Stanford Humanities Lab: September 2005

 

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The Metaverse U conference held on February 16-17 at Stanford University explored the cultural, technological, legal, and economic issues surrounding virtual worlds. A full video transcript of the conference will be made permanently available on the web, archived to become part of a global conversation on virtual worlds. Sites for viewing and download will be announced both here and on the Metaverse U site as soon as they are available.

We cordially invite you to extend the conversation begun at the conference, and solicit your participation in the post-conference exchange of ideas on the Metaverse U wiki. To all our speakers, to our esteemed colleagues and friends in attendance both at Stanford and in Second Life, and to the many individuals who worked to ensure the success of this event, we offer our heartfelt thanks.
 

 
The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

SHL believes that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere.

We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation
 
• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property
 
• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes
 
• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

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SF Chronicle reviews REVOLUTIONARY TIDES

Noted San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker published a lengthy review of the REVOLUTIONARY TIDES exhibition currently at the Cantor Arts Center in the paper's September 29 issue. Read the article online here.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 12:43 PM

"Changing All" in Symbolic Systems Forum's Summer Intern Presentations

The SHL project "Changing All" will be presented at the Symbolic System Forum's Annual Summer Intern Presentations, "How I Spent My Summer". Presentations (see a complete listing here) begin at 4:15pm on Thursday, October 6, at the Math Corner (Bldg 380:380C). "Changing All" focuses on ongoing changes in the grammar and function of "all" in conversational American English, especially its use as an intensifier and to introduce quotations.

posted by Jeff Aldrich at 9:15 AM

Hypermedia Berlin featured in 2nd issue of Vectors

SHL-initiated Hypermedia Berlin is featured in the newly released second issue of the experimental journal Vectors: A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, available at http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/. The project is led by Todd Presner, formerly at Stanford and currently at UCLA, and hosted by the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. To launch the site go to http://www.berlin.ucla.edu/hypermedia/. The first issue of Vectors contained a visual essay by SHL researchers Ehren Fordyce and Gwen Allen on a Jenny Holzer installation piece at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. Conversations are underway with Vectors on integrating the Crowds project website into its upcoming issue on EPHEMERA.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 10:13 AM

SHL announces new pilot projects for 2005-2006

The Stanford Humanities Lab is happy to announce that it will be providing start-up funding to two pilot projects for 2005-2006: Historinet and Advanced Digital Archive Assistance (principal investigator Edward Feigenbaum, Kumagai Prof. of Computer Science, Stanford), and Philosophical Stages (principal investigators Corby Kelly and James Collins, Dept. of Classics, Stanford). Splash pages for both projects will be up on the SHL website within the next few weeks, so keep checking.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 3:23 PM

Revolutionary Tides exhibition opens Sept. 14

In development since the foundation of SHL in 2000, the REVOLUTIONARY TIDES exhibition opened at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford on Sept. 14, 2005. The show includes over one hundred and twenty objects from the poster collections of the Hoover Institution archives and The Wolfsonian-FIU, a well as 1/3 to 1/2 scale reconstructions of constructivist Gustav Klucis's agitprop media stations. Forthcoming also in Italian and French, the exhibition catalogue was published by Skira editore in Milan.

Concurrent with the inauguration of the exhibition, the Crowds website has launched at http://crowds.stanford.edu. The Crowds project book is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in February 2006.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 3:48 PM