HASTAC conference

I’m re-posting with for my friend Cathy Davidson, who is one of the main players in HASTAC, a very interesting digital humanities initiative. Sorry for the poor formatting.

Call for Papers
International HASTAC Conference
“Electronic Techtonics:  Thinking at the Interface”
April 19-21, 2007 *
www.hastac.org

We are now soliciting papers and panel proposals for “Electronic
Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” the first international
conference of HASTAC (“haystack”: Humanities, Arts, Science and
Technology Advanced Collaboratory).  The interdisciplinary conference
will be held April 19-21, 2007, in Durham, North Carolina, co-sponsored
by Duke University and RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute). Details
concerning registration fees, hotel accommodations, and the full
conference agenda will be posted to _www.hastac.org_
as they become available.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
“Electronic Techtonics:  Thinking at the Interface” is one of the
culminating events for the In|Formation Year that began in June 2006 and
extends through May of 2007. /(See the HASTAC website for a calendar of
In|Formation Year events, plus open source archived materials suitable
for downloading for courses or campus events.)/

The keynote address will be delivered by visionary information scientist
John Seely Brown (/The Social Life of Information) /at the Nasher Museum
of Art at Duke. Other events include a talk by legal theorist James
Boyle (co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain,
Creative Commons, and Science Commons), a conversation among leaders of
innovative digital humanities projects led by John Unsworth (chair of
the ACLS “Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities and Social Sciences”
commission), and a presentation by media artist and research pioneer
Rebecca Allen. The conference will also include refereed scholarly and
scientific papers, multimedia performances, an exhibit hall of
innovative software and hardware, plus tours of art and scientific
installations in virtual reality, learning-game, and interactive sensor
space environments.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Six sessions will be devoted to panels with refereed papers on aspects
of “interface” spanning media arts, engineering, and the human, social,
natural, and computational sciences.  Panels will be topical and
cross-disciplinary; they will be comprised of papers that are themselves
interdisciplinary as well as specialized disciplinary papers presented
in juxtaposition with one another.  

We will consider proposals for full panels (three or four papers), for
paired cross-disciplinary papers on a shared topic, or for single
papers.   /

Topics: /Panels might address interfaces between humans and computers,
mind and brain, real and virtual worlds, science and fiction, consumers
and producers, text-archives and multi-media, youth and adults,
disciplines, institutions, communities, identities, media, cultures,
technologies, theories, and practices.   /

Other possible topics/:  the body as interface, neuroaesthetics and
neurocognition, prosthetics, mind-controlled devices, immersion,
emergence, presence, telepresence, sensor spaces, virtual reality,
social networking, games, experimental learning environments,
human/non-human situations and actors, interactive communication and
control, access, borders, intellectual property, porosity, race and
ethnicity, difference, Afro-Geeks and Afro-Futurism, identity, gender,
sexuality, credibility, mapping and trafficking, civic engagement,
social activism, cyberactivism, plus all of the other In|Formation Year
topics:  in|common, interplay, in|community, interaction, injustice,
integration, invitation, innovation.   /

Proposal Submissions:  /Please send 500-1000 word paper and/or panel
proposals to _info@hastac.org_ .   /

Deadline for Proposals/:  December 1, 2006.  

Full-length papers or power-point presentations will be posted on the
HASTAC website prior to the conference. The sessions themselves will be
devoted to synopses of the work, followed by a response designed to
elicit audience participation.  Attendees whose papers are not accepted
will be encouraged to display their work at a digital poster session.   /

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION/ /
Registration will be limited to 150 people.  /HASTAC will announce a
priority registration period for HASTAC In|Formation Year site leaders,
followed by open registration.   /

SCHOLARSHIPS/
Some scholarship funding will be available to graduate students to help
defray fees and conference costs.

For additional information as well as copies of the In|Formation Year
poster, contact Jonathan Tarr, HASTAC Project Manager (info@hastac.org
or 919 684-8471).

HASTAC uses Creative Commons licenses for all of its endeavors.  All
conference sessions will be webcast, archived, and made available for
non-profit educational purposes/.

And now a few words on class, social class that is

I’ve always thought of some of what academics do as “playing at” being of a higher social class than we are. Major field-wide conferences [cough]NCA![/cough]are held at hotels so expensive that they decimate university travel budgets. Groups of academics routinely go out to meals at these events that they can’t really afford. Broke job candidates are expected to dress in nice, expensive suits while senior faculty interview them wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt (okay, people in my department dress considerably better than that on any given day but you know what I’m saying). The first month or so of an assistant professor’s career can be financially crushing as he or she is drawn into a (more) middle class lifestyle before the funds have arrived. The list goes on.

Last night was one of those rituals. Douglas Kellner has been visiting McGill for the past two days, and part of the gig for these kinds of celebrity guest lectures is a trip to a very fancy restaurant with a group of faculty from the University. In this case, it was one of Carrie’s favorites, Chez l’Epicier. Now, a few words must be said in praise of this restaurant. While other French restaurants have reluctantly accommodated my vegetarianism, Chez l’Epicier has done so gleefully the two times I’ve dined there. They put a lot of effort into creation and presentation, and the place itself is beautiful. We dined in private room downstairs with exposed brick which I suspect is around 200 years old. The meat eaters seemed as pleased as I was, and it’s a very creative version of the French menu, peppered with reductions, “recently seized” meats, and perfectly complementary wines. My main course was a bright red concoction which involved orzo prepared as if it were risotto, combined with beet puree, one and possibly several forms of dairy binder, and served with delicately roasted vegetables on the side — one of which I could not properly identify. There was actual silence for a moment after the meal was served and people began tasting their food.

I write not to review the restaurant (though I just did) but to set the scene for a story about social class that wasn’t intended as a story about social class. At one point during the dinner, we learned that one of my colleagues used to be a carnival barker. Two seats over was a former Vegas lounge singer. Which led another diner to suggest that we do around the table and each tell a story of our worst jobs. This is where social class came in. The implication behind a question like that was that everyone would have this storehouse of crappy (or at least bizarre) jobs they had to work at one time or another to make ends meet. And well, some of us did and some of us didn’t. Some of us had to work hard to figure out which of the crappy jobs to tell a story about and which were crappy in a boring way; others had very few jobs to select from. I suspect I fell somewhere in the middle, since I largely avoided manual labor or tasks involving various kinds of waste but had my share of service industry and telemarketing experience which is its own special kind of hell. Perhaps the fact that we didn’t normally think about social class itself marked our privileged positions (or maybe it was just me), since my colleagues and students from working-class backgrounds seem (sometimes painfully) quite aware of their own class positions as they navigate the social customs and expectations of academic life. But the fact that I can even say where I stood on that very odd measure of social class is what made the conversation remarkable.

For a few minutes last night, an element of background was revealed that normally remains hidden in academic life. In polite company, you’re not supposed to talk about money; last night, we almost did.

Miscellaneous

1. It appears that the U.S. government is either too cheap to hire proofreaders or simply can’t spell.

2. Like our building itself, our street’s been under construction for awhile. There are “no parking” signs up and down the street, though people tend to ignore them on the weekends since nobody’s doing construction on the weekends. Well today, at 7ish AM, this truck came through blasting a siren (the same one they get people to move their cars for snow removal). I think the thing drove around the block for an hour. Now, no construction. Someone is obviously reading their Artaud.

3. Also, it turns out that the top layer of concrete on a street is important for absorbing vibrations that are otherwise conveyed directly into the buildings surround it. Have I ever mentioned that our street is a major access point for trucks coming off the freeway and going into the east side of the city?

4. It’s been awhile on the intellectual property front. After a promise of a response from Sage, I’ve heard nothing. Meanwhile, I am using my first SPARC author addendum for an article that went into proofs yesterday. We’ll see what happens.

5. I got my Berlin pictures developed. They are pretty dark. I’ll try and post a few tomorrow. This blog’s been light on images for awhile.

UPDATE: now construction is underway.

10 Things About Berlin

I arrived in Berlin having never spent any time in Germany apart from what must add up to a few days in the Frankfurt Airport (sorry “Flughafen”) and knowing almost no German. Here are some incredibly pedestrian insights resulting from that set of circumstances.

1. From outside the U-Bahn, it sounds just like the Washington D.C. subway. From inside, once the doors open, the recorded voice says a word that sounds an awful lot like “Ookla.” Then the recording says something in German that means “get in, please.”

2. The S-Bahn is lame. At least at night. The u-bahn provides maps that can be figured out in their stations. The S-bahn provides maps but four people with PhDs couldn’t make sense of them. Maybe the PhD is getting too easy to acquire. . . .

3. Like all European cities, you are surrounded by history, but this history is heavily mediated. Much of the division between east and west has been erased, at least to the causal visitor bumbling around the city. Which makes sense since the division itself was so violent and artificial.

4. People really do seem to refer to themselves as “Berliners.” I had that stupid joke running through my head the whole time.

5. I learned that this very cool letter — ß — is pronounced “ss” and that the Swiss got rid of it. German, like French, has language commissions that actually make decisions about these kinds of things.

6. The museum of musical instruments has in its holdings a string bass from about 300 years ago that looks like it could not have been played by fewer than two people, given that people were smaller then. The neck was like a tree trunk. A small tree, but still.

7. “Please” and “you’re welcome” are the same word.

8. They’re “almost out” of East German kitch at the tourist sites. Supposedly the best place to find it is a flea market on Sundays, but I wasn’t there for a Sunday. I did pick up the last tourist guide to East Berlin ever published by the East German government. That’s something, isn’t it? Oh, and a few “wall chunks” of questionable origin. Anyway, the guy at Berlin Story, which is one of the better stores for touristy stuff just said to me “look, it’s been sixteen years.” Sixteen years of stupid Americans like me showing up looking for kitch for their families.

9. It’s not as bad for vegetarians as you might think. Oh, and apparently gummy bears are German. I always assumed they were American. They seem like the kind of thing that gets invented off the New Jersey Turnpike from gelatin byproducts. (I like them too, don’t get me wrong). But they’re so perfectly artificial, how could they not be an invention of American cuisine like the blue raspberry icee? Or pop rocks?

10. I’ll be back.

Photo essay and short report on the conference still to come.

Site Stats

I don’t keep blog stats. I’m sure it would be no thing to install sitemeter but then I’d have Feral Mom’s problem with it (scroll down to #10). The less I know about my readership, the better.

But I do get questions. Last night at dinner a friend asked me how many people read my blog. I honestly have no idea. It’s hard to tell. What with rss and all that these days. I have on more than a few occasions met people who knew me by my blog first.

Textpattern provides a rudimentary tool for logging visits to the site, and so in the spirit of Steven Rubio’s series of posts about the subject, here are a list of topics that have brought people to sterneworks.org in the last few days (this is the main site, not the blog, as far as I can tell):

“jonathan sterne” (more than once–I’m famous on the internets!)
“the problem of two bodies”
“alexander graham bell” (image search)
“what kills inspiration?”
“MLA+ASA+SCMS”
“ear+sound culture”
“mock job application”
“job offer response timeline”
“how+to+make+tenure+smart+way”
“NCA job list”
“stivale+job+search”
“list of synth rock bands”

and here I give up but the list goes one for days and day. I also note some referring links to the professionalization section of sterneworks from other academic institutions. That’s cool.

Happily, now that superbon.net is its own entity, I do not have any statistics for what brings people here.

More Soon

I’ve got pictures once they’re developed for a Berlin story. I always forget the digital camera and then wind up buying those silly ones with the bluejeans prints.

I wrote to Sage after that last IP post and it appears that they’re listening. We’ll see what comes of it.

Back to the email pileup.