Futurescapes

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Symposium in New Media,Technology, and the Humanities 14-15 March 2016, Trondheim

The Faculty of the Humanities at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is pleased to announce a two-day Symposium in New Media,Technology, and the Humanities organized in connection with the Meta.Morf Art +Technology Biennale which is devoted to the technology of outer space and interstellar travel.

Futurescapes shares the Biennale’s interest in interplanetarity, time, and the cosmic beyond, and in humans who dream, invent, construct, and destroy their way into the future. Specifically, the Symposium will explore new locations, and the entanglements of the humanities and technology, and offer a place for diverse scholars and builders to showcase their cosmic or future-oriented work across disciplinary boundaries. But, we will also learn new methodologies and interrogate critically how and with what tools humanists and technologists communicate with each other, think big ideas, and make things. Finally, we want Futurescapes to address the ethical, legal, and political implications of such work, and how it bears on the futures of our diverse fields.

Kari Kraus is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, digital preservation, game studies and transmedia storytelling, and speculative design. She was a local Co-PI on two grants for preserving virtual worlds; the PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and, with Derek Hansen, the Co-PI of an NSF grant to study Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and transmedia storytelling in the service of education and design. Her latest transmedia work is likewise funded by the NSF. With Min Wu and Doug Oard, she Co-PI'ed Exploring Invisible Traces in Historic Recordings, which used audio forensics techniques to help recover provenance information about undated recordings. Kraus has written for the New York Times and the Huffington Post, and her work has been mentioned in the Atlantic, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Huffington Post, Gamasutra, Wired, on Baltimore Public Radio, and by the Long Now Foundation. In 2015, she entered into a Space Act Agreement with NASA. She is currently writing a book about how artists, designers, and humanities researchers think about, model, and design possible futures.

Call for Projects

Futurescape Revised by madheinrichs2

Futurescapes will showcase interdisciplinary and/or digital humanities projects. Scholars, practitioners, and students from the fields of technology, the arts, and the humanities are encouraged to submit their work. We are especially interested in projects addressing any of the following:

Digital humanities, interdisciplinary methodologies and new research questions. How have humanistic thoughts and creative practices associated with fine arts, music, popular culture transformed neuroscience, information technology, communication, and computational sciences? Conversely, how has the digital turn transformed the supposedly “analogue” disciplines of literary studies, linguistics, history, or philosophy? What do text mining, data visualization, data sonification, topic modeling, textual annotation, digital curation offer the humanities? What are the new research questions they enable us to ask? What are the benefits and limitations (economic, methodological, political, legal, ethical, etc.) of this digital and big-data turn and these cross-disciplinary methodologies?

Speculative practices in the humanities and technological fields. How do different disciplines narrate and landscape the future? How do they harvest the “past” for this purpose? Who has the privilege, the right, to create and narrate the future? What is the gender of the future? How are our futures classed and "raced"?

Disciplinary keywords in translation. What are the humanities and technical sciences’ key terms (memory, space, future, data, narrative, network, design, for instance), and how do they travel/translate across disciplines?

Critical pedagogy. How can we use technology in the service of critical pedagogical practices? How can technology help build collaborative and critical intellectual communities? Activate new student networks? Transform teaching, assessment, and reflection into dialogical practices? How can we turn students and educators into active global digital citizens?

Sustainability. How do interdisciplinary humanities engage with sustainability in the environmental and temporal senses? How can those of us working in digital humanities create projects that endure, instead of dying of “digital rot”? Can the humanities help us better understand sustainability? Can technology make the humanities more sustainable?

Legal regimes and access to technology and the humanities. How do intellectual property laws shape knowledge production and sharing in the humanities, the technical and science fields, and across the globe? How does technology enable/disable access to the humanities? Can the humanities make technology more accessible?

Power, technology, and the humanities. How are existing power frameworks (also within the humanities themselves) consolidated, transformed, challenged by new technologies?

Submissions of Abstracts and Proposals (submission links coming soon)

We invite Paper or Mixed-Media Project Abstracts, Proposals for Mini Workshops, and Proposals for Lightning Shorts. Please email them together with 100-word bios stating your academic affiliation and research interests to addresses listed below. (Note different deadlines!)

Abstracts of up to 500 words (Times New Roman, 12 font size, 1.5 spacing) should be sent by 31st November 2015 to the following e-mail address: tba.

Your presentations/talks should be no longer than 20 minutes and should acknowledge the interdisciplinary character of Futurescapes.

Proposals for Mini Workshops of up to 250 words should be sent by 31st October 2015 to the following e-mail address: tba.

Your workshop proposals should introduce specific tools or interdisciplinary methodologies (for instance, TEI, Python, TypeCraft, Omeka, GIS, annotation, data visualization/sonification tools, etc.) but also explain what kinds of research or pedagogical projects can be accomplished using these tools. Please be specific about the kinds of resources you will need to run your session.

Proposals for Lightning Shorts of up to 250 words should be sent by 31st November 2015 to the following e-mail address: tba.

Your Lightning Shorts micro talk/presentations (4-5 minutes) should introduce novel research, teaching, or digital humanities projects that sit at the intersections of new media, technology, science, and the humanities. PhD and MA students are particularly welcome to showcase their work.