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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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SHL in The Scout Report
On the heels of the New Scientist article blogged earlier, SHL has received additional press. We are very pleased to have been mentioned in the current issue (Volume 14, Number 2) of The Scout Report. Quoting: "Started in 2000, the Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) discovers 'fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.' The Lab engages in a number of research projects that are collaborative, co-creative, and team-based. These projects have resulted in new media projects, interactive archives, predictive models of social changes, and exhibitions. First-time visitors can get a good sense of their work by looking through the 'Projects' section of the site. Here they will find projects that detail the Irish-American West, the importance of the crowd in the modern experience, and the perception of artworks. For each completed project, the researchers have created a separate site that provides access to their work, along with a brief explanation of its applications and uses. Also, visitors should take a look at their weblog and their latest news postings."
SHL project in New Scientist
New Scientist has blogged SHL research project Preserving Virtual Worlds, which examines how knowledge about what happens in current virtual worlds can be kept for generations to come. From the blog: "The Stanford team leading that part of the project may find themselves embarking on ethnographic expeditions to make videos and other recordings of 'natives' going about their business. "Once archived though, the stockpiled virtual worlds could offer a kind of time travel to people in the future. At least if it becomes normal to lead a double existence between virtual and real worlds - as people, including those behind this Chinese project, think. "In, say 25 years, people will be able to step back in time to the Second Life of 2008 and the days when virtual worlds were a niche concern?"
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