. A couple of deadlines for applications coming up. I’m the primary PI on two Summer 2018 Institutes:
- JAN 5, 2018: Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D Geospatial Networks, June 4-16, 2018 in Venice, Italy. Sponsored by the Getty Foundation.
- JAN 30, 2018: Virtual/Augmented Reality Digital Humanities Institute. July 23-August 3, 2018 in Durham, NC. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In my Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community capacity I just closed the CFP for new curators for online digital art shows co-organized with us. I’ll be opening up a new CFP soon for contributions to an online show called Origins and Journeys to take place at the conference in August 2018. More details soon!
Continue reading → - Spring 2018 Teaching
In Spring 2018 I will be teaching two classes. The Information Science + Studies Capstone, the culminating course of the ISS Certificate is always one of my favorites because we usually do a group project on a topic of shared interest amongst the students.App projects are often popular; I look forward to seeing what we come up with this time around!
I’ll also be co-teaching Digital Durham with my longtime collaborator, Trudi Abel, who leads the Archvies Alive initiative in Rubenstein Library..
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This course is cross-listed in ISS/VMS/HISTORY/EDUCATION and counts as an ISS elective, as well as a VMS elective. We are busy working with our Bass Connections team this Fall to explore new content to integrate into the class, and working closely with Trinity Technology Services and the Library’s Data and Visualization Services to update our infrastructure for the existing Digital Durham website. We also hope to connect with many of the other Durham-themed projects going on around campus and create a portal site to facilitate future collaborations. The course itself will focus on a key period in Durham history – the late 19th to mid-20th-century period industrialization, education, and shifting race relations. We also hope to tie in some of our work on NC Jukebox as it relates specifically to the Durham context. Our work preparing for the two summer institutes, on 3D Geospatial Networks, and on Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Humanities, should also find its way into this work, giving students lots of opportunities to explore how new technologies transform our abilities to to do research, teach, and invoke the presence of the past in contemporary lived experience. - Fall 2017 Teaching
This Fall I’m teaching two courses. The first, Foundations of Web-Based Multimedia Communications, a core offering in the Information Science + Studies Certificate, is a lecture-section course targeted at students interested in learning HTML/CSS/JS from scratch. Students will acquire the building blocks to code their own site, and then finish up with final projects of their own designs. I have a talented team of graduate students from the Computational Media, Arts & Cultures MA and PhD Programs as well as the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. Last time I taught the course was as a seminar in Venice, so it is an interesting challenge to reconceive it as a large lecture class. Fortunately I’m building upon the work my colleagues have done in earlier semesters to explore those possibilities.
The other course is the Proseminar for the MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media. I’m teaching with teh assitance of Hannah Jacobs, Multimedia Analyst for the Wired Lab, and will be inviting in guests from the various Media Labs in Smith Warehouse. We look forward to exploring a wide range of DH and Comp Media topics together.
In addition to my courses, I’ll be meeting with my collaborator Trudi Abel and others on our Bass Connections Digital Durham: Past, Present Future team regularly to make progress on organizing our primary source materials for exhibition projects and a website revamp, as well as with the new crop of fellows in the PhD Lab for Digital Knowledge at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, which I direct with Phil Stern in History. We have 15 Fellows joining us this year!
Continue reading → - Fall 2016: Course Descriptions at Venice International University
Fall courses at VIU begin on Monday! My course descriptions are listed on the VIU website:
Both courses are hands-on, seminar-sized, lab-based courses where the final projects will be related to digital cultural heritage topics. Venice itself is such a complex place and I look forward to seeing how the students engage with it in relation to digital media forms. In “Digital Storytelling” students will have the option of doing their final projects in Italian if they are also enrolled in the Intermediate Italian course – I am coordinating with the instructor on this.
They are also both Information Science + Studies courses back at Duke and count towards the ISS undergraduate Certificate there.
Continue reading → - Fall 2016 Teaching
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 VIU in Fall 2013, so this is a welcome return.I’m very much looking forward to meeting my new colleagues and students!Both courses, Digital Storytelling, and Web-Based Multimedia Communications, are Information Science+Studies/Visual and Media Studies courses at Duke that I will be adapting to the Venetian context. The courses are listed as part of
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the Cultural Heritage Track at VIU, and students will be doing hands-on digital projects related to the heritage of Venice as part of both. We’ll be in VIU’s lovely Mac Lab, which was modeled on the Wired Lab back home. While I’m at VIU I’ll also be developing a book project on augmented reality and cultural heritage, as well as continuing to work on Visualizing Venice digital projects, with which I hope to involve Duke students upon my return. ( I also expect to drop in virtually to the NC Jukebox project, Wired, the PhD Lab etc.at Duke periodically.)
