Stanford Humanities Lab: May 2007

 

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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

Previous Posts

Archives

  

Crowds wins Horizon Interactive Award Silver Medal

Adding to the already extensive list of awards and citations garnered by this project, Crowds has been named Silver Medal winner by the Horizon Interactive Awards, a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers. The awards showcase the best web site design, cd-roms, dvds, video, kiosks, video games and other interactive media.

posted by Jeff Aldrich at 12:51 PM

The Politics of Presence - a mixed media colloquium

Hosts: Stanford Humanities Center -- Humanities Research Network and the Research Workshop "Critical Studies in New Media" in association with "The Presence Project", and Stanford Humanities Lab presents:

Presence - being there, witnessing; the presence of the past - from its effect upon political opinion to the cultural politics of heritage; the authenticity of media reports; surveillance tracking of the digital citizen; the politics of association in virtual online worlds; political representation in an age of digital media; documentation - making present what may become lost to history ...

Discussion of such topics will be led by archaeologists Ian Russell (Trinity Dublin), Alfredo Ruibal (Madrid), and Chris Witmore (Brown) and by new media expert David Phillips (Austin, Texas).

Schedule: Live - Stanford Humanities Center Wednesday May 23 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm and 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm (buffet included) + "Absent" events - online, in a virtual world, and on a military base in Europe ...

Please join us - RSVP Fred Turner, Michael Shanks or Henry Lowood, Stanford Humanities Lab

Additional information:

posted by Henrik Bennetsen at 9:55 PM

How They Got Game Workshop #3

Please join us on Wednesday the 9th of May 2007 from 3pm - 4:30pm on the 4th floor of Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University for a How They Got Game workshop with John Kuner.

Speaker Bio:

John Kuner is an online community veteran and Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University, where he is working on a project using digital storytelling with camera phones for inter-cultural connection. Before Stanford, he worked at Nokia and Sega on mobile, console, and PC-based online communities such as N-Gage Arena, the Sega Dreamcast Network, and HEAT.NET. His blog is at http://projectview.blogspot.com

Abstract:

Online communities have arguably been around since the first emails were sent on ARPANET in 1971. Since then, they have developed and grown to use new technologies, such as bulletin boards, text-based games, USENET, MMOs, and message boards. In this discussion, we will examine the properties of some of these online communities from the 1980s to the present with an eye toward the current set of Web 2.0 communities based around social media, gaming, and location. Collectively, we can look at the common threads and one-hit-wonders to see what the future will hold.


These workshops are open to all interested parties with a strong interest in topics surrounding new media, technology, and design. They offer the chance to hear talks by industry professionals and seasoned academics, but also offer the rare opportunity for one-on-one questions as well as collaborative work.

How They Got Game is a research project at the Stanford Humanities Lab dedicated to the historical investigation of computer games and other related interactive technologies. Its diverse membership possesses varying academic interests ranging from machinima, virtual worlds and interactive storytelling.

For more information or to show an interest in attending please contact Henrik Bennetsen - bennetsen@gmail.com

posted by Henrik Bennetsen at 1:58 PM