listening to repeating

On Friday, Nov. 21st, in Mary Gates Hall 420 (UW-Seattle Campus), from 2:30 to 4:00pm, Matt Wilson and I will be leading an Information School research conversation on the digital humanities and our curriculum design.  If you are a UW student, staff, or faculty, then drop by if you have the time and are interested!  Given the conversation is part of the I-school’s research conversation series, we’ll be focusing particularly on humanities computing and its relation to information science.

Here’s the info:

TITLE: “Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities: Mapping the University”

ABSTRACT:

How might digital humanities curricula synthesize the acquisition of technical skills with critical practices? Motivated by this question, our 2008-09 Huckabay Teaching project not only explores the implementation of new technologies in humanistic inquiry, but also the social implications of that implementation. In English and the Comparative History of Ideas, students are trained to examine and critique the ways in which technology is culturally embedded, how it influences aesthetics, and how it shapes our understanding of the humane. However, these same students rarely have the opportunity to learn the technical skills required to produce the very objects they study. In Geography, there is a similar trajectory, yet in the opposite direction: students often learn technical skills in geographic information systems (GIS) without becoming well-versed in qualitative or critical GIS, fields that consider technology to be value-laden. As such, we are designing a digital humanities curriculum that would ask undergraduates to use mobile technologies to collaboratively compose an interactive, digital map of the University of Washington, Seattle, and then write academic essays that analyze technology’s role in the production of that map and the values it represents. By synthesizing technical skills with critical practices, the curriculum would allow UW students and faculty to: (1) implement a new, next-generation authoring tool for collecting and archiving information, (2) pursue sustainable forms of collaborative, digital scholarship, (3) become more familiar with how to use mobile technologies for pedagogical purposes and experiential learning, and (4) develop a complex, participatory geospatial representation of the University.

BIOS:

JENTERY SAYERS is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English and teaches computer-integrated courses situated in the digital humanities and science and technology studies. As the recipient of the 2008 Kairos Computers and Writing Teaching Award, as well as a 2009 UW Science Studies Network Core Organizer and a 2008-09 HASTAC Scholar, Sayers is invested not only in historicizing technology in particular cultural contexts, but also exploring the ways that it can be mobilized through creative, critical and collaborative projects. His dissertation attends to how technology is culturally embedded in 19th and 20th century Anglo-American literature, with particular emphasis on sound technologies and their relation to print. In Spring 2009, he will teach, “Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities: Mapping the University,” which is the subject of this conversation.

MATTHEW WILSON is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. His research is situated across the disciplines of political geography, science studies, and technoculture studies, particularly as these interface with a more specific field called ‘critical geographic information systems’. He is interested in how geographic information technologies enable particular neighborhood assessment endeavors, and how these kinds of geocoding activities mobilize notions of ‘quality-of-life’ and ‘sustainability’. His dissertation research concentrates at the intersections of several phenomena, namely the energies with which nonprofit and community organizations approach neighborhood quality-of-life issues, the increased role that geographic information technologies have in addressing this kind of indicator work, as well as the increased geocoding of city spaces more generally. As an instructor with the UW Extension GIS Certificate program, he lectures on principles of cartography and cartographic critique. He also serves as the editorial assistant for a journal, Social & Cultural Geography.

Here we go again with geolocation and the like.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve been working through the limits of location—how to undo, in a sense, a lot of the work I did for two years on the politics of location, longitude, and latitude.  The reason for this switch, I think, is that I’m realizing how an emphasis on location and position largely ignores movement and assemblage.  It’s not that I want to toss out location altogether; it’s that I want to account for, as Matthew Fuller writes, “how this becomes that.”

Enter Alfred North Whitehead and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  That is, don’t mistake the abstract for the concrete.  Fuller writes a bit about this fallacy in Media Ecologies, and I just want to expand upon that writing a tad here.  It seems that misplaced concreteness is largely attributed to the naturalization of space and systems in order to render them homogeneous.  And as Fuller points outs in his chapter, “How This Becomes That,” this homogeneity breaks down when objects AND their systems resist isolation—when objects become processes and when systems conjoin with other systems.

Fair enough.

It seems to me, then—and this is likely obvious to most people in, say, geography and science studies—that the objectification or neutralization of latitude and longitude and their status as data is one way of making the abstract concrete.  “I am standing EXACTLY right here.”  This claim is not to say that longitude and latitude are simply relative.  Rather, the question is how you got EXACTLY THERE in the first place.  Or, perhaps, how the abstract BECAME concrete.

That said, I’ve come to realize that, in teaching a politics of (geo)location through something like geoblogging, I’ve been pretty solid at prompting inquiry into the context of any given media form and situation.  For instance: When, where, and from what position did you take the photograph, and how does that context influence your (and others’) interpretations of the photo?”  Such questions often lead to more questions about representation.

What I haven’t prompted are inquiries into how media forms and situations come to be—the “how did you get there?” and, ostensibly, the “where and when did you go?” questions.  In other words, I’ve been treating media such as digital photographs as stills and, indeed, as isolated in time and space, able to be fixed and geolocated.  This is the serialization of movement.

What’s next?  Re-reading Cinema 1, it seems.  And then re-prompting, adding movement to location.

More soon…

Kairos 12.2 is now online, and there you will find “Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University” by Curtis Hisayasu and me. Per the co-editors’ comments:

In “Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University,” by Curtis Hisayasu and Jentery Sayers, the authors contend that when composition instructors learn to include new information technologies in their coursework, they expand the writing classroom beyond its traditional borders. Using “geoblogging” as a means, they argue that a pedagogy based on the virtual university can be used to construct writing scenarios that both include and go beyond the academy—that, in essence, address the impact of context and location on student writing. They intend to “disrupt the very terms that create distance between the official and the everyday” and to show how geolocational approaches, as through the interactive maps presented in the webtext, can provide students with “complex, process-based writing situations” that contexualize analytical thinking and writing “by mapping them as practices onto a larger socio-cultural landscape.” Located at the University of Washington, the Geoblogging Project is in its early stages, yet it offers a rich theoretical discussion and practical prompts for student writing in both the outlined mapping strategies and the geoblogs themselves.

Also included in issue 12.2 is my review of “Digitial Media Studies in Detroit,” a panel at Comptuers and Writing 2007.

Enjoy!