Literature.Culture.Media

Literature.Culture.Media Center Research Slam
Where poster session meets poetry slam!

Friday, May 22, 2009

1:00 - 5:00 pm
Department of English, South Hall Second Floor

1:00 - 1:10 Opening Remarks, SH 2635

1:15 - 2:00 Session I, SH 2635

Nick Alward - Special Content
Hypertext-based project exploring forced simulated torture and our perception of war through both a narrative structured around a hypothetical CIA black site in New Mexico and an essay discussing World of Warcraft.

Salman Bakht - _object.soundingspace.textfield
Sound installation designed for an academic conference setting exploring dichotomies found in language: speech/text, semantics/phonology, sense/nonsense, etc.

Jenna Frazier - Sitt-Marie Rose: The Deaf-Mute Perspective
Using web design and text-analysis tools to explore the significance of the deaf-mute sections in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose.

Bola C. King - Pedagogical Affordances and Opportunities in Second Life
Discussing general teaching possibilities and a look at UCSB Lane and its possibilities and limitations.

Julia Panko - Literature on the Record: Mourning, Memory, and Information Storage in The Raw Shark Texts
Exploring how Hall’s print novel performs crucial digital humanities work by situating these themes within the intersections between narrative, storage technologies, print, and contemporary information culture.

2:10 - 2:55 Session II, SH 2509

Anne Cong-Huyen - CouchSurfing Toward Self: Identity in Literary and Virtual Space
Exploring contemporary identities that are continually constructed and evolving within digital spaces and communities.

Kim Knight - Describing the Viral
Tag clouds that are drawn from the descriptive labels applied to a sampling of content on YouTube.

Richard Lau - Sacco on Sacco
Analyzing the role of authorial self-insertion in Joe Sacco’s landmark works of New Journalism, graphic novels /Safe Area: Gorazde /and /Palestine/.

Amanda Phillips - The Uncanny Abyss: Reflections on Anxiety, Robots, and Intersubjective Relations
Reworking Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley, theorizing the anxiety induced by robots, realistic CGI, and artificial intelligence.

3:10 - 3:40 Discussion, SH 2635
Led by Anne Cong-Huyen, Julia Panko, and Amanda Phillips

3:40 - 3:50 Closing Remarks

3:50 - 5:00 Reception

Priya Ganapti, “$12 Computer: Playpower Wants to Save the World 8 Bits at a Time,” Wired (March 11, 2009)
“The Apple II computer is long gone, but its heart beats on in the developing world, where 8-bit computers sell for as little as $12. Now, computer scientists see a way of using those ubiquitous, primitive PCs to help kids learn — by playing games. “It is about bringing affordable computer learning to the 90 percent of learners in the world who can’t afford a $1,000 or even a $100 computer,” says Derek Lomas, who is leading the Playpower.org team. The project, first talked about last year, is gathering steam. Lomas and his partners are talking to manufacturing partners in China to produce the $12 systems, which are based on cheap computers already sold throughout the developing world. Some of the computers will be sold through Maker Shed, the e-commerce arm of Make magazine in the United States, while the rest will be distributed through non-profit partners in developing countries. And the Playpower team has collaborated with other groups in the 8-bit computer hacking community to help build educational software for the computers….”Rather than figure out how we can create a cultural niche for a $10 computer, we thought: Let’s identify the systems that are affordable and in demand, and put them to work,” says Jeremy Douglass, co-founder of Playpower.org.”

Jeremy Douglass (UCSB 2007; UCSD posdoctoral researcher in software studies)

The LCM’s Film.Literature.Software presentation this quarter will be the anime film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. This film explores the question of humanity and its relation to machines, especially cyborgs and androids. An urban adventure that probes philosophical, moral, and aesthetic issues, this is one of a small number of animated films to become a finalist for the famed Palme D’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Join us on Thursday, February 26, at 6pm in SH 2635 for movie and discussion - all are welcome!

“Interactive Narrative: What It Can Do & What It Can’t”
Facilitated by Porter Abbott (UCSB) with special guest Marie-Laure Ryan (University of Colorado)
Thursday, February 26 / 3:30 PM
English Department Seminar Room, South Hall 2635
A discussion keyed to two texts by Dr. Ryan, “Peeling the Onion: Layers of Interactivity in Digital Narrative Texts” and “Interactive Narrative, Plot Types, and Interpersonal relations” (latter available shortly on ERES).

TALK: “What Has the Computer Done for the Word?”
Marie-Laure Ryan (English, University of Colorado)
Friday, February 27 / 4:00
English Department Seminar Room, SH 2635
Sponsored by the Department of English, Literature.Culture.Media, the Program in Literature and the Mind, and the Department of Film and Media Studies.

“When Geeks Go Camping: Cyberspace and the Outdoor Life”

English Department / Literature.Culture.Media Center Talk
Tuesday, Feb. 24th, 3:30-5
SH 2635

This talk examines the evolution of nature metaphors in computing and cyberspace via some examples of the influence of Californian outdoor life on computer culture in Silicon Valley and beyond.  It is drawn from research for a book-length study, The Wild Surmise: Nature and Cyberspace, which discusses the many ways in which we use our experiences of nature to situate and comprehend our experiences of cyberspace.

Sue Thomas is a Research Professor based at De Montfort University, UK, and works in both the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities.  She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English, UCSB, funded by the British Academy to research the California section of The Wild Surmise project.  More information about Prof. Thomas is available at http://www.suethomas.net

Discussion:  Ivanhoe (literary interpretation game)
Thursday, February 19
SH 2509
10:30-11:30

Talk:  “I.nterpret”
Thursday, February 19
SH 2635
3:30-5:00

DATE: Friday, January 30, 2009
TIME: 10am-Noon
ROOM: Literature.Culture.Media Center (2509 South Hall, formerly the Transcriptions Studio)

Our campus has seen technologies such as course mangement systems, Facebook, blogs, and wikis utilized in both graduate and undergraduate courses; there has been recent interest in how these work and what they’re good for. Join us for a panel and roundtable discussion on incorporating these and other technologies into a humanities or cultural-studies classroom. Our panel includes faculty and graduate students from the English department who will share their success stories as well as suggestions and advice on what different applications can do, how you can get your students engaged, and how easy some of this stuff really is.

Happy new year! I’m back for one more quarter as the LCM’s RA. First off, the open drop-in hours will be:

Tuesdays 11am-4pm
Wednesdays 11am-3pm
Thursdays 11am-2pm
Fridays 10am-2pm
And, of course, by appointment.

Instructors and TAs who have technology-related needs or would like to discuss ideas on using technology in their curricula should feel free to contact me (bck@umail.ucsb.edu). Our resources include two iMacs and 6 Windows-based machines;  I will post a complete list of available hardware and software later this week. Here’s to a great spring quarter!

– Bola C. King

Monday, December 1, 12:00-2:00p.m., South Hall 2509

Guest speaker: Aaron McLeran, MAT

The LCM’s Film.Literature.Software series is pleased to present a software demo of the recently-released Spore. This newest game from the makers of SimCity and The Sims is perhaps the most sweeping simulation ever, starting from a cellular organism and ending with a spacefaring civilization.

MAT graduate student Aaron McLeran, who worked on the game’s generative music during software development, will be on hand to discuss his work. The Creature Creator program will also be available to allow for a hands-on experience with this unique content-authoring software.

LCM is pleased to co-sponsor a lecture by John Durham Peters, Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Media History and Social Theory, University of Iowa

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
1:00-3:00 p.m.
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6220

Peters works in media and cultural history, communication and social theory, and understanding communication in its broad historical, legal, philosophical, religious, and technological context. He is the author of Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (U Chicago Press, 2005) and Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (U Chicago Press, 1999)

The Literature.Culture.Media (LCM) Center continues the work in digital humanities and new media begun in 1998 by the Transcriptions project. As was the case in its earlier incarnation, “the idea 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 [...]