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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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Drama brings philosophy to life in Humanities Lab summer research projects
[ Excerpted from the Stanford Report, 8/23/2006.] "To the ancients, the art of living was, at heart, a public performance. That conviction is central to Philosophical Stages, an interdisciplinary research project experimenting with using dramatic arts to teach philosophy to Bay Area high school students and Stanford undergraduates. The project, one of more than 20 sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Lab, is directed by James Henderson Collins and Corby Kelly, both advanced doctoral students in the Classics Department. "Over the past two summers the project has brought dozens of students to campus to take part in a three-week-long workshop that combined instruction in aspects of theater arts by professional actors with the study of classical texts. The workshop culminated in a July 29 performance in Wallenberg Hall, where students combined adaptations of classic Greek plays with staged reflections on their own real-life dilemmas against a backdrop of projected slides." (...continue reading the Stanford Report article here...)
Stanford Humanities Lab builds presence in Second Life
Following on the decision to develop the Life Squared project on a private island in Second Life, SHL has established a virtual center on the mainland of this online digital world: SHL-SecondLife ( SHL-SL). In what promises to be a perpetual work in progress, a series of galleries has been created to showcase SHL's research. Currently on view are a sampling of political posters sourced from Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914–1989, streaming video of “Antigone Reflected” from the Philosophical Stages project, as well as references and links to other ongoing work: Life Squared, Virtual Mandala, and others. In addition to its function as a gallery of our work, SHL-SL provides space for meetings and presentations, incorporating multiple streaming video and audio feeds and other tools to facilitate collaboration among SHL staff and our cohort of researchers. Visit SHL-SL in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cayuga/176/199/60/.
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