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ISIS TECH & NEW MEDIA TUESDAYS (TNMT) Alternating Tuesdays, 12:00-1:00 PM (unless otherwise noted) Formerly TechTuesdays, the goal of the biweekly Tech & New Media Tuesdays lunch forum is to create a shared dialogue around innovative uses of technology that spans Duke's faculty, graduate student, and IT development communities. In doing so, Tech & New Media Tuesdays seeks to fuel increased collaboration and integration among Duke's technology developers by allowing members to pool resources and expertise. Each Tech & New Media Tuesday session features a 30 minute project presentation followed by an open discussion. Lunch is provided at each meeting. Parking vouchers are provided for the Medical Center parking decks. Google Calendar users may subscribe to the ISIS calendar by clicking the "+ Google Calendar" button below:
THIS YEAR: 2009-2010 SCHEDULE
TECH & NEW MEDIA TUESDAYS 2009-2010 SCHEDULE SEP 15 | OCT 13 | OCT 27 | NOV 10 | DEC 1 | Spring dates coming soon
ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Victoria Szabo (27)
"Information Aesthetics at SIGGRAPH 2009"
This year Victoria Szabo chaired a new area at the annual conference for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH). The conference took place in New Orleans, LA from August 3-7, 2009. This new area included a gallery space and two panels, as well as a Keynote devoted to the topic of "Information Aesthetics." This talk will describe the showcase, its origins, and its reception as a new area for discussion and research at SIGGRAPH and beyond. From the Call for Proposals: The emergent field of information aesthetics combines a rich variety of technical and artistic disciplines. Designers and new media artists are joining scientific visualization, informatics, and medical imaging specialists to create purposive, predictive, and creative representations of information. SIGGRAPH 2009 highlighted this field in recognition of the increasingly prominent role that information visualization and data graphics are assuming in our digitally mediated culture. The Information Aesthetics Showcase includes 2D and 3D prints, interactive and presentational screen-based works, multimodal installation environments, and physical objects that reveal information. In keeping with this year's theme, Networking the Senses, the works shown here engages not only the visual, but also auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities. The relationship to information expressed in these exemplary pieces ranges from straightforward visualization of data to fanciful re-invention and transformation of it. Presenters included computational journalists, visual and material artists, biological researchers and neuro-scientists, graphic designers, scientific visualization developers, historians, cultural theorists, and digital media center collaborators. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Timothy Lenoir, Casey Alt, Patrick Jagoda and Harrison Lee
"EMERGENCE: Your Choice. Your Consequence." Abstract: We will discuss our new project, EMERGENCE, a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) designed to encourage diplomacy and social cooperation over violence. Following a period of worldwide devastation, economic, political, and environmental collapse, the goal of the game is to join together with thousands of other players to create a new and sustainable future. Players join competing factions and brave the chaos of this new dystopian world to rebuild a dying and divided planet. Featuring a richly articulated scifi landscape, innovative gameplay, and an elaborately unfolding player-driven narrative in which players must cooperate to survive the hostile world of the future, EMERGENCE represents a new and exciting paradigm in video game design. Emergence: Team Bios Tim Lenoir is University Professor and the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies in Society at Duke University. In addition to publishing several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present, he has been involved in digital archiving and web-based collaborations, including projects with Stanford University, MIT, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the NSF-sponsored Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara. His current research centers on the use of text-mining and visualization tools for mapping the recent history of bio-and nanotechnology, the use of computers and digital imaging in biomedical research, and the history of interactive simulations and video games. Lenoir is co-founder of the innovative company SparkIP, based in Atlanta. Lenoir also teaches courses on interactive simulation and video games. As recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Millennium Award, Lenoir recently completed work on Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares (http://www.virtualpeace.org), a training and simulation game-based learning environment for workers and students in the field of peace and conflict resolution. Casey Alt is an artist whose work explores how interface mediates power and culture. Though primarily engaging in problematics and processes of computational media, his works often span multiple mediums, including software, design, installation, and performance. Casey grew up in rural North Dakota and attended high school on the Texas-Mexico border. In 1991 he enlisted as an Electronic Warfare Cryptolinguist in the US Army and trained at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, where he graduated with honors as an advanced Arabic linguist in 1993. In 1994 Casey was accepted as a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. While at West Point, Casey received numerous awards and distinctions, including top-ranked cadet of his class (3 semesters), Dean's List (3 semesters), Distinguished Cadet for 1993-1994 academic year, and the Rowe Memorial History Award in 1995. Casey left West Point in 1996 to complete his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he majored in Human Biology and minored in Studio Art. He received his BA from Stanford in 1999, graduating with distinction and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Arthur Giese Memorial Award for Painting. In fall of 1999, Casey continued his studies at Stanford as a graduate student in the Program in the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology with Professor Tim Lenoir. After completing his MA, he was subsequently accepted into the PhD program, where he received the Centennial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2003. While at Stanford, Casey's graduate research focused on the ways in which new media practices have transformed science and other forms of cultural production. In investigating this question, he has written on media as diverse as bioinformatics to comic books, 3D modeling programs to videogames. In 2001 Casey and Tim Lenoir founded the hpsCollaboratory as an independent group of humanists, designers, artists, and programmers devoted to creating new and innovative approaches to collaborative, digitally mediated, academic research. In 2004 Casey began a leave of absence from his PhD program to accept a position as the Director of the Information Science + Information Studies Program at Duke University. In the fall of 2006, he returned to graduate school in the Masters of Fine Arts program of the Design | Media Arts Department at the UCLA, graduating in 2008 as the recipient of the School of the Arts & Architecture Graduate Recognition Award. In 2007 he was selected as the graphics editor summer intern for The New York Times, where he continues to freelance periodically. Currently based in New York, Casey is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University and is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation at Columbia University. Patrick Jagoda is a writer and a graduate student at Duke University. His scholarly work explores the way that metaphors and representations of network structures have influenced fiction, film, and new media from the end of World War II through the early twenty-first century. Patrick was born in Austria to parents who were Polish refugees, and spent the early years of his life in Sydney, Australia. Upon moving to the United States, he spent the remainder of his childhood in Chicago. In 2000, Patrick began his undergraduate work at Pomona College where he double majored in English and Philosophy. He received his BA from Pomona in 2004, graduating magna cum laude with distinction, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He was also awarded the Margery Grey and S. Fischer Creative Writing Scholarship, the F.S. Jennings Prize in Expository Writing, and the Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Study Scholarship Award. In fall of 2004, Patrick received the James B. Duke fellowship and entered a PhD program in English at Duke University. Concurrently with his doctoral work, he earned an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies. His current scholarly research concerns cultural fears about interconnectivity that have arisen in the era of globalization. His dissertation analyzes literary and visual works that grapple with such network figures as terrorist networks, economic networks, computer webs, and disease ecologies. During his time at Duke, Patrick has worked as a project manager on the online Walt Whitman Archive. He is currently a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Scholar and an editorial assistant for the journal American Literature. Related to his new media work, his research and teaching interests have included video game studies, the culture of online synthetic worlds, electronic fiction, and speculative literature. Along with his academic pursuits, Patrick is completing a final draft of a near-future techno-science fiction novel about the future of online military games that is entitled NecroNexus. Harrison Lee is an undergraduate student in the fields of information science and critical studies of new media. A child of immigrant parents, Harrison moved with his family between a wide variety of countries and cultures, including Boston, Massachusetts; Tianjin, China; Kobe, Japan; and Cincinnati, Ohio, and has traveled to over thirty different countries on five continents. He graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 2007 and enrolled at Duke University with a full scholarship as a member of the Robertson Scholars program, a unique academic collaboration between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that includes a one-semester "study abroad" program at the sister college. Harrison's work and studies have spanned many different fields and experiences, including policy, marketing, social justice, digital media, game design and theory, molecular biology, and computer science. In 2008, Harrison began working with Professor Tim Lenoir on a number of different projects, including the MacArthur Foundation-funded Virtual Peace simulation and a yet-unreleased video on the development of gaming as a unique medium for narrative. Harrison’s other work include online social network-based viral marketing for the Thousand Kites Project, a nonprofit social justice movement based in Kentucky, and developing computerized cost-tracking and analysis systems for fuel expenditures at the Cincinnati Jewish Community Center. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Eric Green
Community Health and Activity Mapping Project (CHAMP): ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Sarah Cohen
News organizations have long harnessed creative visualizations allowing readers to explore data, but those graphics often come too late to inform the reporter who is writing the accompanying story. Now some news organizations are beginning to use visualization earlier in the process to help reporters find key subjects, uncover unknown patterns and identify places of interest. This talk with provide some examples of early newsroom visualizations, their principles, their uses and the challenges that remain. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays Contact ISIS to present! BACK TO TOP OF 2009-2010 SCHEDULE
TECH & NEW MEDIA TUESDAYS 2008-2009 SCHEDULE SEP 9 | OCT 28 | NOV 18 | DEC 2 | JAN 12 | JAN 27 | FEB 10 | FEB 24 | MAR 24 | APR 7 | APR 21 ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Mandy Dailey from HASTAC (24)
Mandy Dailey will discuss the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. This year's theme is "Participatory Learning." The deadline for competition entries is October 15, 2008. View Mandy's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Fatimah Tuggar (34)
"Fatimah Tuggar is a multidisciplinary artist, who uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She combines, objects, images, and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies, and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities." You can find more information about her work at these links: Diane Villani Editions, Rethinking Nordic Colonialism, and a brief article here. Abstract: Borrowing from the familiar language of advertisement, popular entertainment, and folklore, also drawing from the experimental, visual artworks are created that investigate the cultural and social implications of our everyday use of technology. Technology is both medium and a subject of this artwork. Technology severs as a metaphor for power dynamics to explore how media diversely impacts our realities. Assemblage, collage, and montage are the central methods of exploration and expression for these ideas. Assemblage, is employed by combining household tools from different cultures with their varying couterparts as a way to look into the implications of the juggling act that occurs as we adapt, modify and are modified by, the implements and power systems that define our environments. In both computer montages and video collages a variety of images and/or sounds are brought together in order to closely examine cultural nuances so that the actual meaning of the work exist primarily in between the elements brought together. The goal is not to pass definitive judgements on the cultures involved, but to look in between the cultural products and structures as a way to better understand how media technology influences and affects the daily lives of people; focusing on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures. Web based interactive artworks that allow the veiwer/participant to choose backgrounds and animated elements to create a collage using provided backgrounds and elements facilitate the creation of temporary non-liner narratives that can be constructed or disrupted based on the choices made by the participant. The process of assembling locates the actual content of the work in an interaction that is in constant flux. Therefore, content mainly exists in between the elements that are brought together. This creates a space for combining personal perceptions with these set components to create ongoing conversations, which are in expansive change. This opens up additional spaces for further dialogues that can be both fluid and/or resistant. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Sean Aery and Will Sexton (24)
Sean Aery has worked at Duke University Libraries since 2002, most recently as a Web Designer (since 2007). He holds a Master's of Science in Information Science (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2007). His professional interests include user interface design and evaluation, information architecture, and graphic design. Will Sexton has worked as Metadata Analyst and Programmer at Duke University Libraries since 2002. He holds a Master's of Science in Information Science (UNC-Chapel Hill, 1999). His main areas of professional interest lie with metadata concepts and the architecture and development of systems that support online research in primary sources. In early 2008, the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections Program launched a new platform for discovery and access to digitized content that uses faceted browsing. The two programmers who worked on the project, Will Sexton and Sean Aery, will be presenting their work on this new platform. View Will and Sean's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Timothy Lenoir and Patrick Herron (45)
"Virtual Peace: Turing Swords to Ploughshares: The Huamnitarian Assistance Training Simulator" Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares brings together digital learning technologies and international humanitarian assistance efforts. Students and educators enter an immersive, multi-sensory game-based environment that simulates real disaster relief and conflict resolution conditions in order to learn first-hand the necessary tools for sensitive and timely crisis response. Virtual Peace reflects a rich, interdisciplinary collaboration among experts and educators at the Duke-UNC Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution, Virtual Heroes (a Durham, NC-based developer of game-based training and learning environments), Duke University's Visual Studies Initiative, the Duke Computer Science Department, and the Program for Information Science + Information in Society at Duke. Together, the group has transformed video game technology previously used for army training simulations into an innovative tool for international humanitarian aid education. The simulation developed by these partners takes as its model the real-life events following a major natural disaster: Hurricane Mitch, which devastated much of Central America in 1998. The project is supported by a generous grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. View the Duke Today article on Virtual Peace, "Virtual Swords to Ploughshares." View Tim and Patrick's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media MONDAY featuring Nick Gessler (28)
"ALiCE: Artificlal Life, Culture and Evolution" Come meet the newest ISIS faculty member, Nick Gessler and learn about the work he will be housing in the new Visual Studies Space at the Arts, Cultures, and Technology Warehouse on East Campus: A Realworld Simulation Laboratory How to describe, understand and explain the complex adaptation of individuals to their social, technological and natural environments. A workshop in building experimental multiagent and evolutionary models with which to study alternative "what-if" counterfactual scenarios (counterfactuals). A look at the cutting edge of Artificial Life, Artificial Culture and Evolutionary Computation.
View Nick's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Allison Clark (40)
"OurComixGrid: A Method of Multimodal Learning" This talk describes the theoretical underpinnings of a multimodal Web 2.0 collaborative semantic grid e-learning design environment called OurComixGrid (OCG). OCG combines new media creation and online social networking with cyberinfrastructure to facilitate multimodal literacy education. New media literacies are a necessity in our multimodal world, in which many types of information work together to form meaning. The medium of comics, or sequential art, is itself multimodal, a synergy that makes it an ideal multimodal literacy teaching tool. OCG integrates the multimodal language of comics with grid computing, bringing popular art virtual collaborative space for four overlapping communities: students, primary and secondary educators, art practitioners, and academic researchers. The design of OCG also makes use of a self-organizing neural network application to facilitate qualitative an quantitative study of online collaborative practices. Thus, OCG proposes to maximize the potential for these communities to co-create art, pedagogy and curriculum. Bio: Allison Clark is a research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Clark explores the feasibility of using technology to create self-sustained interdisciplinary communities of collaboration involving technologists, social scientists, artists and humanists from around the world. Her research interests include examining culturally specific approaches, particularly the combination of information technology with hip-hop culture, as an intervention strategy to aide in the creation of digital literacy for youth. View Allison Clark's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Timothy Senior (33)
"Towards the Memory Tower " For the ISIS Tech and New Media talk, I propose to present the scientific and artistic ideas behind an art installation that I am currently developing here at ISIS. To begin, I will give a brief introduction to memory formation from the perspective of the neurosciences. I will explain how we are beginning to better understand which brain areas are involved, which forms memory can take and what mechanisms may underlie their formation. The emphasis will be on the role of brain oscillations in the encoding and representation of information within neural networks. I will describe how oscillations of different frequencies may serve different roles within memory-related encoding and retrieval processes. One reason why it is so difficult to disseminate our understanding of brain function is that the workings and compartmentalizations of the brain appear to bear no relation to how we actually experience the world around us. Indeed, in the study of fundamental brain mechanisms, the substrate for their function is often discarded, rendering them almost alien to us. Thus there is value in expressing scientific findings in art and much can be achieved through the cross-fertilization of these ideas. I will also suggest that such art projects should directly engage people in thinking about how the brain works, propagating the spirit of investigation that drives scientific study. The installation, called “Memory Tower”, describes the encoding of a single memory in the cortex. It takes the form of a highly ornate and fragmented tower in the process of being bound into a single, unified entity. It is placed at the centre of a larger framework of rhythmically positioned towers designed to represent the brain oscillations through which the tower can only be constructed. Embedded within this network are similar, older memories in the form of buildings that share strong visual commonality with the central tower. Through the encoding of current experience and its simultaneous binding to past memories, a new mnemonic context for the central tower is created. These structural elements in part describe the development of Greek architectural motifs (from early classicism to the present day) serving both exemplary and metaphorical roles in their expression of individual and collective experience. Although only a static snapshot in time, the installation tries to capture both the dynamic nature as well as the fragility of human memory. Bio: Timothy J. Senior has recently completed his doctorate in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. His work has focussed on identifying changes between waking, sleep and anaesthetised states in the cooperative network activity of neural assemblies in the brain. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS) at Duke University, where he is continuing the exploration of his interests in learning and memory through drawing and art installation. Recent examples of his work include illustrations for a new book of German poetry “Das schöne Auge des Betrachters” (Berlin: Johannes Frank, 2008) as well as the journals Belletristik (issue 7/2008) and Rampike (in press). View Tim's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Katherine Hayles (33)
Welcome and meet Kate Hayles of the Literature Program to Duke and to the ISIS Community! "Two Strategies of Academic Transformation: Assimilation and Distinction" As the Digital Humanities explore ways to interface with the Traditional Humanities and larger academic and public communities, two patterns of action emerge. Assimilation strategies seek to build on existing research programs in the Traditional Humanities and to embed themselves as fully as possible within existing academic departments, programs, and curricula. Distinction strategies strike out in new directions and forge new research questions, new methodologies, and new fields of study. Each strategy has its advantages and limitations; moreover, they usually co-exist with one another, so the differences between them tend to appear as matters of emphases rather than clear-cut boundaries. Nevertheless, important attitudinal differences characterize the two strategies, ranging from the confrontational to the reassuring. This talk will illustrate the two strategies with examples and explore the institutional contexts in which one or another may be more effective. At stake are issues of disciplinarity, funding, prestige, credentialing, and the future of the academic landscape. Bio: N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Recent publications include My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently at work on a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.
ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Mark Hansen (21)
Welcome Mark Hansen of the Literature Program to Duke and to the ISIS Community! "Expanding Consciousness or Cognition: Digital Media, Transcendental Sensibility and the Problem of Protention" Bio: Mark Hansen teaches cultural theory and comparative media studies in the Literature Program and ISIS at Duke University. His research program focuses on the changing conception of the human in relation to technical evolution. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), and Bodies in Code (Routledge 2006), as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and media. His essay, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life” appeared in Critical Inquiry in Spring 2004. He has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (with Taylor Carman, Cambridge 2004) and is currently co-editing two volumes: Critical Terms for Media Studies (with W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago 2010) and Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second Order Cybernetics (with Bruce Clarke, Duke 2009). His current project is a study of time and time-consciousness in the age of digital technics.
View Mark's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Pyungho Kim (13)
Pyungho Kim is one of the ISIS Visiting Research Scholars for the 2008-2009 academic year. Please join us for his presentation, meet and welcome him to the ISIS community! "Internet Protocol TV in perspective" The presentation contextualizes Internet protocol TV (IPTV) in terms of its genealogy, business points, and structural identity. Despite the rhetoric of newness, IPTV is a replica of the Interactive TV (ITV) of the past which has a long turbulent genealogy of its own. Telecommunications firms have continuously attempted to build a new form of television over the last three decades by making the best use of ever-developing information and communication technologies (ICTs), changes in media consumption patterns, collapse of regulatory barriers, and so on. IPTV is a physically unique television system, but not qualitatively different from conventional television even with the interactive services. It is because firms design IPTV following the TV model, which has long been established through the dynamic interaction between the corporate imperative and historical discipline. It should be noted, however, that IPTV is still evolving, and thus its future shape is not yet fully determined. Bio: Pyungho Kim is Associate Professor at the Department of Broadcasting and Multimedia in Dankook University, Seoul, Korea. I’m interested in the history of telecommunications media and the relationships between media, technology, and society. I wrote a number of articles on new media such as Interactive TV, the Internet, and the mobile phone with respect to their social implications. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Trudi Abel and Shawn Miller (30)
"Visualizing the New South City: Historic Maps, Google Earth, and the Transformation of Durham" This talk will focus on the collaboration between Professor Trudi Abel and Shawn Miller of CIT in a mapping project funded by a CIT Visualization Grant. Duke cultural historian Trudi Abel will discuss the creation of the Digital Durham website, a repository of digitized primary sources, maps, photographs, letters, etc. from post-Civil War Durham and its use by scholars, students, K-12 educators and the general public for historical research. She will highlight the forthcoming publication of a collection of historic maps of Durham, NC. Shawn Miller of CIT will talk about the challenges and possibilities of using Google Earth to create georectified historical maps. The presenters will give the public a sneak-peek at a new set of georectified fire insurance maps from the late 1800s as well as a few rare Durham maps that have not previously been digitized. Bio: Trudi Abel is a cultural historian who directs the Digital Durham Project at Duke University. She received her doctorate in American history from Rutgers University in 1993. In 1999, Professor Abel became one of the first humanists at Duke to win an instructional technology incentive grant from the Center for Instructional Technology. Since then, she has developed the Digital Durham website together with a research service-learning seminar where undergraduates teach eighth graders how to conduct research with digitized resources. She has written “The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology, and Service Learning” for the American Historical Association’s Perspectives. This essay, which highlights the Digital Durham web site and Professor Abel’s collaborative work with her Duke students, Durham Public School eighth graders, and their social studies teacher, will appear in the May 2009 "Digital History" issue of the American Historical Association's Perspectives. View Trudi and Shawn's presentation on iTunesU. BACK TO TOP OF 2008-2008 SCHEDULE
TECH & NEW MEDIA TUESDAYS 2007-2008 SCHEDULE SEP 4 | SEP 24 | OCT 16 | OCT 23 | OCT 30 | NOV 6 | NOV 13 | NOV 27 | JAN 15 | JAN 29 | FEB 12 | FEB 26 | APR 1 | APR 15 | APR 22 ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Harry Halpin (32)
The Dialectics of Collective Intelligence Abstract: In the midst of dizzying technological change that threatens to eradicate the very concept of the historical moment, digital technologies ranging from the personal computer to the Web appear often as alien artifacts beyond our control, while simultaneously as fulfilling our utopian desires. Yet technologies are ideas given flesh, the exteriorization of the ideas of ordinary humans, and so are alien only insofar as their history is unknown. The creation of the digital era did not happen by magic or fiat, but through institutions, ideological projects, and individuals that mobilize the resources, ranging from the social to the financial, that build these artifacts through metal, silicon, and human labor. We trace the line of development of digital technologies from the efforts of J.C.R. Licklider's "Man-Machine Symbiosis" abd Douglas Engelbart's "Human Augmentation Framework" to today, and how these seminal works led to the advent of personal computing at Xerox PARC to the birth of the World Wide Web at CERN, which in turn led digital representations to beomce ubiquitous. Resuscitating Hegel for a digital era, we show how each technology dialectically overcomes divisions of time, space, and collectively and so provides the cognitive scaffolding of collective intelligence, leading to the massive collective editing of Wikipedia being the flagship project of our age, just as Diderot's Encyclopedia characterized the Enlightenment. Far from alien, these digital tecnologies are intimately part of ourselves, extending our very mind and creating productive relationships that make the Web the universalizing social factory of today. This talk will be followed by an optional participatory exploration of the digital archive of interviews, papers, and patents that documents the foundations of the digital era, an archive that can interact with using the Studio and visualized in three-dimensions in DIVE. For more information, see http://vis.duke.edu/Research/interface/index.html. Bio: Harry Halpin, research postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh with Andy Clark and Henry S. Thompson. His interests lie in the intersection of the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. He was recently a visiting researcher at Duke University where he helped organize the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference, for which the archive exlpored in this talk was created. He is also active in web standards as Chair of the GRDDL W3C Working Group and a member of the W3C Semantic Web Co-ordination Group, and previously he has worked in areas as diverse as computational linguistics and collaborative tagging. Special ISIS Tech and New Media Monday featuring Bill Seaman (22)
Title: Recombinant Poetics, Pattern Flows and Neosentience Seaman will present an artist talk that will cover differing aspects of his research. He has been exporing generative emergent approaches to meaning production through Recombinant Poetic technological systems. He has articulated an embodied approach to multi-modal sensing and meaning production, and new approaches to interface design that he describes as Pattern Flows. Most recently Seaman and Rössler have been researching the creation of a model for a Neosentient computer/robotic system. Seaman is currently working on a series of poetic installations, scientific research papers and a book in collaboration with the scientist. He is also collaborating with Artist/Computer Scientist Daniel Howe on works exploring AI and creative writing/digital media, as well as on a work that explores intelligent generative/associative multi-media installation - the Bisociation Engine, and The Architecture of Association. Bill Seaman received a PH.D. from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry In Interactive Arts, University of Wales, 1999. He holds a MSvisS degree from MIT, 1985. His work explores an expanded media-oriented poetics through various technological means. Seaman is Department Head and Graduate Program Director of Digital+Media at Rhode Island School of Design. Seaman's works have been in many international shows where he has been awarded two prizes from Ars Electronica in Interactive Art (1992 &1995, Linz, Austria); International Video Art Prize, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Bonn Videonale prize; First Prize, Berlin Film / Video Festival for Multimedia in 1995; and the Awards in the Visual Arts Prize. Seaman was given the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2002. Selected exhibitions include 1996, Mediascape Guggenheim, NYC - the premiere exhibition of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany; 1997, Barbican Centre (London); 1997, C3 - Center for Culture & Communication, Budapest; 1998, Portable Sacred Grounds, NTT-ICC Tokyo; 1999, Body Mechanique, The Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio, ; 2004, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University; 2005, Itau Cultural Center ; 2006, Harris Museum, UK. Seaman contributed a video set for SLEEPERS GUTS by Ballett Frankfurt. He has collaborated with Regina van Berkel on two major dance/performance/installations. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Kenneth Price
"From Scholarly Edition to Thematic Research Collection: The Walt Whitman Archive and the Metamorphosis of Humanistic Studies" What are the implications of the terms we use to describe the electronic scholarship currently being produced? And how do these conceptions frame and sometimes limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, archive, project, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Drawing on a range of resources including the Walt Whitman Archive, I'll consider how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure the work in progress. In addition, I'll use the final term, thematic research collection, to discuss yet-to-be-developed parts of the Whitman Archive dealing with place-based cultural analysis and translation studies as a way to illustrate the expansive possibilities of this new model of scholarship. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Marsha Kinder
“Refiguring Representation: Envisioning Science and Database Learning” This talk will feature two of her interactive science projects that deal with the interplay between physical science and culture, “Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California” and “A Tale of Two Genes: Exploring the Biology and Culture of Aggression and Anxiety” (a collaboration with Dr. Jean Chen Shih, a molecular biologist from the USC School of Pharmacy). MARSHA KINDER ON THE LABYRINTH PROJECT - A RESEARCH INITIATIVE FOR EXPANDING THE LANGUAGE OF INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE The Labyrinth Project is an art collective and research initiative on interactive cinema and database narrative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder since 1997, this initiative works at the pressure point between theory and practice, committed to creating a productive dialogue between the immersive language of cinema and the interactive potential and database structures of digital media. All Labyrinth projects are what Kinder calls "database narratives." This term refers to narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language: the selection of particular narrative elements (characters, images, sounds, events, and settings) from a series of categories or databases, and the combination of these chosen elements to generate specific tales. Although a database narrative may have no clear-cut beginning, no narrative closure, no three-act structure, and no coherent chain of causality, it still presents a narrative field full of story elements that are capable of arousing a user’s curiosity and desire. This desire can be mobilized as a search engine to retrieve whatever is needed to spin a particular tale or to provide a rich array of sensory and intellectual pleasures. All Labyrinth projects take a conceptual and collaborative approach to interface design. The design emerges from the material and captures the unique style of the primary artist the project is centered on: the repetition compulsions of Chicano novelist John Rechy, whose network of painful memories and ritualized accounts of the sex hunt turn the world of gay cruising into one vast city of night; the claustrophobic circularity of Nina Menkes’s films of resistance, all featuring her sister as a deeply alienated woman trapped within a series of violent landscapes captured in long takes; the sensory beauty of Pat O'Neill's richly textured, multilayered films with their fluid camera movements and surprising surrealistic jolts; the mesmerizing quality of Péter Forgács's haunting documentaries based on found footage with their shadowy historical figures and melancholy rhythms; the vigorous stream of Norman Klein’s verbal commentaries on history, swirling with vivid details, comic asides, and fascinating digressions; and the rich quilting of Carroll Parrott Blue’s stories, dreams, and voices that interweave the struggles between her and her mother with the cultural history of Houston’s black community. Kinder’s first interactive title (produced in collaboration with Charles Tashiro and Barry Schneider) was a hypertext called Blood Cinema: Exploring Spanish Film and Culture (1994), the first scholarly CD-ROM published in film studies. A companion to her book Blood Cinema (California 1993), it launched the Cine-Discs series of bilingual CD-ROMs on national media cultures (on which Kinder is general editor). The second title in the series, Yuri Tsivian’s Immaterial Bodies: a Cultural Analysis of Early Russian Cinema, won the 2001 British Academy Award for best Interactive Project in the Learning category. Co-sponsored by Art, Art History and Visual Studies, the Film\Video\Digital Program, and the Center For Documentary Studies. Marsha Kinder is also speaking at the Nasher Museum on Monday, October 22, 2007 and 7:00 PM. Please click the thumbnail below for further information.
More information on the Labyrinth Project can be found here. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Mauro Maldonato
Mauro Maldonato is a psychiatrist. He was born and lives in Italy, where he is Associate Professor of General Psychology at the Università degli Studi della Basilicata. At his work and researches activities he focused on Neurosciences, with specific attention to Epistemology and Philosophy of the Science. He’s a member of the International Association of the Complex Thought presided by Edgar Morin. He’s also a member of several editorial boards of both national and international specialist journals, and collaborates as a writer on some others journals. "Embodied Mind and Knowledge: Prolegomena for a neurophenomenology theory" Even though the concept of a “disembodied mind” – according to which, phenomena that go from the conscience to knowledge can be conceived without neurobiological structures – has enjoyed scientific and philosophical success, it is surrounded by relevant empirical and theoretical problems. The concept of a “disembodied mind”, promoted greatly by Descartes, is also the basis for “disembodied knowledge”, according to which knowledge is entirely a mental process: i.e., the process would be exclusively based on representations of the mind; as a matter of fact, it’s object would be those representations. In reality, recent neuroscientific evidence shows that may difficulties arise with this concept. These difficulties, along with others that could be argued, demonstrate how the concept of a “disembodied mind” is not plausible. This must give way to a concept of an “embodied mind”, According to which the mind is simply made up of certain bodily skills, including sensory and motor skills. Since sensory and motor skills are based on unconscious mental processes, it would be absurd to say that everything mental is conscious. The mental, on the other hand, is made up of skills and processes that are in part conscious, but greatly unconscious. The concept of embodied knowledge questions the radically subjectivist character of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Husserl, which conceives knowledge as disembodied knowledge. The methodological proposal in neurophenomenology consists in incorporating experience in the neurodynamic levels explicitly as well as rigorously. The objective is to integrate the phenomenic structure of experience in big scale neural operations. It deals with creating controlled experimental conditions where the subject is involved in identifying and categorizing experience, in order to clarify the neurodynamical properties of the conscience and cerebral activity and to then formulate a strong and predictive model that links the domains of experience and neurons. The neurophenomenologic strategy proposes to fill in the philosophical and scientific explanatory gaps, taking on the epistemological and methodological task of relating accounts of first person phenomenological experience to third person cognitive-neuroscientific ones (Varela, 1996). Neurophenomenology is a methodological way to answer the hard problem (Chalmers, 1996), without filling the gaps through ontological reduction, but by bridging experience and neurocognitive-behavioral phenomena. This event is jointly sponsored by the Program in History and Philosophy of Science Technology and Medicine (HPSTM). ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Matt Kirschenbaum
Abstract: Matthew Kirschenbaum will speak about his current work on MONK, a large text mining and visualization project designed to leverage the increasing availability of large volumes of content through GoogleBooks, the Open Content Alliance, and other sources. What to do with a million books (or ten million) is the grand challenge of the digital humanities, and it will require us to think in terms of what Franco Moretti has termed distant reading as an alternative to tradition close reading. Bio: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland (promotion to Associate Professor with tenure effetive August 2007) and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanites (MITH), an applied thinktank for the digital humanities. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature and creative new media (including games), textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia's Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (where he was the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive). His dissertation was the first electronic dissertation in the English department at Virginia and one of the very first in the nation. Kirschenbaum's first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, will be published by the MIT Press in late 2007. (Taking its cues from textual studies and recent critical interest in writing and inscription technologies, Mechanisms addresses itself to the material and historical particulars of landmark works of new media and electronic literature, applying computer forensics to conduct new kinds of media-specific readings and drawing on significant new archival sources for works like Michael Joyce's Afternoon and William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa.") He is a principal investigator for MONK, a multi-institutional Mellon-funded project to develop advanced analytical and visualization tools for digital text collections. With Amit Kumar, he developed the Virtual Lightbox, an online tool for image comparison. He is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, incuding Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, and MediaCommons. Kirschenbaum's current research interests in new media include serious games and simulations, digital preservation, writing technologies and the conditions of contemporary authorship, text visualization, social software, and cyberinfrastructure. His most recent graduate seminar (spring 2006) was Inscribing Media. He is currently directing or co-directing five dissertations. He blogs at both MGK and Zone of Influence (the latter mainly about games). He is married to Kari Kraus. His other interests include military history and boardgames. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. [source] View Matt's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Sara Wood
"Bringing Data into the Web's Fabric: The Swivel Approach" The Web is awash in textual information on every topic imaginable. However, the amount of hard data that can be usefully accessed on the Web remains remarkably small, despite the potential for an Internet of people and their computers to exploit in ways that can improve their health, happiness and bottom line. Swivel is a site where users explore, publish, compare, visualize, share and discuss data. By combining web technologies and user enthusiasm to liberate data from its traditional vaults, Swivel allows people to discover and share insights in that data. We'll discuss how data accessibility, collaboration and Web 2.0 will facilitate better decision-making by both policy makers and the general public. Swivel has established partnerships with UN and governmental agencies, academic institutions and researchers, foundations, and businesses across the secotrs whose goal is to make their data available to the widest audience possible. At the same time, we encourage interested individuals to participate equally in the sharing of data and engaging in debate. Bio: Sara Wood is the Chief Data Officer for Swivel. Sara has spent the better part of the last decade working with some of the world's most important data: the World Health Organization, Harvard School of Public Health, the UN and UNDP. Previous to that she worked for a number of technology companies and research organizations, including web startups such as Salon.com, where she helped to solve emerging issues of content and data management on the web. View Sara's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Jason Graves
"The Art and Science of Music" Jason will talk about the creative challenges of composing music for a living and how technology has evolved and influenced my creative process. Bio: As a graduate of the University of Southern California’s prestigious film scoring program, Jason Graves was given the rare opportunity to study under film composers Elmer Bernstein, Christopher Young, and Disney Legend Buddy Baker, as well as Ron Jones, Jack Smalley, and famed Hollywood orchestrator Will Schaefer. Jason has composed music for national and international commercials (Honda, Toyota, Walt Disney, Activision), television shows (CBS, FOX, The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, Spike TV), movie trailers (Hollywood Pictures, Gramercy Pictures), and feature films (Sony Pictures, Paramount Studios). He has composed and conducted for the Hollywood Studio Orchestra at Capitol Records and Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles, as well as the Northwest Sinfonia in Seattle and orchestras in Salt Lake City. With more than one hundred television shows to his credit, Jason has won three Telly’s, an Addy, nine Silver Reels, a Gold Case Award, and more than thirty other state and national communications awards. He wrote music for The Discovery Channel’s Mega Movie Magic, which won a Cable ACE Award. Jason also won 2nd Prize in Turner Classic Movies’ 2005 Young Film Composer Competition, of which there were more than 500 entries. His ties to Los Angeles has allowed Rednote personal connections with top Hollywood film composers when working on film-based video games, including relationships with Elmer Bernstein (Wild Wild West), Hans Zimmer (King Arthur), John Debney (Zathura), and most recently Harry Gregson-Williams (Flushed Away). Jason has composed more than fifty videogame scores, including Blacksite: Area 51, Transformers, Star Trek Legacy, Rayman, The Gauntlet, Price of Persia, Heroes of Might and Magic, Blazing Angels, The Sims, Pac-man, and Jaws Unleashed. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays Special IMPS Room and Gaming Demo (12)
Come out and see the Interactive Multimedia Project Space (IMPS), how to run it, and the games we use in our classes. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Brett Barney
Digital Humanities, Metadata, and the Need for Control Bio: Brett Barney became interested in digital humanities when he was hired as a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive in 2000. Since joining the staff of the Center's predecessor the following year, he has worked on a variety of projects, including the Willa Cather Archive and the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online. He is Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and project manager and Senior Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. He is nearing completion of a digital edition of the interviews of Walt Whitman, and he continues to nurture project ideas for digitizing the work of several lesser-known writers from the colonial and early Federal periods—aspirations that began during a doctoral program focused on postcolonial theory and nationalism in early American literature. Publications include:
View Brett's presentation on iTunesU. *Canceled and Tentatively Rescheduled for February 26, 2008* ISIS Tech & New Media Tuesdays featuring Mark Tribus
"CompanyCommand.com: Online Leadership Development in the United States Army" Lieutenant Colonel Mark Tribus, Professor of Military Science at Duke, will describe the Peer to Peer Leadership Development program in the United States Army. The online program enables junior officers to share experiences and learn from their peers in a high trust environment with immediate, detailed feedback from peers. This approach contrasts both with more conventionally structured, hierarchical training modalities and purely informal social interactions. Tribus will discuss the program as it presently exists, as well as look ahead to potential areas for expansion and development of this breakthrough training resource. For background on the project, please see pages 56-57 in the Harvard Business Review article entited "Breakthrough Ideas for 2006" posted here. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Marilyn Lombardi (17)
"Introducing the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University" Abstract: Marilyn Lombardi is director of the new Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University, which occupies the renovated first floor of the Telecom Building on West Campus. The RENCI at Duke Center is part of a multi-site virtual organization founded by Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University as a catalyst for innovation. The RENCI organization’s resources include the fastest supercomputers in North Carolina, a staff of ninety focus area specialists, computational scientists, software developers, and engineers, and an Innovations Lab where engineers fabricate new devices, taking them from concept to prototype. RENCI draws on these resources and the combined intellectual capital of RENCI’s member campuses to tackle problems of broad public concern, from disaster prediction, global climate change, and human health to nanotechnology, national security, and economic development. A dedicated high-speed network connects the Duke Center with the RENCI anchor site at the Europa Center in Chapel Hill and with Duke’s sister sites at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State. All the RENCI campus sites come equipped with a shared audio and video teleconferencing system with a large display so that multiple groups of collaborators at various locations can see one another simultaneously, while sharing presentations and high-resolution visualizations. The facility also boasts a one-of-a-kind Multi-Touch Visualization Wall. Similar to the futuristic interface imagined for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, the Multi-Touch Visualization Wall is intended to foster hands-on creativity and inspire new research applications. Two full-time computer scientists specializing in high-performance data mining and visualization will be on staff to collaborate with Duke researchers on new applications and grant proposals. How might the Center and its resources advance your research agenda? Are you a biochemist who needs to create thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional molecular models for studying protein design, protein folding and protein-protein interactions? Perhaps you’re a biomedical engineer working on a better cochlear implant for patients suffering from severe hearing loss, or a visual artist planning a multimedia interactive installation? Dr. Lombardi’s talk will focus on the nature of Duke-RENCI engagement and will welcome audience participation. Bio: Dr. Marilyn Lombardi directs the RENCI Center at Duke University. In this capacity, she manages the Duke component of the RENCI virtual organization and a facility with state-of-the-art visualization equipment, dedicated high-speed connectivity to the major research universities in the Triangle, and a staff of computing specialists to support Duke faculty in large-scale research collaborations. Lombardi is also a scholar-in-residence for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and she writes the organization’s annual three-part white paper series covering current issues in technology and pedagogy. From 2006-2007, she also served as interim director of The Croquet Consortium, an international not-for-profit alliance of industry and academic institutions to advance and promote the creation and widespread adoption of open source Croquet technologies in research, industry, and education. Lombardi is an invited contributor to the Carnegie Foundation book "Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2007) and a member of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) advisory panel on “Humanities and High Performance Computing.” ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Darion Rapoza (21)
"The Science of Video Game Design: What does Behavioral Psychology have to Offer?" To an operant psychologist, video game play represents one of the purest examples of the real-life application of operant theory to the control of human behavior. Whether they know it or not—and with great success—the designers of the game industry’s hit titles have created “addictive” game play through the application of the basic principles of operant psychology. With a knowledge and understanding of the principles of operant psychology, designers can move beyond creating compelling game play by mere intuition, experimentation, and accident to easily creating it by the relatively simple application of established scientific principles. Better still, as the industry can boast very few examples of the application of advanced behavioral programming techniques to game design, designers who understand advanced behavioral principles will have the capacity to take game design to the next level. This talk will begin with an intense, rapid-fire review of basic principles of behavioral programming that must be understood before a discussion of the more advanced topics can take place. Examples drawn from animal behavior studies will be compared to hit game titles to illustrate the application of these principles to create addictive game play. Next, the science of creating effective real-life behavior change video games will be discussed. A review of some effective behavior change videogames will be presented, as well as some thoughts on what types of behavior portrayed in videogames might not be expected to affect real-life behavior. Scientific evidence of how different personalities respond differently to different types of message presentation will be covered, and the implications for serious game design discussed. Finally, pilot data from the speaker’s own R & D on using video games to prevent or treat drug abuse will be presented. Bio: Darion Rapoza: President, Entertainment Science, Inc., Senior Research Scholar, ISIS. Darion Rapoza founded Entertainment Science, Inc. in 1997 with the mission of studying the real-life behavioral impact of videogames and of developing videogames with empirically demonstrable positive behavioral impact. He is currently working in collaboration with Virtual Heroes on a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse for development of a 3D “Virtual Brain” museum exhibit to educate the public about the impact of drug use on the brain. Past funded projects include development of a videogame for neurocognitive rehabilitation of drug-induced deficits in inhibitory control (aka “impulsivity”), and development of video games designed to prevent drug use. He has been issued a US patent on his videogame-based method for drug abuse prevention. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Biopsychology, where he studied the behavioral pharmacology of drugs of abuse. ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays featuring Patrick Herron (27)
"We Generate Our Self" BACK TO TOP OF 2007-2008 SCHEDULE
TECH TUESDAYS 2006-2007 SCHEDULE AUG 22 | SEP 5 | SEP 19 | OCT 3 | OCT 17 | OCT 31 | NOV 14 | NOV 28 | JAN 16 | JAN 23 | FEB 6 | FEB 20 | MAR 6 | MAR 20 | APR 2 | APR 17 ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Eyal Fried
"Ubiquitous computing", "Environmental Computing", "Disappearing Computing", "Tangible Interfaces", "Tangible Media, "Interactive Spaces" — these are just a few of the "Bon-Ton-ish" buzzwords encapsulating, at least in part, the co-evolutionary process of the physical and the digital, the unification of the atoms and the bits. This ongoing process is the platform upon which the generation of new environments, new experiences, new behaviors and narratives can take place. We are very pleased to welcome Eyal Fried for our first TechTuesdays of the academic year, in which he will introduce the top-of-the-art in the thinking and application of the physio-digital domain, and also touch on the deeper meanings these might inflict on the human experience. Eyal Fried is an Interaction Designer and Social researcher, now operating from Israel. With an academic background in psychology and communication, Eyal has done web design work in New York, research with the PLAY research studio of the Interactive Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Human-Computer research and design for MAX Interactive in Tel-Aviv, Israel. He graduated from the postgraduate program at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Ivrea, Italy, where he worked experimentally and commercially with physical computing and interactive spaces. He is now collaborating with the ID-Lab, an IDII spin-off. Eyal is currently teaching at Shenkar Design and Engineering Academy and the Holon Institute of Technology , and is a co-founder of the B-Lab, an Interaction Design experimental initiative. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Rachael Brady
Rachael Brady, Director of the Visualization Technology Group, works
with researchers from many different departments at Duke. She promotes the use of visualization and virtual reality technologies for improved understanding of scientific data and human cognition. This Tech Tuesday will describe a few case-studies of what exactly is involved in transforming an initial idea or concept into a visualization or DiVE application. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Wayne Miller, Ken Hirsh, & Melanie Dunshee
Wayne Miller (Director of Educational Technologies, Duke Law School), Ken Hirsh (Director of Computing Services, Duke Law School), and Melanie Dunshee (Deputy Director of the Law Library) will present on their innovative open access model for Duke University Law journals. Duke Law School's seven student-edited journals were prominently featured in the June 6, 2005 unveiling of the Open Access Law Program, an initiative of Creative Commons and its Science Commons Publishing Project. The announcement of the Open Access Law Program was notable not only for the encouragement and support the Program will provide for increasing free access to scholarly literature in law, but for its acknowledgment of Duke Law School's longstanding commitment to making legal scholarship freely available on the World Wide Web to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as well as to legal scholars. Specifically, Wayne, Ken, and Melanie will discuss technology and techniques for the online presence of: their print journals; their online journals; their scholarship repository at http://eprints.law.duke.edu (which currently contains over 1000 articles); and their database of faculty scholarship that feeds their faculty bibliographies and our recent faculty scholarship page (accessible via http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/facpub.html). *Rescheduled for March 20, 2007* ISIS TechTuesdays featuring John Taormina
John Taormina, Curator of Visual Resources for the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke, will discuss the new imaging system Duke is implementing (MDID-Madison Digital Image Database) to replace Luna Insight for its teaching and digital image repository. The system, supported by Arts and Sciences IT office, is available for access by the campus community. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Fred Stutzman
Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, will be speaking about his work on ClaimID.com, a project that allows individuals to control their online information. Fred's research interests include social software and networks, identity production in digital worlds and cultural effects of social computing. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Peter North, Kyle Johnson & Jessica Mitchell
Peter North, a senior in Duke's Trinity School, Kyle Johnson, Director of Information Technology Services for Duke University Student Affairs and Jessica Mitchell, OIT Analyst and co-instructor of ISIS 200, will be presenting on the collaboration between the ISIS 200 Research Capstone students and Student Affairs that resulted in the new eFlyer electronic events flyering system for Duke student events. View the TechTuesdays website and schedule. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Paolo Mangiafico
You probably have somewhere in a box photographs and letters left to you
by your grandparents, and scholars have always counted on libraries and
archives to preserve and provide access to documents and other media for
study. Will future generations be able to see and use the terabytes of
"born digital" data that our society is creating now? What will it take to make sure that digital materials are preserved and usable beyond the short lifespan of current technologies? ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Ricardo Pietrobon
Duke University Professor of Surgery, Ricardo Pietrobon, MD, PhD, will be presenting on "Research about Research: Studying research problems and proposing solutions." Dr. Pietrobon's presentation will focus on ongoing studies of common problems occuring in research teams and research policy environments, their study from an interdisciplinary perspective, and proposed solutions using web applications. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Deborah McGuinness
Deborah McGuinness is the acting director and senior research scientist at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "Emerging Semantic Web Trends: Transparent and Trustworthy Applications and Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration." As web applications proliferate, more users (both people and agents) find themselves faced with decisions about when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information obtained from arbitrary applications, users need to understand how the information was obtained and what it depended upon. Particularly in web applications that may use question answering systems that may be heuristic or incomplete or data that is either of unknown origin or may be out of date, it becomes more important to have information about how answers were obtained. Emerging web systems will return answers augmented with Meta information about how answers were obtained. In this talk, Deborah McGuinness will describe an approach that can improve trust in answers generated from web applications by making the answer process more transparent. The added information is aimed to provide users (humans or agents) with answers to questions of trust, reliability, recency, and applicability. The talk will include descriptions of a few representative applications using this approach explaining cognitive assistants that learn and intelligence analyst tools. The talk will also briefly highlight work on semantically-enabling access to and integration of scientific data. Examples will be taken from Deborah’s work on the NSF-funded Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory and the NASA-funded Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration projects. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Paul Jones
Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org, will present "Participatory Digital Libraries - Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends," in which he will talk about experiences and futures of Contribtor-run Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories with some particular focus on the ibiblio tends. This will be somewhat of an update of his paper "Open (source)ing the doors for contributor-run digital libraries.[PDF]" Communications of the ACM. Volume 44 , Issue 5 (May 2001). Also at http://ibiblio.org/pjones/presskit/ACM-p45-jones.pdf or if you prefer the Japanese language version http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/presskit/p45-jones.jp.pdf. Paul Jones will be preparing his talk on his wiki. Anyone may add things to it. Also, feel to leave comments to the post or on his blog as to what he could say during his TechTuesday talk. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Jane M. Gaines and Josh Gibson
Josh Gibson, Assistant Director of Film/Video/Digital and Jane M. Gaines, Founder and Former Director of Film/Video/Digital, will present: "Student Digital Works." These are works made by Duke undergrads in recent FVD courses. Please join us afterward for a tour of the ISIS Deep Lagoon Mac Lab in John Hope Franklin Center room 036. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Harry Halpin
Harry Halpin, research postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh and visiting HASTAC project planner at Duke University, and the Chair of the GRDDL W3C Working Group and a member of the W3C Semantic Web Co-ordination Group. His interests lie in the intersection of the Web, artificial intelligence, philosophy of the mind, and computational linguistics. Title: The Next Generation of the Web The Web is, in the words of its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, a "quite boring place" where a human user goes from one hypertext document to another by following a link. With the rise of the "Web 2.0" phenomena, the combination of Javascript and XML (AJAX) can now be used to deliver applications over the Web itself - and now after the original "dot com" crash, both the creativity and money have returned. However, there are concerns about data privacy and the scalability of this approach. One possible road of evolution is the Semantic Web, which applies the principles behind the Web (a universal naming system for information and the ability to link arbitrary information) to any sort of information, not just hypertext. With the rise of microformats and a new technology called GRDDL, we can now deploy the next-generation of the Semantic Web easily from the current Web to achieve globally scalable "mash-ups." Finally we will investigate the use of functional programming and proofs to answer the age-old question: Where did your data come from, and who did what to it! ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Sarah Ellis & Richard Lucic
As the instructor for the ISIS 140 Web-Based Multimedia Communications course, Richard Lucic will discuss how iPods have been integrated into the learning environment in the ISIS program and the impact that has had on the quality and creativity of student work. He will also discuss some specific results of the students' use of iPods including the project assignment that produced Sarah Ellis' remarkable iTheory project. During her first semester of music theory, junior Sarah Ellis saw her fellow students struggle with the development of aural skills, primarily because they did not know how to practice on their own. An open-ended final project for ISIS 140 thus provided her with the perfect opportunity to develop iTheory, a music theory ear-training program for the iPod. Through a series of quizzes, iTheory allows on-the-go users to practice interval recognition, scale recognition, chord recognition and perfect pitch. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring John Taormina
John Taormina, Curator of Visual Resources for the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke, will discuss "Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Transition to Digital Media in the Academic Visual Resources Library." View John's presentation on iTunesU. ISIS TechMondays featuring Nicholas Tishuk
Wiki Love: Collaborative Pedagogies for the Urban Classroom *CANCELLED ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Jessica Mitchell ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Jessica Mitchell OIT Analyst and ISIS 200 co-instructor Jessica Mitchell will present on the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI). BACK TO TOP OF 2006-2007 SCHEDULE
TECH TUESDAYS 2005-2006 SCHEDULE SEP 27 | OCT 25 | NOV 1 | NOV 15 | DEC 2 | JAN 24 | FEB 7 | FEB 21 | MAR 7 | MAR 21 | APR 4 | APR 18 SPECIAL ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Daniel Foster, David Gilbert, & Tim Lenoir
We're kicking off the new year with a special edition of TechTuesdays as part of the Duke University Podcasting Syposium. The session will feature a panel discussion of Podcasting in the Classroom, which will be moderated by Lynne O'Brien, Director of the Center for Instructional Technology. Panelists include Daniel Foster (Department of Theater Studies, Duke University), David Gilbert (Department of Communication Arts, Marymount Manhattan College), and Tim Lenoir (Jenkins Chair in New Technologies & Society, Duke University). Lunch will be provided to all registered attendees. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Rebecca Miller
Rebecca Miller from OIT will be discussing "DukeCast: Podcasting on Rails." Her presentation will detail her development of DukeCast, a University-wide podcasting management tool that is currently in beta phase. Rebecca Miller began working in OIT Project Office in June 2005. Prior to that, she received her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring David Eisinger and Mary McKee
Mary McKee and David Eisenger will be presenting their work on the Duke campus map project, including how it started as an ISIS 200 course project and what it's been like to follow the project to OIT as permanent employees. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Jessica Mitchell
Jess Mitchell from OIT will be discussing working with the government of Ghana to improve their information technology infrastructure as part of her Geek Corps volunteer experience. SPECIAL ISIS TechTuesdays featuring David Rose
Please join us for a special joint session of ISIS TechTuesdays with the CSEM-ISIS Visualization Friday Forum as we present David Rose, Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Ambient Devices. Wireless devices today require an enormous amount of a very scare resource—our attention. Their interfaces are inscrutable, and we continuously apologize for their lack of social etiquette with interruptive ringing, beeping, and buzzing. In his talk entitled Entitled "Calm technology: designing information with manners," David will discuss how Ambient Devices, a spinoff of the MIT Media Lab, is pioneering new ways of looking at information which leverages our peripheral senses. Ambient sees a future where impolite PCs, PDAs and smart phones won’t be the way we access the Internet. Instead we will populate our living and working spaces with dozens of Ambient objects to keep us attuned to the information we care about most. Prior to founding Ambient Devices, Rose founded Viant’s Innovation Center, an advanced technology group for Fortune 500s including Sony, GM, Schwab, Sprint, Compaq and Fleet. He helped build Viant to over 900 people, $140M in revenues and a successful IPO. In 1997 Rose patented online photosharing and founded Opholio (acquired by FlashPoint Technology). Before the Internet, he founded and was President of Interactive Factory (acquired by RDW Group) which creates museum exhibits, educational software and smart toys, including the award-winning LEGO Mindstorms Robotic Invention System. Rose teaches Information Visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a frequent speaker for corporate research departments and conferences. He received his BA in Physics from St. Olaf College, studied Interactive Cinema at the MIT Media Lab, and earned a Masters Degree from Harvard University. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Cathy Davidson
Please join us as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Cathy Davidson, discusses her work with the Humanities, Arts, Science, & Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). HASTAC is a national consoritum of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers from leading institutions dedicated to working together both to develop innovative computing and information systems that support interdisciplinary research and teaching and also to stretch the possibilities and applications of existing computational technologies. HASTAC members have been working together on varied projects since 2002. These include a 3-D visualization project and virtual museum, social software to enhance distance collaborations, a global grid project with the government of Costa Rica, and a variety of educational and lobbying projects aimed at including humanities and arts projects in technology funding and encouraging technological innovation to handle the massive amounts of data required by multimedia applications. Duke's ISIS program was the local forerunner of HASTAC. In 2006-2007, over seventy HASTAC affiliate institutions at nine sites--including Duke, RENCI, the National Humanities Center, and the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science for RTP--will be running concurrent and collaborative faculty and graduate student seminars, a webcast public lecture and performance series, workshops, conferences, and research projects. Duke's topic for the year is "Interface." The HASTAC international conference will be at Duke April 12-14, 2007. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Bryan Andregg
Bryan Andregg, Technologist Programmer from the Duke Human Simulation and Safety Center, will be presenting on the Center's SimDot project, an on-line community for human simulation users. Bryan C. Andregg is a programmer for the Department of Anesthesiology at Duke University Medical Center specializing in the application of open source software to the practice and teaching of medicine. In addition, he is working with Medical Center Information Services to support federal patient information privacy and security legislation (HIPAA) and the School of Medicine pursuing informatics in medical education. He is also a member of the Simulation Center Executive Committee for the Duke University Medical Center Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center. Prior to DUMC, Bryan worked at Red Hat, Inc., the market leader in Linux technology, for four and a half years. Mr. Andregg started as the first member of Red Hat's IS staff and in his time there has been a systems administrator, network administrator, and security administrator. During the period that Red Hat grew from one office in North Carolina to more than twenty offices worldwide he was the global Director of Networks, transferring to the United Kingdom for several months. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Brett Walters and Mark Olson Brett Walters and Mark Olson from the John Hope Franklin Center Core IT Staff will be discussing their work on the Duke University Global Gateway--a gateway to all things international at the University and the Medical Center. The Global Gateway was built to replace two previous international websites and attempts to improve and promote awareness of Internationalization efforts at all of the schools of Duke University through a singular, engaging website. Mark and Brett will discuss the social and technical challenges faced in designing, developing, and deploying the large-scale project with particular emphasis on the implementation of the Drupal content management system for the Gateway. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Julian Lombardi
Julian Lombardi from OIT will be discussing his role as a designer of the Croquet Project. Dr. Julian Lombardi is a former biology professor, author, and award-winning software designer with an interest in developing software systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, and dissemination of information that is distributed across many individuals. He brings his background in developmental and evolutionary biology, complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, and in the study of emergent properties in biological systems to his work in information technology. Dr. Lombardi has long been fascinated by the transformative potential of new interface technologies. In the late 1980s, and while a professor at The University of North Carolina he began developing instructional software for biological and medical education. In 1995, he combined his interests in information technology and evolutionary/developmental biology and developed systems and methods for enabling representations of network-deliverable resources to self organize and optimize within the framework of social computing systems. Based on this work, he was awarded a patent on technologies and processes for visualizing and organizing location-based information and in 1999, he founded ViOS, Inc. He served as ViOS's CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Chief Software Architect. Over an 18 month period, he oversaw the successful completion of the company's core technology and the company successfully launched a user-friendly knowledge management and social computing platform with an industry award-winning interface. In 2000, Dr. Lombardi was the subject of a feature article in Success Magazine, was identified as one of the nation's "Thought Leaders" in information technology by Access Magazine Online and the ViOS product won Best of Show at the Upside Magazine's prestigious Launch! event. Julian is an independent entrepreneur who provides executive management and consulting services for emerging IT companies. He also managed a software R&D group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he helped define and lead university-wide initiatives that seek to transform teaching and learning through the use of technology. Julian is also a former professional theatrical director who enjoys performing as the comic lead in community productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Marilyn Lombardi
Marilyn Lombardi from OIT will be discussing her work with the Croquet for Education intiative, which is a multi-institution development project for the Croquet Project. Prior to her arrival at Duke, Marilyn was Senior Strategist for the 600-employee Division of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. In that role, she was responsible for providing a strategic perspective on national trends, building enterprise-wide and multi-institutional coalitions, and working with DoIT senior management team to develop and deploy new digital initiatives in support of the university’s academic mission. Dr. Lombardi is also Scholar in Residence for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI, formerly NLII), a national association of institutional leaders, policy makers, faculty, librarians, and students dedicated to advancing learning through IT innovation. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Steve Feller
Please join us as Steve Feller, Associate in Research at the Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communication Systems, presents on the implementation of large, localized, real-time, adaptive, and interactive sensor and display systems. Steve will discuss his work involving distributed sensing and display systems for the Duke Integrated Sensing & Processing (DISP) group and the Visualization Technology Group (VTG). Steve's presentation will include examples from previous projects such as the Argus imaging array, the FreeSpace modern dance performance, and the soundSense interactive installation as well as current systems such as the DiVE, Sensor Studio, and our current data management challenges. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Tim Poe
Tim Poe, Senior Manager of Digital Media Solutions (DMS) at OIT will be giving a presentation on the scope of the emerging digital media infrastructure at Duke. Topics will include: video conferencing, classroom/event capture/access (Lectopia, etc.), streaming, Web conferencing, podcasting, IP television, and video on demand. Details on DMS can be found at: http://www.oit.duke.edu/dms . BACK TO TOP OF 2005-2006 SCHEDULE
TECH TUESDAYS 2004-2005 SCHEDULE JAN 25 | FEB 8 | FEB 22 | MAR 8 | MAR 22 | APR 5 | APR 19 ISIS TechTuesdays Organizational Meeting The goal of this biweekly lunch forum is to create a shared dialogue on innovative uses of technology that spans Duke's faculty and graduate student research and IT support communities. In doing so, TechTuesdays fuels increased collaboration and integration among Duke's technology developers by allowing members to pool resources and expertise while reducing redundancies and replicated work. Each TechTuesday session features a 30-40 minute project presentation by a member of the community followed by an open discussion. Lunch is provided at each meeting. Parking vouchers will be provided for parking in the Medical Center parking decks. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Tim Lenoir and Zach Pogue
Tim Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Professor of New Technologies & Society, and Zach Pogue have graciously volunteered to discuss their current development of a Benchside Consultation Module, which they've designed to be an online multimedia platform for interactively researching, documenting, and discussing practical ethics issues in engineering and science research. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Neal Caidin and Jim Coble
Neal Caidin and Jim Coble from the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) present their Project Notebook application. The Project Notebook is a web application written using the Struts MVC framework and is an evolving tool that has developed from CIT's need to track both large and small projects through which it assists faculty in the effective use of technology. CIT uses the Project Notebook to help with this and to help us provide feedback to departments on how they are leveraging our services. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Matt Cohen
Matt Cohen from the English Department presents on his work as an editor of the online Walt Whitman Archive. Matt will discuss the technical, social, and scholarly challenges involved in reconfiguring Whitman's work for an online research archive. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Casey Alt
Casey Alt from Information Science + Information Studies discusses the design of SOMA (Semantic Object Mapping Application), a graphical interface for editing and visualizing collaborative semantic webspaces. Casey will discuss how the SOMA project developed out of earlier online timeline and genealogy projects, as well as the technical and philosophical problems presented in constructing a general semantic web tool for collaborative research. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Richard Lucic
Richard Lucic from Computer Science discusses "Automating Course Content Distribution with Podcasting." Richard's talk will examine new methods of information gathering, processing and transmission for automating course content delivery. In what ways can Podcasting enhance the academic process? Can we demonstrate that leaning has been facilitated? We will explore how Podcasting works, discuss what makes for a quality Podcast, and what course content is appropriate for this delivery technology. A number of Podcasting resources will be provided. View PDF of slides from Richard's talk. Listen to MP3 from Richard's talk. ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Ben Sawyer
Ben Sawyer from Digitalmill discusses his "Serious Games: Game-Based Learning" initiative. As co-founder of Digitalmill, Ben Sawyer is in charge of strategy, technology, and business development. Sawyer has authored or co-authored more than 10 computer trade books as well as numerous articles on a wide range of technology areas including e-commerce, interactive game development, software marketing, and computer graphics. He is also a regular speaker on the topics of e-commerce and other emerging Internet trends. Ben's visit is being co-sponsored by ISIS and the Kimberly Jenkins Chair in New Technologies and Society. His talk is intended to complement Jeff Taekman's "Gaming, Simulation, and Learning" presentation at the Visualization Friday Forum from 12:00-1:00 in LSRC D106 on Friday, April 22. If you would like to help promote Ben's presentation, we've posted a downloadable flyer at http://isis.duke.edu/events/ben_flyer_sm.pdf. BACK TO TOP OF 2004-2005 SCHEDULE
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