Stanford Humanities Lab: November 2005

Stanford Humanities Lab: November 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

SCI-Arc/SHL Symposium: Augmented Architecture

Inaugurating a series of collaborations between SCI-Arc and SHL, a symposium entitled Augmented Architecture: Design, Practice & Education will take place on Wednesday, November 30, at SCI-Arc. The symposium will focus on Design, from the viewpoints of both Education and Practice. SCI-Arc and SHL will present their approaches to a new model of design education, where team-based research and "hands-on" methods of building and thinking will be examined. See the Symposium poster here. (PDF)

REVOLUTIONARY TIDES book presentation at Cody's Books in San Francisco

On Tuesday, November 29, Jeffrey Schnapp will present his book REVOLUTIONARY TIDES: THE ART OF THE POLITICAL POSTER 1914 - 1989. The event is set for 7:30 PM in the Cody's at 2 Stockton Street, San Francisco. See the Cody's events calendar here.

STANFORD MAGAZINE publishes a write-up on SHL

Featured in the November 2005 issue of Stanford Magazine is a story entitled Strength in Numbers: Humanities Scholars Put Heads Together concerning SHL itself and the Crowds project, with particular reference to the Revolutionary Tides exhibition. The article may be accessed on-line here. For addditional information and more links, see the Revolutionary Tides and Crowds project pages.