Stanford Humanities Lab: 10/7/07 - 10/14/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 10/7/07 - 10/14/07


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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

Seminar: Making Money in Virtual Worlds

Joel Greenberg, Electric Sheep Company at Stanford, following the Virtual Worlds Conference

4-5 PM Thursday, October 11, 2007 at 235 Wallenberg Hall, Stanford University

What is unique about the virtual media?
How can users' attention be monetized?
What measurements capture commercial value?

Joel Greenberg talks about answers to these questions and the need to develop standards that cross virtual platforms. As new developments let avatars to travel between worlds, can messaging systems keep up with them?

Joel Greenberg is the Vice President of Marketing Innovation at the Electric Sheep Company. He is building an ad network for Virtual Worlds, beginning with Second Life. By understanding the "spacial" metaphor of Virtual Worlds versus the "page" metaphor of the Web from a cultural point of view, he and his colleagues are defining new ad forms, metrics, and proposed standards. Formerly of GSD&M and Human Code, he has over 20 years experience in non-traditional media, from simulations to games, from development to research to marketing.

He's a frequent speaker on Marketing and Virtual Worlds. He serves on the advisory board of conferences such as SXSW Interactive and Chaos: New Agendas in Advertising. Joel comments on Virtual Worlds and marketing on his Tuple vs. Kipple blog.

This seminar is co-sponsored by Media X and the Stanford Humanities Lab.