Monthly Archives: January 2015

Researching Gamification: Strategies, Opportunities, Challenges, Ethics

CHI 2015 Workshop

From social sciences to biology, gamified applications and games are being increasingly used as contexts and tools of research: as “petri dishes” for observing behavioral dynamics; as sources of ecologically valid and/or “big” data on user behavior; as crowdsourcing tools for research tasks; or as means to motivate participation. However, their use also entails many open questions and deep ethical ramifications. This one-day workshop, co-located with CHI 2015 in Seoul, Korea, invites HCI and game researchers as well as industry practitioners and ethicists to advance the practice of using gamified systems and games as research contexts and tools in an ethical manner.

 

Deadline for submissions is January 19, 2015

– See more at: http://gamification-research.org/chi2015/#sthash.LdQScsAH.dpuf

 

 

Critical, Expanded, Material: Re-thinking the Digital Humanities

A Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies/Sussex Humanities Lab Symposium

Monday, January 12th, 2015
Time: 1:30 – 5:30
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabiankatu 24 A, Seminar Room 136, Ground Floor.

Speakers:
Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History
‘Voices of Authority: recreating the trial experience using the Old Bailey Online’
Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Studies
‘Performance and Live Data’
Dr. David Berry, Reader in Digital Media
Digital Humanities and the Post Digital (title to be confirmed)
Professor Caroline Bassett, Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
‘A lateral theory of time travel: digital humanities, SF and influence’

Digital transformation is transforming cultural forms and practices as well as ways of researching and publishing. The objects as well as the tools and methods of humanist study are changing. In this context there is a growing realization of the need to re-invent digital humanities, to expand its reach, to develop critical modes of analysis, and explore new forms of cultural production. The Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL), a four year research programme based at the University of Sussex in the UK, is exploring these issues and the symposium is intended to develop a dialogue between the SHL and academics engaged with digital humanities in Finland.

Convenor/organizer Mikko Tolonen, HCAS.
Registration for this event is required but free of charge. Please register online.
Holding page for registration is:
http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/events/rethinking-digital-humanities/index.html

 

Media archeology contributions sought

Media Archaeologies ForumJournal of Contemporary Archaeology 

The recent emergence of ‘media archaeologies’ is an exciting theoretical and methodological shift within media studies. In 2010, in The Routledge Companion to Film History (ed. William Guynn), Erkki Huhtamo defined ‘media archaeology’ as ‘a particular way of studying media as a historically attuned enterprise’ that involves researchers ‘”excavating” forgotten media-cultural phenomena that have been left outside the canonized narratives about media culture and history’ (203). In the same year, Jussi Parikka added that ‘media archaeology needs to insist both on the material nature of its enterprise – that media are always articulated in material, also in non-narrative frameworks whether technical media such as phonographs, or algorithmic such as databases and software networks – and that the work of assembling temporal mediations takes place in an increasingly varied and distributed network of institutions, practices and technological platforms’(http://mediacartographies.blogspot.ca/2010/10/what-is-media-archaeology-beta.html). German media theorist and trained archaeologist, Wolfgang Ernst, describes media archaeology’s focus on the ‘nondiscursive infrastructure and (hidden) programs of media’ (2013, Digital Memory and the Archive, p. 59). If media archaeologists such as Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman, Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Cornelia Vismann and Siegfried Zielinski are interested in scalar change, material-discursive assemblages and deep time relations as they pertain to media technologies and networks, how might archaeologists with interests in the media actively contribute to the shaping of this field?

Alongside archaeology’s discursive travels across the humanities, most notoriously via Michel Foucault, archaeologists have long engaged with media. From Silicon Valley to Atari dumps, from the mobile phone to the media technologies of post-war astronomy and from telegraphy to the material-discursive actions of media as sensory prostheses, the global archaeological community has produced a large number of important studies of media techno-assemblages that both map specifically archaeological approaches and push at the limits of archaeology as a discipline. What are the archaeological specificities that mark out a distinct disciplinary approach to understanding media? How might the practices of media archaeologists such as Huhtamo, Parikka, et al challenge assumptions that archaeologists located within the discipline might have about their methodological and conceptual specificities? In short, where are the boundaries between media archaeologies and archaeologies of media? How are those boundaries drawn, performed and maintained? And how might we work together to ask new questions of media technologies and their relations?

This forum invites contributors to submit responses to the provocations contained in the first paragraph. The forum invites contributors to draw out key archaeological theories and practices to contribute to the rich field of media ecologies, archaeologies and ‘variatologies’ in order to explore the implications of distinct yet diverse archaeological approaches to media assemblages. Commentaries are welcomed in the form of short texts (1,000 – 3,000 words) or in any other genre suitable for print, including drawings and images. We welcome especially original thoughts and specific examples from around the world.

 

Commentaries will be selected in terms of originality, diversity and depth and will be published in a forthcoming Forum in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (http://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/JCA). Deadline for submissions is 3 February 2015.

 

For submissions and questions, please contact Angela Piccini, a.a.piccini@bristol.ac.uk