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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. |
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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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Schnapp, Lowood, and Turner to participate at Games@IULM
The Humanities Lab at IULM University in Milan, Italy, is organizing a digital games conference and exhibition for May 3rd 2006. The event brings together game researchers from Italy, the United States ( Stanford University), and Europe (the Computer Games Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Stanford's Jeffrey Schnapp, Henry Lowood and Fred Turner will take part in the event in mediated form. Their contributions will be delivered via video interviews recorded by SHL visiting scholar and game researcher Matteo Bittanti. Jeffrey Schnapp examines the role of humanities in the digital age; Henry Lowood discusses the status quo of game studies and game culture, while Fred Turner comments on the politics and ideology of digital games. The video interviews will be freely available for viewing and downloading on the Games@IULM official website from May 3rd 2006. In addition to the conference, Games@IULM features a retrospective on digital artist Mauro Ceolin, titled "L'arte videoludica di Mauro Ceolin". The exhibition, also staged at IULM University, will be open from May 2nd till May 12th 2006. For a complete list of speakers and events, please check the Games@IULM official website.
HYPERMEDIA BERLIN receives ACLS Digital Humanities grant
The SHL-initiated Hypermedia Berlin project, led by UCLA Assistant Professor Todd Presner, has been awarded one of the inaugural American Council of Learned Societies "digital humanities" grants for 2006-2007. The project was launched in 2001 within SHL and, since 2004, has been supported by the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. The project was featured in the mobility special issue of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.
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