Transcriptions

Friday January 13th, 2012
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, 2–6 pm

Catastrophic events produce radical uncertainty. The temporality of such events varies: they could be sudden, unexpected, but ever–possible (e.g. natural disasters or terrorist attacks) or protracted events whose long duration escapes the human imagination (e.g. radiation toxicity). Speculative projections of disaster, catastrophe, and crisis trigger endless efforts at securing a collective future against various forms of macroscalar destruction. This symposium hosts two distinguished speakers, Professor Peter van Wyck (Professor of Communications Studies, Concordia University, Montréal) and Professor Andrew Lakoff (Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California), who have variously addressed speculations of catastrophe in their work. Professor van Wyck has written extensively on nuclear threats (Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, 2005) and Professor Lakoff on public health and biosecurity (Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, ed., 2010).

Speakers: Professor Peter Van Wyck (Concordia University) and Professor Andrew Lakoff (USC)

An Archive of Threat, Peter Van Wyck

I will be presenting a text in development that attempts to follow an itinerary of images from Signs of Danger, and Highway of the Atom. In this text I trace a route from Canada’s far north, to Japan, Finland and New Mexico. A history written not with lightening, but close; a history written with the energy of restless, recalcitrant matter. I want to convey some small piece of this story of the nuclear, at least as I have been following it. For this, to paraphrase Isabelle Stengers, is not simply a matter of power, but an affair of a process, or processes that one must follow. Here, as elsewhere, my concern is about the constellation of effects wrought by atomic and nuclear threats and disaster. In particular I am interested in aspects of memory in relation to traumatic transformations of place, of landscape.

Biopolitics in Real Time: The Actuary and the Sentinel in Global Health, Andrew Lakoff

Focusing on recent developments in biosecurity and global health, this talk contrasts two ways of understanding and managing catastrophic disease threats. Whereas an actuarial approach projects the past into the future, a sentinel–based approach assumes that the future cannot be known and that one must remain vigilantly prepared for surprise.

Transcriptions is pleased to sponsor a lecture by Jessica Pressman in winter term. She will be speaking on “The Undead Book: Jonathan Safron Foer’s Tree of Codes as Bookwork.”

Date:  Friday, March 9 (time TBA)

Jessica Pressman is Assistant Professor of English at Yale, where she works on literary experiments from the 20th and 21st centuries and across media forms. Her first book project, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, reads contemporary works of digital literature in relation to literary modernism and her current research, which she will present, focuses on how 21st-century literature—both in print and online— responds to the threat of an increasingly paperless and multimodal society.

Oct.14 (Fri), 2-5 pm
Symposium: Perspectives on Risk
(Wallis Annenberg conference room at SSMS 4315)

Serving as an introduction to programs on “Speculative Futures” (the Critical Issues in America theme for 2011-2), the talks offer both history and post-mortem: the pasts of contemporary risk discourse and the impact of thinking about futures on the present.

2:00-3:00
Professor Wolf Kittler (UCSB), “Origins of Risk”

The talk will trace the long history of risk. First used by dolce stil novo poets in the thirteenth century, the word was soon applied to maritime insurance by North Italian bankers, “the Pope’s Merchants,” as they were called, who brought the word and the idea from Lombardy to Lombard Street in London. After the Italians had been expelled, their business was taken over by the coffee house owner Edward Lloyd and his descendants who made a fortune in the slave trade. At the end of the nineteenth century, when new forms of danger had emerged in the industrial revolution, the Accident Insurance Act, which was issued by the new German Reich in 1884, transferred the term risk from maritime law to the legislation on firm land. Since Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society, which was published in 1986, the extension of the term has acquired global dimensions.

3:00-3:30       Coffee Break

3:30-4:30
Professor Colin Milburn (UC Davis), “Post-mortem: the Necrosis of Nanotechnology”

This talk will attend to the necropolitics of the molecular sciences, the ways in which nanotechnology and related fields now mobilize dead matter–even the concept of death as such–in the service of a speculative “postmortal” future, making death a new way of life. It is about various technical agendas to produce life after death, to reanimate, to resurrect dead bodies–both human and nonhuman. It is about the speculative visions that inhabit the technological present. In other words, this talk is about zombies.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, Transcriptions will be co-sponsoring the “Speculative Futures” series with the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center . Look forward to announcements regarding guest speakers, film screenings, symposia, and other events focusing on three themes: risk-uncertainty, security, and virtuality. Follow Speculative Futures on Twitter (@specfutures) and Facebook.

Friday, May 27 | 3:00 – 5:00 pm | Multicultural Center Theater

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, whose work has been featured at LACMA, New York’s New Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou, will be the keynote performers at this year’s Arnhold Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Conference! This event, sponsored by the Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows, COMMA, the EMC, Poetry/pOETICS Hub, IHC, and the MAT program, will feature critical panels, poster presentations, and poetry readings by UCSB undergraduates, as well as a performance and talk-back by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Don’t miss it!

4TH ANNUAL RESEARCH SLAM
Friday, May 13
South Hall (various locations)

The Transcriptions Center and the Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows Program proudly present the schedule for our Fourth Annual Research Slam, taking place on Friday, May 13. We are fortunate to have a group that spans disciplines from Media Arts and Technology to Spanish and Portuguese to Music, and who will be presenting work on topics including crowdsourcing, video games, avatar creation, Readies machines, and collaborative field recording projects. Please join us for a hyperactive afternoon of interdisciplinarity and temporal disruption to celebrate the myriad ways that the humanities can meet with technology.

The goal of the Research Slam is to combine the best features of traditional academic humanities venues like lectures and roundtables and combine them with the free-flowing, hyperattentive and participatory focus of the poster session and poetry slam. The format includes a series of parallel presentations, followed by a wrap-up session at the end of the afternoon. Glow necklaces and bracelets will be provided!

OPENING REMARKS: 1:00 (South Hall 2635)
Alan Liu, English Department Chair

SESSION 1: 1:10 pm – 2:10 pm (SH 2635)

Featuring DJ Otter Pop (UCSB student Chloe Lucado)

August Black (Media Arts and Technology) – Re-Framing the World Wide Web
Anne Cong-Huyen (English) – Non/Documents: Temporary Subjectivity in US Immigration Papers and Fiction
Amanda Phillips (English) – Avatar S(l)ideshow: Exploring the Limits of Avatar Customization Systems
Penny Richards (UCLA Center for the Study of Women) – “Citizen Archivists”: Flickr Commons and the Crowd in Crowdsourcing
Lindsay Thomas (English) – Bunnies, Birds, and Cows: Animal Life, Realism and Histories of Bio-art

SESSION 2: 2:20 – 3:20 (Transcriptions Center – SH 2509)

Stacey Church (English) – Creating and Constraining the Vast: The Implications of World-Building through Digital Textual Objects and Spatial Mapping of Narrative in Dragon Age: Origins
Liliana Gallegos (Spanish and Portuguese) – Tijuana Disco Ball
David Novak (Music) – Kansai Mix
Julia Panko (English) – Interfacing with Modernism: Reading Machines and Haptic Storage
Amanda Phillips (English) – Snapshots of Bayonetta: Postfeminist Icon or Queer Queen of the Damned?

RESEARCH SLAM WRAP-UP SESSION: 3:30 – 4:15 (South Hall 2635)
How can the Research Slam be better/more awesome/more inclusive/more widely known/etc. Attend this session and let us know!

Reception to follow: refreshments and snacks will be provided.

***CALL FOR PARTICIPATION***

Transcriptions and the Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows Program Present
4th Annual Research Slam
Where the Poster Session Meets the Poetry Slam!

Friday, May 13
1 pm – 5:30 pm
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of English
South Hall (various locations)

One of the goals of UCSB’s Transcriptions Center is to investigate and highlight innovative ways of combining traditional humanities research with information media and technology. In this tradition, the Transcriptions Center and the English Department’s Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows Program are hosting the fourth annual Research Slam to showcase the unique work done by scholars interested in these intersections.

The goal of the Research Slam is to combine the best features of traditional academic humanities venues like lectures and roundtables with the free-flowing and participatory focus of the poster session and poetry slam. The format includes a series of parallel presentations, followed by a plenary discussion at the end of the afternoon.

A Research Slam is:

•    Non-linear intellectual encounters
•    Smaller, more personalized discussions, followed by a large group session
•    Multi-media, multi-modal, multi-temporal
•    Inclusive of faculty and students
•    Performative, interactive, playful
•    Burning man without the fire
•    A Poetry/Art slam without the judging
•    Interested in new paradigms of sharing scholarly work

A Research Slam is not:

•    Hierarchically divided into presenters & audience
•    Rigidly structured
•    Quiet
•    Lecture-based
•    Traditional

The Transcriptions Center is now soliciting multimedia projects, research posters, and other creative or scholarly works taking advantage of the intersections between culture, information and technology to showcase at the Slam, regardless of department, class level, or period of focus of the contributor. If you think your project fits the structure of the event, we invite you to participate!

Here are some suggestions for possible presentation formats:
•    posters
•    original media pieces
•    software / hardware demonstrations
•    performative scholarship
•    live coding
•    audio work
•    robots
•    short films
•    digitized interpretation

Project descriptions are due on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. Please send a 300 word abstract, a short bio and any equipment requirements to transcriptions.ucsb@gmail.com.

Patrik Svensson, Umeå University, Sweden

Friday, March 11 | 2:00 pm | SH 2509

On Friday, March 11, Transcriptions will host a seminar with HUMlab director, Patrik Svensson. He is pre-circulating a draft version of an article forthcoming in Digital Humanities Quarterly as the basis for the seminar; please email transcriptions.ucsb@gmail.com for a copy of the article. Patrik has suggested that a general theme for the discussion might be “how to build/create/design for different kinds of institutional contexts/projects/programs.”

Wine and light refreshments to follow.

The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center, The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, The Transcriptions Center, and the Department of Film and Media Studies present

RISK MEDIA AND SPECULATION

Friday, March 4

10 am – 5:30 pm

Mosher Alumni House – Alumni Hall

The conference analyzes how speculation shapes global connections and futures as it negotiates uncertainty. The speakers address how risk media domesticates dynamic, unpredictable emergences–accidents, biohazards, piracy, terrorism–in the name of control and profit. They also explore critical, creative speculative approaches promoting common, more habitable worlds.

10:00-12:00 Keynote Panel: ACCIDENTS

Greg Siegel, UC Santa Barbara
“‘By Accidents and Sagacity’: Forensic Reconstruction as Retrospective Prophecy”

Karen Beckman, University of Pennsylvania
“Contemporary Art, Animation, and the Visualization of Hybrid Risk”

12:00 – 1:30 pm Lunch break

1:30-2:45 Panel: LEGALITIES

Sudipta Sen, UC Davis
“The Injustices of Sholay: Law, Lawlessness and the Cinematic Popular in 1970s India”

Bhaskar Sarkar, UC Santa Barbara
“‘Everyone is in Love with Pirates!’ India’s Informal Economy in the Wake of TRIPs”

2:45-3:00 Coffee Break

3:00-4:15 Panel: GLOBALITIES

Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota
“Speculations of the Black Atlantic; or, Spinoza’s Dream of the Long Twentieth Century”

Colin Milburn, UC Davis
“Greener on the Other Side: Science Fiction and the Problem of Green Nanotechnology”

4:15-4:30 Coffee Break

4:30 – 5:30 pm Roundtable discussion

Karen Beckman, University of Pennsylvania
Bishnupriya Ghosh, UC Santa Barbara
Geeta Patel, University of Virginia
Rita Raley, UC Santa Barbara

Monday, January 10 | 3:00 pm | SH 2635

Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and was published by the MIT Press in 2006. Current projects include a monograph, “Making Knowledge with Paper,” and an edited collection,”‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has previously taught at Harvard University and at The Catholic University of America.

Transcriptions, begun in 1998, focuses on work in digital humanities and new media.  Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise placed in engagement with the lore of [...]