1. “Sensing” Place: Habit Change in the Mobile, Connected Present (44:33)

Date:
2020-11-18
Main contributors:
Heidi Rae Cooley
Summary:
We live in an age when mobile touchscreen devices are customarily “on” and in-hand. As a consequence, we frequently engage in practices that involve documenting the self in motion, our geolocational beads (or arrows) locating us and guiding us to destinations of interest (e.g., ATMs, gas stations, restaurants, friend’s houses). These are the sorts of habits our technologies engender. And I contend that, in doing so, they help form and regulate conduct in a nonconscious, habitual—even neurophysiological—manner. In which case, it is at the nonconscious level of existence that habit change needs to work. In this talk, I will draw on American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce’s account of habit change to discuss how our geolocative devices might orient us differently in relation to the landscapes and urban terrains we traverse. To provide example of what habit change might look like in the mobile, connected present, I discuss three collaborative mapping projects in whose design and development I have participated. These projects—Augusta App, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, and Ward One App—have afforded me opportunities to explore how the very mechanisms through which technologies of connectivity and location awareness shape habit might also serve as vehicles for re-appropriating social, political histories and practices in the service of habit change.

2. A Tale of Two Projects: Successes and Failures in Community Engagement (1:06:00)

Date:
2019-02-19
Main contributors:
Rebecca Wingo, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities
Summary:
Community engagement in the digital realm is always a careful balance between giving community members control of their own history and bringing academic expertise into the community. That balance isn't always the same from project to project. Dr. Wingo will draw on her experiences with two similar projects that had very different outcomes: an amazing community-led project to build the history of Rondo with the African American community in St. Paul Minnesota, and a community history project with the Crow tribe in Montana that has so far failed to get off the ground. She'll then walk the audience through best practices for thoughtful, considerate digital community engagement that acknowledge and privilege local community goals.

3. Academic Libraries; Mapping; Public Engagement; Public Participation (1:30:02)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Summary:
Working in public, and with the public, can enable scholars to build vital, sustainable research communities, both within their fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with a broad range of publics, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful response, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. This workshop will focus on ways of envisioning the publics with whom we work and the questions that public engagement surfaces.

4. Approaches to public data and archives: Mapping as a form of activism (1:18:08)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities , Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
Toxic discourses towards the Mexico-United States borderland and its communities have continuously altered history, social dynamics, culture, among other things that are part of this region. Meanwhile, by utilizing digital companions such as digital maps, it is possible to contest to these kind of narratives that invisibilized borderlands’ dynamics. According to Annita Lucchesi, “The power of mapping is that there is so much power in it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be oppressive…It can be liberating. It can be healing. It can be empowering, especially when it’s being used by people who have been historically oppressed” (“Mapping MMIWG” 2019). By taking into consideration Lucchesi’s argument, this workshop will work in a hands-on experience with archival material and public data to create maps that challenge toxic discourses and colonial cultural records. Taking into consideration projects such as Borderlands Archives Cartography and Torn Apart / Separados, this workshop will go over the creation process of activism projects through the use of mapping technology. Participants will work with archival material and public data, will gain ethical and critical skills to the incorporation of humanities studies with digital companions, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to create activism mapping resources.

5. Aspects of Mapping and GIS Service in Higher Education Library (44:42)

Date:
2020-11-20
Main contributors:
Girmaye Misgna
Summary:
Based on experience at the Penn Libraries, my talk will explore the landscape of Mapping and GIS services at higher education institutions, and the role and core competency of the GIS librarian in promoting spatial literacy on campus through presentation of several examples: 1) The Penn MapRoom/MapTable as a collaborative mapping method that have been successfully integrated as a course curriculum into an Urban History class; 2) Penn COVID-19 Twitter sentiment mapping; 3) crowdsourced accessbility mapping application; 4) deep mapping in an ancient history project; and 5) miscellaneous research project consultations. The examples cover applications in various disciplines from the Social sciences, humanities, and health sciences, to physical sciences.

6. Black Glitch in the Hour of Chaos (1:27:02)

Date:
2016-11-30
Main contributors:
Marisa Parham
Summary:
How might we conceptualize "the digital” as a kind of mediation that articulates the time and space of diasporic experience? In answer, Parham's talk will explore rememory, affective excess, and glitch aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hiro Murai’s video for Flying Lotus & Kendrick Lamar’s “Never Catch Me,” and Zun Lee’s digital project, “Fade Resistance.

7. Bringing the Field Recording Home: Sampling the Everyday (1:24:00)

Date:
2021-03-12
Main contributors:
Andrew (Drew) Daniel , M.C. (Martin) Schmidt
Summary:
Where, exactly, is “the field” implied by field recording? Can you make a “field recording” inside your own home? What does the widespread dissemination of portable recording devices mean for the future of sonic practices? Is the sound of your everyday life already a work of music? In this hybrid lecture presentation and artist’s talk, Drew and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos will discuss the political and social questions of consent, control, access and “shareveillance” that surround their critical and creative practices of sampling and composition. The talk will discuss both their work as electronic musicians in Matmos and “Quarantine Supercut”, a globally crowdsourced audio collage documenting the public and private sounds of life during COVID lockdown.

8. Centering Gender: A Feminist Analysis of Makerspaces and Digital Humanities Centers (1:16:30)

Date:
2017-11-28
Main contributors:
Kimberly Martin
Summary:
The maker movement, a subculture affiliated with a do-it-yourself ethos and, more recently, a passion for digital technologies, has been growing over the last two decades and is making its way onto the university campus . Digital humanities (DH) centers in particular have taken up the maker ethos, incorporating digital technologies such as 3D printers and microcomputers into their spaces. While recent literature acknowledges both the lack of female presence in makerspaces and a desire for more diversity in the digital humanities, no study of making has yet employed a feminist approach to understanding why and how these issues arise in the first place. The Centering Gender Project aims to do just this, by employing Wajcman’s (2004) theory of TechnoFeminism in an examination of public and academic examples of making. Martin's talk will showcase preliminary findings from her first on-site visits to makerspaces, and challenge the audience to think through ways their learning spaces could diversify their population.

9. Constellations: The Limits and Inspirations of Mapping Queer Cities of Survival & Desire (1:13:00)

Date:
2021-11-12
Main contributors:
Jen Jack Gieseking
Summary:
LECTURE ABSTRACT: The path to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) liberation has been narrated through a claim to long-term territory in the form of urban neighborhoods and bars. Lesbians and queers fail to attain or retain these spaces over generations—as is often the case due to lesser political and economic power—so what then is the lesbian-queer production of urban space in their own words and images? Building from, and extending, the arguments of my book, A Queer New York, I led the design, development, and construction of a digital, interactive maps in An Everyday Queer New York: Mapping LGBTQ NYC History (AEQNY, https://bit.ly/AEQNY). AEQNY maps over 3,000 NYC-based places in lesbian-queer organizational records and media publications from Brooklyn’s Lesbian Herstory Archives spanning 25 years. In this talk, I examine how the AEQNY mapping project and related LGBTQ interactive mapping projects such a Queering the Map and LGBTQ HistoryPinafford three insights. First, I speak to new ways of thinking about the contributions of geospatial “big” data: namely, how most big data is created and recorded in ways that reproduce systems of oppression, while the marginalized are often left with little or no data of their own to map their own stories. Second, while these maps enhance public understanding of LGBTQ history through mapping vast archival materials, less obvious is the skilled, collaborative labor required to produce and maintain such maps. Finally, in comparing my queer feminist theoretical contribution of the inherent relationality of lesbian-queer spaces as constellations, I examine how GIS mapping both expands and limits how we record, portray, and imagine lesbian-queer geographies.

10. Culture, Power and Learning in Makerspaces: Enacting Equity at the Crossroads of Arts, Humanities... (1:22:53)

Date:
2017-10-10
Main contributors:
Shirin Vossoughi
Summary:
Making is a deeply cultural and historical practice that often lives at the intersection where science meets the arts and humanities. As a portal to practicing various ways of knowing, inquiring, creating and relating, making is increasingly shaping educational spaces, both inside and outside of the classroom. Yet efforts to expand access to “makerspaces” often treat making as a normative or ahistorical practice, and tend to reproduce individualistic and economic narratives with regard to the purposes of making. In this talk, Vossoughi offers a critical framework for design, practice, and research on making in educational spaces. This framework draws from cultural-historical theories of learning, literature on educational equity and justice, and Vossoughi’s long-term ethnographic research on afterschool tinkering programs that merve students in non-dominant communities. More specifically, Vossoughi argues that a framework for equity in making ought to include: a) critical analyses of educational injustice; b) historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary activity; c) explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and d) ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. Offering examples of each of these principles, Vossoughi considers the specific theoretical and pedagogical sensibilities that animate transformative visions for educational equity.