Stanford Humanities Lab: 3/11/07 - 3/18/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 3/11/07 - 3/18/07


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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

NYT report: Game Canon at GDC

SHL Co-Director Henry Lowood (second from right) and researcher Matteo Bittanti (right) are cited in New York Times article "Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact," recounting their contribution to establishing a canon of video games, presented at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.

Lowood’s canon is modeled on the National Film Preservation Board's annual list of films to be added to the National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress.

Lowood and the four members of his committee — Bittanti; the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; and game journalist Christopher Grant — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

[Read the complete article in the Art & Design section of the New York Times here.]