Viewfinder, Precision Targets shown at HASTAC II Conference

Digital Humanities, Events, Flex, Viewfinder,
6/6/08

HASTAC II, the second annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, was held at UC Irvine and UCLA on May 22-24. The theme? “Technotravels.” Unfortunately scheduling conflicts prevented me from checking out many of the sessions (would love to have seen Brenda Laurel’s provocation, as her book Computers as Theatre was an early inspiration for me), but happily I was able to attend Curtis Wong’s presentation entitled “From Beethoven to Betelgeuse, 20 Years in the Quest for the Holy Grail of Interactive Storytelling.”  It was great getting to hear about what Curtis has been up to since the Voyager days, and to get an introduction to his latest project, Worldwide Telescope—a kind of Google Earth for the sky that seamlessly integrates astrophotography from a variety of sources into an experience with lots of hooks for user-generated content.

I presented two projects at HASTAC II, the first of which was Viewfinder. The presentation was done on UC Irvine’s HIPerWall, the extremely high resolution display consisting of 50 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays linked together. I was able to distribute the presentation materials (slides, two videos, the Viewfinder web interface, and Google Earth itself) across the width of the screen, and while we weren’t running at the native resolution of the display, it was still pretty cool to be able to play with a visual field of that size. During the show I was able to give a look at the evolution of the Viewfinder web application UI since our initial release—in this version, we had the complete workflow running as a Flex application using the new Flash Google Maps API released the week before. The first session was very well attended, and I’m told there was some lively discussion afterwards. Thanks to David Theo Goldberg for inviting me to present on the HIPerWall, and Sung-Jin Kim for invaluable help with the presentation logistics.

The following day, Caren Kaplan and I presented our upcoming piece Precision Targets as part of the demo sessions at UCLA. Precision Targets combines six narratives about GPS and its movement from military to civilian use in a comic-book-inspired format (featuring art by Ezra Claytan Daniels) that places the narratives inside a navigable 3D cube with commentary written by Caren. The work was very well received—we got a lot of great feedback that we aim to translate into momentum to complete the project in the next few months.

Next up: A report on the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, Washington…

 

 

“Beyond the Book” Digital Humanities Conference

Digital Humanities, Events,
2/3/08

Yesterday I was at UC Davis for the “Beyond the Book” Conference on the digital humanities—which was something of an eye-opener for me as far as providing some broader context for the work we do at Vectors. My perspective on this field tends to be very narrowly project-focused, so it was good to have my horizons expanded a bit with both a sense of the history of digital humanities scholarship as well as the obstacles facing those trying to do this kind of work today—work which still lacks the kind of legitimacy within the academy that would make it a less risky choice for junior scholars.

There seemed to be a genuine interest and energy in the room directed towards making it possible for more institutions, scholars, designers and programmers to participate in this kind of work. A number of Vectors projects were featured throughout the day, along with intriguing excerpts from And Then It Was Now by Frances Dyson and a preview of Precision Targets, the project I’m currently working on with Caren Kaplan. Sharon Daniel joined the proceedings virtually from Berlin, where Public Secrets is currently being shown at the Transmediale festival, and I got the chance to speak a bit about the connections between music composition and interactive design, while showing an early version of a visualizer for Vectors project databases (more on that in a future post).

Thanks to Caren Kaplan, Carolyn de la Pena, Jennifer Langdon, the technical staff and everyone else involved at UC Davis for putting on such an informative event and for featuring Vectors so generously.

 

“Public Secrets” at Transmediale; “Beyond the Book” conference at Davis

Announcements, Digital Humanities, Events,
1/7/08

A few tidbits of news to share with you today:

Public Secrets, the Webby-honored interactive documentary I designed with Sharon Daniel, will be exhibited at the Transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin in late January/early February.

In addition, the Davis Humanities Institute is hosting a one-day conference on February 1 entitled “Beyond the Book: Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age” which will feature a number of Vectors personnel and alumni, including Tara McPherson, David Theo Goldberg, Sharon Daniel, Minoo Moallem, Caren Kaplan, Jenny Terry and myself, among other distinguished speakers. The day includes a keynote panel, lunchtime roundtable, and afternoon demonstration sessions. For more information on the conference, download the pdf.

Be well.

 

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