Tuesday, April 23, 2013

How is technology changing the way humans think?

Our next meeting will be held on Friday 3 May from 2-3pm (Arts 1.33) and we'll be discussing how technology is changing the way humans think.

We'll be exploring a chapter from an extraordinary text, Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934), which examines the history of 'machines' and their impact on society. The session will be hosted by UWA researcher David Savat (Communication Studies). David has a background in political theory and is interested in the political, economic, and social effects of technology.

Please RSVP for the session to johawkins@gmail.com.
We can then email you PDF copies of the readings below.

Essential reading:
Lewis Mumford, 'Chapter 1: Machines, Utilities and "The Machine"', in Technics and Civilisation, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, p.3-23.

Supplementary reading:
N. Katherine Hayles, 'Introduction', in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, p.1-18

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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Exciting news! GovHack is coming to Perth for the first time in 2013

What is GovHack?

"Governments collect and publish enormous amounts of data, but have limited resources to get it into the hands of their citizens in engaging ways. GovHack is an event to draw together people from government, industry, academia and of course, the general public to mashup, reuse, and remix government data."
(Source: GovHack website)

Data sets from 2012 included the National Archives, Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia. You can find out more about GovHack Perth here or register your interest.


What is the schedule of events?

  • Friday May 31 - 6pm Kick-off party, Data release
  • Saturday 1 June - Day of Hacking
  • Sunday 2 June - Day of Hacking, Finish with Awards

Want to know what people can build in a weekend? Take a look at the 2012 winners.

Digital Humanities Research Seminar with Harold Short - 23 May

The UWA Institute of Advanced Studies are running a master class with Harold Short, Professor of Humanities Computing at King’s College London. The seminar will run on 23 May between 2pm-4pm. Spaces are limited so sign up today!

Guns in the Garden: Collaboration and contest in digital humanities research

Digital humanities as a field of academic activity is fundamentally inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary. This cross-disciplinary character gives rise at best to new questions and new methods, and in many cases require larger teams of researchers than have typically been the norm in arts and humanities research. It follows that successful projects require new and increasingly sophisticated forms of collaboration, and many projects across the international digital humanities world demonstrate both the challenges and potential benefits of this. 

Find out more.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Data visualisation in the humanities II (The sequel)

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project.
If you missed our session on data visualisation at iVEC on Fri 22 March - you'll be pleased to know that next week's meeting will be a follow-up.

We'll be discussing some of the big issues that were raised including representing ambiguity/ uncertainty and epistemological assumptions.

Find out why Johanna Drucker has described data visualisation as an 'intellectual Trojan horse'!

The next session will run on Friday 12 April, between 2.00pm-3.30pm. The iVEC team have generously offered up their meeting room while our usual meeting room is being renovated. The iVEC facility is located on the ground floor of the Physics building (entrance opposite the Reid Library or through the main Physics foyer).

As usual, we will be discussing an article and a case study. Since we explored data visualisation in the context of history last time, we decided to explore an example from literature next week.

Recommended reading:
Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display”, Digital Humanities Quarterly,Volume 5, Number 1, 2011.

Case study:  The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project
Simon Burrows and Mark Curran, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project and the STN Database, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012.
Explore the tool here: http://chop.leeds.ac.uk/stn/

See you then!