Stanford Humanities Lab: 8/5/07 - 8/12/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 8/5/07 - 8/12/07


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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

Library of Congress: Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve Creative Works

The Library of Congress, through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), today announced eight partnerships as part of its new Preserving Creative America initiative to address the long-term preservation of creative content in digital form.

Preserving Creative America is the most recent initiative of the NDIIPP. Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. SHL will be participating as one of four primary partners in the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project, Preserving Virtual Worlds project, to explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include SHL project Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island, and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

For a more detailed description of what this project will entail, see the How They Got Game project blog.