Thursday, May 17th  | 1:30 p.m. | Harrelson G108 | Workshop

“Your Middle State and the Job Market”

For the Graduate Research Network, I’ll be giving a brief talk on developing web presence (e.g., portfolios) for the academic job market. Rather than simply echoing my ProfHacker piece, my talk will be intended specifically for graduate students in the field of Computers and Writing and will emphasize the importance of “middle-state publications.”

Friday, May 18th | 10 a.m. | Tompkins 123 | Panel

“Whither the Prosumer?: The Creative Economy and Emerging Forms of Scholarly Communication”

Panel Abstract: Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn describes U.S. citizens as Internet “consumers,” separating these consumers from the “creative economy.” She repeatedly uses this binary to distinguish the people who use the Internet from those who create its content. This illustrates a failure to recognize prosumers, those who simultaneously create and access the Internet. The panel will examine prosumption from perspectives ranging from the attention economy to social communities to digital scholarly communication.

“Context-Providers in an Attention Economy” (Jentery Sayers, U of Victoria)

“Folksonomy as Gift: Motivations for Social Tagging” (Noel Radley, Santa Clara U)

“Working in the Bubble Factory: Prosumer Humanists and Scholarshift” (Daniel Anderson, U of North Carolina)

“Prosumers and Algorithmic Truth” (John Jones, West Virginia U)

Sunday, May 20th | 9:00 a.m. | Tompkins 129 | Roundtable

“Hacking the Classroom: A Roundtable of Lightning Talks”

Roundtable Abstract: With hacking in mind, these panelists (who hail from disparate institutions, levels, and disciplines) will briefly engage the following questions: “Why does the higher ed classroom need to be hacked, and how might we hack it?” They will also provide particular examples of their own hacking practices, or their aspirations to hack the classroom at their respective institutions, while addressing some obstacles, enthusiasms, and curiosities encountered along the way.

Virginia Kuhn, U of Southern California

Jim Brown, U of Wisconsin-Madison

Liz Losh, U of California San Diego

Vicki Callahan, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Mary Hocks, Georgia State U

Aimee Knight , St. Joseph’s U

Melanie Yergeau, U of Michigan

Craig Dietrich, U of Southern California

Viola Lasmana, U of Southern California

Introduction and Moderation: Jentery Sayers, U of Victoria

While I will unfortunately not be able to attend this fantastic event, I am proud to say I served as a juror. If, between June 20th and June 23rd, you are anywhere near Morgantown,WV, then I highly recommend participating.

The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, funded by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), seeks a postdoctoral fellow in Modelling and Prototyping, with expertise in Data Modelling and Digital Humanities.

This position is based in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, in partnership with the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. The successful candidate is anticipated to work closely with team members at U Victoria, U Toronto, Acadia U, U Saskatchewan, U Western Ontario, U Guelph, U Alberta, and beyond.

The postdoctoral fellow will work with conceptual data models and new forms of knowledge expression currently under development by INKE, collaborating with INKE’s Modelling and Prototyping team and others, consulting with project stakeholders and potential stakeholders, and liaising with other INKE researchers located in North America and the UK. If interested, then the fellow may also teach a light course load in the Faculty of Humanities and/or Department of English at the University of Victoria, to be remunerated in addition to the fellowship’s salary.

The successful candidate will have skills and aptitudes in humanities-oriented research and data modelling, including training or demonstrated experience working with the Resource Description Framework and/or other conceptual modelling approaches. Organizational skills are essential. Interest and aptitude in research planning and management would be an asset, as would knowledge of TEI P5 and data visualization (e.g., D3 or Gephi). The ability to work in concert with our existing team is a critical requirement.

Examples of technologies employed in INKE projects are as follows: TEI P5; XML, XSLT, XSL and XHTML encoding; XQuery; eXist XML databases; JavaScript; and Ruby on Rails. Experience in some or all technologies in use in INKE-related projects and similar areas would be an asset, but is not a requirement, though hands-on aptitude with—as distinct from merely interest in—digital tools is required.

Our current team members pride themselves on a passionate interest in both the humanities and their computational engagement. Our ideal candidate is someone with similar passions who can introduce the team to new ideas and provide new perspectives on existing digital humanities issues. The salary for this position is competitive in the Canadian context, and is governed in part by SSHRC practices.

Applications comprising a brief cover letter, CV, and the names and contact information for three referees may be sent electronically to jentery@uvic.ca. The contract can begin as early as 1 July 2012; it is for a one-year term, with the possibility of renewal. The position is subject to funding and budgetary approval.

Interviews may be conducted via Skype, or in person at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Waterloo), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Victoria), and other venues at which INKE team members are present. Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled.

Through a media archaeology-esque focus on the design of the telegraphone and its correspondences with fiction, popular magazines, and public demonstrations, the essay historicizes what Matthew Kirschenbaum refers to as a “medial ideology.” In short, I argue that the history of Kirschenbaum’s medial ideology is a history of binding perception to production. From the start (ca. 1878), the inscription-free playback afforded by magnetic recording directed human attention toward the noise-free aesthetics of magnetic media and away from their material particulars. This learned lack of attention to the forensic materiality of magnetic recording allowed engineers and businesspeople as well as writers and consumers to begin articulating strategies for purposeful and measurable listening. Ignoring how exactly sound was inscribed onto magnetic media facilitated quantifiable productivity—a form of productivity not entirely removed from current fascinations with computer screens (where the allure of information often seems detached from its inscription).

Building upon the research I began in my dissertation project, I hope to publish the essay soon.

The conversation following my talk was lively, leaving me with plenty to consider as I continue exploring the intersections of cultural criticism with digital humanities. To be sure, I’m looking forward to future meetings of the DH-Theory Discussion Group during 2012.

As of Sunday, April 22nd, we have eight spots remaining in the workshop, which is scheduled for Saturday, April 28th, 1:30-5 pm, in Spirit Room CD of the Inn at Laurel Point. Should you be interested in participating ($25 per person; checks payable to Victorian Media Conference, University of Victoria), then please do not hesitate to contact me.

Below’s a description of what we’ll be doing. Although you do not have to register for the conference in order to participate in the workshop, I encourage you to peruse the fantastic conference program and consider attending the entire VSAWC event.

UPDATE (May 11, 2012): In PDF, here are the slides from my presentation during the Omeka workshop. Feel free to use them for other workshops, reference, or the like.

“Using Omeka to Exhibit Old Media Online,” Instructor: Jentery Sayers, English, University of Victoria

How do we make a physical collection of old media (e.g., analogue photographs, videos, and audio) publicly available online for discovery, use, and interpretation? How do we translate such a collection into a rich, scholarly exhibit anchored in literary history and culture? And what are best practices for authoring, curating, updating, and preserving online exhibits? Directly addressing these questions, this three-hour workshop gives participants opportunities to test-run Omeka: a free and open-source platform designed specifically for building scholarly exhibits. During the workshop, participants will (in this order) survey existing Omeka exhibits, create a data model for an example exhibit, begin using the Omeka platform, learn the basics of Dublin Core metadata (for discovering media on the web), and discuss techniques for integrating the platform into existing research and teaching practices (with an emphasis on documenting and peer-reviewing digital scholarly communication).

Prior to the workshop, participants are encouraged to review the Omeka showcase of exhibits. To the workshop, they should bring their own laptops and, if they so choose, some digitized content (e.g., images) they would like to exhibit. (Sample content will also be provided by the instructor.) Prior to event, they are also welcome to contact Jentery Sayers with any questions or concerns: jentery@uvic.ca.

Omeka is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

Together with Bianco, Matt Gold (the volume’s editor), Doug Armato (University of Minnesota Press), Liz Losh (UC San Diego), and Stephen Ramsay (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln), I had the wonderful opportunity to present some of my ongoing work in digital pedagogy and digital humanities, including a draft portion of an essay—titled “Drop the Digital”—I hope to publish soon. The essay mobilizes “ruination” (e.g., systematically removing the word “digital” from texts) as a technique for deforming arguments made throughout the Debates volume in order to explore what else digital humanities could be, should do, or might at least consider (with an emphasis on cultural criticism). Aside from traditions in deformance, the essay borrows largely from Kari Kraus’s work on conjectural criticism and in part from Graham Harman’s ruinations of Lingis.

Though lacking context, here are the slides for the brief (ten-minute) pedagogy talk I gave while at Pitt. The talk was titled “Making Multimodal Books,” drawing Scalar material from Humanities 250 at the University of Victoria.

Elsewhere, Stephen Ramsay published the written version of his talk at the Debates symposium; it is titled “The Hot Thing.” Highly recommended.

Thanks again to DM@P and the Debates team.

Thank you to Richard Lane, the MeTA Digital Humanities Lab, and the VIU Digital Humanities Research Group for inviting us. Also, thanks again to the ETCL for supporting the Humanities Physical Computing research group at UVic.

Photo by Shaun

This year, I decided to take words like “document” quite literally, using my Day of DH blog to regularly post time-stamped images (mostly screen grabs) of my engagements with technologies on the 27th. I’d say the account rather accurately depicts my DH everyday.

If you’re interested, then you can register here. Fittingly, the event occurs on the Day of DH.

“As new digital methods of critical analysis reshape academic practices in profound ways, scholars have begun to use digital tools and platforms to rethink their assumptions about what can or should happen in the college classroom. From work in the online archive to encoding texts to multimodal composition, digital tools and methodologies are changing how students learn and how instructors teach. Many of these developments move beyond the physical classroom into emerging domains for hands-on learning, including the humanities lab, the library, and the open web. How do these developments lead us to rethink learning outcomes, power dynamics, assessment, etc.? Where do we draw the line between digital pedagogy and Digital Humanities or should we? In this seminar, two experienced practitioners of Digital Pedagogy will share their experiences with digital teaching and learning and consider the implications for digital pedagogy.”

Update (as of March 28, 2012): A recording of the seminar is available here. Katherine Harris also blogged about the event, and there are two different Storify accounts: one by Rebecca Frost Davis and another by Caro Pinto.