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Margaret Wiese Graduate Research Award

Up to two awards will be made to support graduate student research (i.e., travel, materials, archival or field research) related to preserving the culture, language and/or artifacts of northwestern Native Americans. These awards have been established through the Margaret J. Wiese Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Eligibility

To be eligible to apply for the Margaret Wiese Graduate Research Award, you must meet the following criteria:

  • Be currently enrolled full-time in a master’s or doctoral degree program;
  • Have an interest in preserving the culture, language, or artifacts of northwestern Native Americans; and
  • Be able to demonstrate financial need through the Office of Student Financial Aid and Scholarships (or International Affairs, in the case of an international student).

 

Application Process and Deadline

Applicants should submit their applications no later than 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. The following application materials must be submitted in PDF form to the Applicant Information Form in the link below:

  1. A completed Applicant Information Form
  2. A one-page proposal. The proposal must include:
    1. A description of the travel plans and use of funds; and
    2. A description of activities or research related to preserving northwestern Native American culture, language, or artifacts.
  3. A statement by the applicant (not to exceed 250 words on no more than one page) addressing his/her financial need in whatever terms the applicant feels are most informative.

Letter of Recommendation

This award requires one letter of recommendation from a faculty member who can speak to the student’s academic record and the value of the proposed use of funds.

Click here to submit a recommendation letter or send the linkhttps://gradschool.uoregon.edu/wiese-recommendation to your recommmender. Letters also must be received by the deadline stated above.

(Note: Only authenticated UO faculty and staff can access the recommendation form. If your recommender is not affiliated with UO, please have them email their letter of recommendation to Brandy Teel at bota@uoregon.edu or 541-346-2489).

Award

All applicants will be notified of the decision during spring term. Up to two awards in the amount of $1000 will be made and disbursed in early fall term.

Contact

Brandy Teel at bota@uoregon.edu or 541-346-2489

Note for Graduate Students with Financial Aid
Receiving this award may reduce your financial aid award.  Please contact the Office of Student Financial Aid and Scholarships prior to applying for this (and any other type of) support.

Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well

The following is an excerpt from the New  York Times article “Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well,” by Frank Rose. Originally published April 2, 2015.


 

LONDON — Thinking about a life coach but not ready to commit to the real thing? App stores offer lots of electronic alternatives that can be downloaded to your iPhone or Android device. There’s Success Wizard, which promises to “help you plan, focus and achieve real and lasting results.” LiveHappy, brim-full of exercises from the California psychologist who wrote “The How of Happiness.” Niggle, for people who want “a pocket sized coaching buddy on call 24/7.” And soon, from the British art group Blast Theory, an entirely different approach: Karen, a mock life-coach app that develops boundary issues and leaves its users feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

Karen is a fictional coach in a software-driven experiential art piece. Part story, part game, designed to be played over a period of days, it offers a deliberately unsettling experience that’s intended to make us question the way we bare ourselves to a digital device.

Unlike most real life-coaching apps, this one displays video rather than text — a tactic that makes it easy to forget the distinction between what’s digital and what’s human. When you open the app, Karen (played by Claire Cage, an actress who has appeared on the British TV series “Coronation Street” and “Being Human”) starts speaking to you directly, asking a series of questions.

She seems winsome and friendly — a little too friendly, perhaps. “She’s only recently out of a long-term relationship,” explained Matt Adams, one of the three members of Blast Theory, “and she has a hunger for a new social alternative.”

The dynamic that unfolds is somewhat reminiscent of “Her,” the 2013 Spike Jonze film in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system. With Karen, however, it’s not the user but the app that starts exhibiting inappropriate behavior. “She develops a kind of friend crush,” Mr. Adams said. “And over the next 10 days or so, she feeds back to you things she’s learning about you — including some things you’re not quite sure how she knows or why.”

One other thing that’s different about Karen: It’s not a movie. It’s a personalized experience that plays out on a smartphone or tablet. There is no fourth wall. There is no Joaquin Phoenix. This story is about you. It morphs to fit the user, based on information the user supplies, choices the user makes and inferences the app itself begins to make. And just as you reveal yourself to Karen, she reveals herself to you, in ways that veer farther and farther from a legitimate life-coach experience.

Beginning April 16, shortly after it’s scheduled to be available for free download on Apple’s app store, Karen will be featured in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes competition, which showcases innovative, interactive approaches to storytelling. “I love the idea of a life coach that goes wrong,” said Ingrid Kopp, director of interactive at the Tribeca Film Institute and curator of the competition. “And I thought it would particularly appeal to New Yorkers.”

Ms. Kopp has had her eye on Blast Theory for a while. Based 50 miles outside London in the seaside resort town of Brighton, the group has a reputation for edgy, tech-infused work combining games, video and performance. “We’re interested in the intimacy of mobile phones,” Mr. Adams said. “How they might be thought of as a cultural space. Karen was an opportunity to take this strategy further — how you might engage with a fictional character who is software-driven.”

Claire Cage, who plays Karen in the app. Credit Ruler

But few software characters offer the peculiarly ego-boosting appeal of adapting themselves to the user. This makes Karen an intriguing tool for exploring the knotty relationship between digital personalization and human solipsism. “We know we’re making a satanic bargain” when we rely on personalized devices, Mr. Adams added, “but it’s a rich, murky space, and we’re not entirely sure what we think.”

Curious to learn more about Karen and her creators, the British art group Blast Theory? Read the entire NYT article here.

 

Conference, Call for Applications: THATCamp, in Buffalo, NY. “Emerging Possibilities for Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy.” August 14-­‐15

What is a THATCamp?

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It is an unconference: an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot. An unconference is to a conference what a seminar is to a lecture, what a party at your house is to a church wedding, what a pick-up game of Ultimate Frisbee is to an NBA game, what a jam band is to a symphony orchestra: it’s more informal and more participatory. Here are the key characteristics of a THATCamp:

  • It’s collaborative: there are no spectators at a THATCamp. Everyone participates, including in the task of setting an agenda or program.
  • It’s informal: there are no lengthy proposals, papers, presentations, or product demos. The emphasis is on productive, collegial work or free-form discussion.
  • It’s spontaneous and timely, with the agenda / schedule / program being mostly or entirely created by all the participants during the first session of the first day, rather than weeks or months beforehand by a program committee.
  • It’s productive: participants are encouraged to use session time to create, build, write, hack, and solve problems.
  • It’s lightweight and inexpensive to organize: we generally estimate that a THATCamp takes about 100 hours over the course of six months and about $4000.
  • It’s not-for-profit and either free or inexpensive (under $30) to attend: it’s funded by small sponsorships, donations of space and labor, and by passing the hat around to the participants.
  • It’s small, having anywhere from 25 or 50 to about 150 participants: most THATCamps aim for about 75 participants.
  • It’s non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary and inter-professional: THATCamps welcome graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and programmers, K-12 teachers, administrators, managers, and funders as well as people from the non-profit sector, people from the for-profit sector, and interested amateurs. The topic “the humanities and technology” contains multitudes.
  • It’s open and online: participants make sure to share their notes, documents, pictures, and other materials from THATCamp discussions before and after the event on the web and via social media.
  • It’s fun, intellectually engaging, and a little exhausting.

Registration

More information

Contact THATCamp

New Media & Democracy Conference Schedule Posted

The New Media & Democracy Conference schedule and list of speakers is now posted! Details are below, and more information is available on the conference website: http://nmdc.uoregon.edu/

New Media and Democracy: Global Perspectives

April 9-10, 2015
Knight Law Center 1515 Agate Street

The “New Media and Democracy: Global Perspectives” conference will bring together a diverse set of scholars to investigate the changes in global political discourses and practices brought about by the digital revolution. The event is part of the Wayne Morse Center’s theme of inquiry on Media and Democracy and is free and open to the public.



Keynote: 

Thursday, April 9th (7:00-8:00 pm)

Dr. Sang Jo Jong will give the keynote address titled “South Korea as the World’s Most
Wired Nation: Its Digital Democracy as a Real-Life Case Study?”Dr. Jong is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law & Technology at Seoul National University. Dr. Jong previously taught comparative IP law at Georgetown Law center and at Duke Law School, and is currently a panel member of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center.

 


Conference

Friday, April 10th (9:00-3:45)

Matthew Adeiza (University of Washington), project manager for the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington.

Tarek El-Ariss (University of Texas at Austin), author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and editor of the forthcoming MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: Literature, Culture, Media. Associate editor, Journal of Arabic Literature.

Camille Crittenden (UC Berkeley), Director Data and Democracy Initiative and the Social Apps Lab, and Deputy Director the Center for Information Research Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

Sean Jacobs (The New School), co-editor of Thabo Mbeki’s World: The Politics and Ideology of the South African President and Shifting Selves: Post-apartheid essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity.

Purnima Mankekar (UCLA), author of: Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, co-editor of Transnational Erotics: Media and the Production of “Asia” and Caste and Outcast by Dhan Gopal Mukherji.

Leah Lievrouw (UCLA), author of Media and Meaning: Communication Technology in Society (in preparation), Foundations of Media and Communication Theory, and Alternative and Activist New Media.

Aswin Punathambekar (University of Michigan), author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry and co-editor of Global Bollywood and Television at Large in South Asia.

Margaret Rhee (UCLA), author of How We Became Human: Race, the Robots, and the Asian American Body (manuscript in preparation), co-editor of “Hacking the (Black/White) Binary”, a Special Issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (forthcoming), and co-founder of “From the Center.”

Joe Straubhaar (University of Texas at Austin), author of The Persistence of Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class and the Digital Divide in Austin, Texas and co-author of World Television from Global to Local and Television In Latin America.


 

Organizers: UO faculty member Biswarup Sen (SOJC) and doctoral students Patrick Jones and Laura Strait

Cosponsors: Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, CAPS, School of Journalism and Communication, Office of Academic Affairs, Office of International Affairs Global Studies Institute, New Media and Culture Certificate Program, Oregon Humanities Center, Agora Journalism Center, International Studies Department, Department of Comparative Literature,The Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Department of History


Schedule: 

New Media and Democracy: Global Perspectives Conference
April 9th and 10th | Room 110 – Knight Law Center

Thursday, April 9th

Keynote Address 7-8 PM
Dr. Sang Jo Jong, “South Korea as the World’s Most Wired Nation: Its Digital Democracy as a Real-Life Case Study?”

Reception 8-9 PM (Wayne Morse Commons, Knight Law Center)

Friday, April 10th

Introduction and Opening Remarks 9-9:15
Biswarup Sen, University of Oregon
Doug Blandy, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, University of Oregon

Session 1: 9:15-11:00
Informational Politics
Moderator: Dan HoSang, Associate Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, University of Oregon

Panelists:
Leah Lievrouw,UCLA, “Alternative and Activist New Media, v. 3.0”
Camille Crittenden, UC Berkeley, “Data and Democracy: How New Digital Tools Enhance and Endanger Representational Politics”
Margaret Rhee, UCLA, Short-circuiting Citizenship: Feminist Movement Building in our Digital Age

Session 2: 11:15-1.00
Identities, Subjects, Publics
Moderator: Carol Stabile, University of Oregon

Panelists:
Purnima Mankekar, UCLA, “The Recursive Public Sphere, ‘New Media,’ and Cinema in the New India”
Tarek El-Ariss, University of Texas at Austin, “The Leaking Subject”
Sean Jacobs, The New School, “Making Sense of African Political Identities Online”

Lunch Break (Wayne Morse Commons, Knight Law Center) 1-2PM

Session 3: 2-3:45 pm
Digital Democracy: Local Iterations
Moderator: Daniel Rosenberg, Professor of History and Faculty at the Robert D. Clark Honors College

Panelists:
Matthew Adeiza, University of Washington, “Text Me Maybe: Digital Media, Elections, and Stomach Infrastructure in Nigeria”
Joe Straubhaar, University of Texas at Austin, “Technological Junctions, Networks and Entry Points: Four Key Moments in Social Movements and Democracy in Brazil”
Aswin Punathambekar, University of Michigan, “Politics After Youtube: Satire and Democratic Politics in Digital India”


More informationhttp://nmdc.uoregon.edu/

Call for Papers: Ada Issue 9: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology | adanewmedia.org
Issue 9, April 2016

Editors: Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University) and Nina
Huntemann (Suffolk University)

Ada invites contributions to a peer-reviewed open call issue featuring
research on gender, new media and technology. They are particularly
interested in contributions that exemplify Ada’s commitments to politically
engaged, intersectional approaches to scholarship on gender, new media and
technology

Contributions in formats other than the traditional essay are encouraged;
please contact the editors to discuss specifications and/or multimodal
contributions.

All submissions should be sent by AUGUST 10, 2015 to editor@adanemedia.org.
Your contribution should be attached as a word document. Please use “Ada

Open Call Contribution” for your subject line and include the following in
the body of your message:

A 50 word abstract
Your name
A mailing address
Preferred email address.
Important dates:

–       Deadline for full essays: Monday, August 10, 2015
–       Open peer review begins: Monday, January 11, 2016
–       Expected publication date: Monday, April 4, 2016

About Ada:

Ada is an online, open access, open source, peer-reviewed journal run by
feminist media scholars. The journal’s first issue was published online in
November 2012. Since that launch, Ada has received more than 200,000 page
views. Ada operates a review process that combines feminist mentoring with
the rigor of peer review.

Information about the editors:

Radhika Gajjala is professor of media studies and American culture studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where she teaches courses in global media, international communication, media and cultural studies and feminist research methods. She is the author of Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women and of Cyberculture and the Subaltern:Weavings of the Virtual and Real. She has also co-edited South Asian Technospaces and Cyberfeminism 2.0. She is co-editor of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.

Nina Huntemann is associate professor of media studies at Suffolk University and and co-director of Women in Games Boston. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, culture and technology, applying feminist theory and cultural production perspectives to the industrial and social practices of digital gaming. She is co-editor of Gaming Globally: Production, Play and Place and Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. She is also the associate producer of the film Joystick Warriors: Video Game Violence and the Culture of Militarism and produced and directed Game Over: Gender, Race and Violence in Video Games, both distributed by the Media Education Foundation. She is co-editor of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.

DIGITAL DESIGN & FABRICATION POSITION AT LSU

Job Summary/Responsibilities:
The School of Art at Louisiana State University seeks a full-time Instructor or Professional in Residence in Digital Design and Fabrication for an initial one-year appointment to begin August 2015. The position is based in the 3D area, which includes Ceramics and Sculpture, and will involve interaction with faculty and students from Art, Architecture, Interior Design, and Landscape Architecture.

The successful candidate will be an innovative and dedicated artist and educator, with demonstrable skills in 3D digital design and fabrication. Candidates will be required to teach introductory coursework in theoretical foundations, method skills, and subject-specific knowledge in such applications as: Rhino3D, Grasshopper3D, Solidworks, MasterCAM, Arduino, CAD, CAM, as well as have a thorough understanding of the range of contemporary digital design and fabrication tools and processes.

Required Qualifications:
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) or Masters of Architecture, or equivalent, is required at time of hire for both levels.

Instructor: Teaching experience including a minimum of two years beyond TA is required.

Professional-in-Residence: Eight to ten years of related professional experience is required.

Desired Qualifications:
Particular emphasis will be given to candidates who focus on the use of innovative technologies in ceramics and the creation of functional objects, as well as exhibits detail-oriented craftsmanship with a variety of materials.

Special Instructions to Applicants:
Applicants must present a portfolio of professional work and student work to complete their application. All media is to be attached in the SlideRoom application found here:https://lsuart.slideroom.com/#/permalink/program/24674

A copy of your transcript(s) may be attached to your application (if available). However, original transcripts are required prior to hire.

Additional Position Information:
LSU is the flagship university of Louisiana. Located amid 1500 live oaks, it is one of the loveliest campuses in the South. The School of Art is accredited by NASAD, and includes six studio areas, art history, graphic design and digital art, and is part of the College of Art & Design. The School is home to approximately 400 undergraduate majors and 50 plus graduate students. Additional information on the program can be found at http://design.lsu.edu/art.

Salary and rank are commensurate with qualifications and experience. An offer of employment is contingent on a satisfactory pre-employment background check. Review of applications will begin immediately. Application deadline is April 15, 2015, or until a candidate is selected.

BENEFITS: LSU offers outstanding benefits to eligible employees and their dependents including health, life, dental, and vision insurance; flexible spending accounts; retirement options; sick leave; paid holidays; wellness benefits; training and development opportunities; employee discounts; and more!

Apply here:
http://lsusystemcareers.lsu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=58924

Fembot and Ms. Magazine: Gender-Balancing Wikipedia, One Article at a Time

 

The following is an excerpt from an article by Margaret Rhee of Ms. Magazine, published on March 13, 2015.

Over International Women’s Day weekend, dozens of feminists armed with laptops came to the Ms. magazine offices to reclaim the largest encyclopedia in the world: Wikipedia.

A collaboration between Ms. and theFembot Collective, the Ms. Fembot Edit-A-Thon aimed to “contribute to the digital legacy of women, trans and/or gender non-conforming scientists, writers, scholars, filmmakers, artists, activists, politicians and others by writing them into Wikipedia.”

An astonishing 90 percent of Wikipedia’s editors are men, and that glaring imbalance often trickles down into who gets a Wikipedia entry and who doesn’t. As Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world, its gender gap causes a very male-centric well of knowledge for the countless folks who use it every day.

Transforming knowledge production was at the heart of the feminist event. As Ms. in the Classroom director Karon Jolna asked in her introductory address: “Imagine if [all of] Wikipedia was written by women?”

More and more feminists are organizing to make that wish a reality. The Ms. Fembot event joined several others across the country–such as the Art + Feminism events—committed to including more women editors and more representation of women within Wikipedia.

Editing Wikipedia at Ms.

The participants at Fembot created numerous entries and made 29 changes within existing Wikipedia entries. Among the accomplishments were the creation of entries on civil rights icon Rosa Lee Ingram, suffragist and playwright Paula O. Jakobi and 91-year-old American inventor Barbara Beskind. (You can read and/or edit all the Fembot entries here.)

Read the full article here.

Congratulations to all those who participated in this phenomenal event!!

 

March Shelfie Feature: Farhad Bahram

Workspace
Farhad in his studio space.

Farhad Bahram
http://farhadbahram.com/

Master in Fine Arts, Photography
Department of Art


 

I am third year graduate student in Fine Art and currently working on my thesis which is about various qualities of communicative act in creative practice. The structure of my portfolio as an artist, since I started as a photojournalist in Iran until now that I am graduating with a MFA in the US, is mainly about the process of reception, and also the work of art as a medium that actively impacts the communicative act.

In my creative practice I mostly focus on proliferation of both participatory and process-based projects that engage with the idea of social relations outside of the conventional art spaces and through different modes of communicative act such as intervention and collaboration. I also study various channels and alternative contexts wherein I could apply those communicative modes to structure and distribute new social and cultural objects–whether in the form of social encounters or creative work of art that is no longer conceived of as noun/object but as a verb/process.

Check out Farhad’s website here.

New Media Interests:

My interest in New Media studies originates from the same concept, particularly the way it looks at medium as an expressive cultural object. By cultural object I mean a medium that is not self-sufficient or merely related to the archeology of its existence but rather to the genealogy of its reception through the process of communicative act.

According to Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, new media mostly cares about those mediums that being made for ‘distribution and exhibition’ rather than production (like film features and TV broadcasting) and storage (such as books and magazines). In other words, New Media negates the medium as predicative gesture that is fixed in time and space and solidifies a message into a single untouchable lexeme that is going to be digested by the audience.

Thinking about this concept, I centered the main trajectory of my work on examining the possibilities for transforming this determined correlation between medium and message into an ever-moving chain of relations with no fixed entities to hold onto. This effort introduces the communicative act as a subjective mechanism related to the inability of the addresser to fully express her intentions, but at the same time, her ability to enunciate a context for spontaneous realization. In fact, in this context, the study of new media helped me to establish different ways in which I could define a meta-lingual relationship between medium and message, mainly by focusing on the process of reception rather than a denotative medium such as photography, painting or even, in a broader sense, language and coding. New Media study actually made a move beyond the primacy of the text and emphasized on contextual aspects of distribution and reception. This also necessitate the building of transferrable tools, environments, and platforms –to shape a peripheral medium which actually becomes possible because of the emergence of those new methods in communication and distribution.

That being said, I believe, new media is not addressing certain issues of culture, technology or art. New media is actually introducing itself as an underway of new approaches toward the distribution of new cultural objects and the way in which they will be received. It evolves and reforms itself according to the contemporary issues raised by other fields such as art, history and empirical and human sciences. And in fact this was a new perspective that I have applied to my projects and also my research on creative act as a communicative process.

Teleography (images 1-3) is an open-call and ongoing collaborative project, that I started a few years ago, in which participants are invited to contribute photos (Teleographs), taken from their TV screen, to an online archive. By referring to the same concept that I mentioned earlier, here I was seeking out the possibility of a shift from a passive communicative process (production -> reception) to an active schema (production <-> reception <-> distribution).

Image1_teleo1 Image1_teleo2 Image1_teleo3

Reversality (image 4-5) was another process-based and collaborative project about transforming the subjectivity of the artist, as a historical medium, into a cultural object! The project started as an international open-call in 3 phases, introducing self- determination as an enforced human right and referring to necessity of providing indigenous peoples with the option to state and freely choose how they would be addressed and identified within various cultural and political contexts. The project had been supported by Tokyo Foundation and also the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), by receiving an international fellowship called Sylff Award in 2014.

image2_rev1
Image 4: Reversality (2014)

 

 

image2_rev2
Image 5: Reversality.

MFA Thesis:

My terminal creative project, «A», (image 6-7) will be an structured space that offers a communicative process in which the audience could spontaneously realizes the illegitimacy of the artist’s intention in conveying the message. The installation tries to be an obscure lexicon, consists of several indexes referring to destruction and subtraction. Each piece in this installation negates the presentation of itself as a medium. There are books that are impotent of conveying their intended message; destructed prints that are depleted from the iconic value of an image; and bodies that are unable to introduce the real identity of individuals.

Inside this destructive space that somehow invites the viewer into an engagement with the artist’s intentionality, lies an important and affirmative sentiment, which is the main objective in my thesis: the possibility of relocating the meaning from within the art object and also from the intentionality of the artist to the contingencies of the reception process.

image3_thesis1

image3_thesis2
Image 6-7: From Farhad’s terminal creative project: «A»

 


Some good reads:

Useful Resources on New Media and Digital Culture:

 

 

On the New by Boris Groys

In terms of current readings and resource recommendations about new media, On the New by Boris Groys, the German media theorist, was a very interesting and enlightening reading for me. Here Groys investigates the continuous shifting of the line that separates culture from history, profane from sacred and thus, new from old.

 

 

 

 


And finally, I would like to close this article with the same excerpt that I started my thesis with, from a play called The Story of the Panda Bears told by a Saxophonist who has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt, written by Matéi Visniec, Romanian-French playwright:

 

“ HER: Say « A ».
HIM: « A ».
HER: Whisper: « A ».
HIM: « A ».
HER: Say « A » as if to say you love me.
HIM: « A ».
HER: Say « A » as if to say you’ll never forget me.
HIM: « A »
HER: Say « A » as if to say : « stay! »
HIM: « A ».
HER: Ok… Do I want a coffee?
HIM: « A »?
HER: Yes, I’d love one.
[He gets up and pours her a coffee.]
HIM: « A »?
HER: Just a small piece, thank you.
HIM: « A »?
HER: I don’t know… Though I think I prefer to eat at home.
HIM: « A ».
HER: Now, look me straight in the eyes.
HIM: « A ».
HER: Say « A » in your mind.
HIM: …
HER: Now, say « A » in your mind as if to say you love me…
HIM: …
HER: Say « A » in your mind as if to say you’ll never forget me.
HIM: ….
HER: And now I’m going to ask you something… Something very important… And you’re going to answer in your mind. Are you ready?
HIM: …
HER: « A »?
HIM: …
HER: …
HIM: … 


What’s on your shelf? Interested in being the next NMCC Shelfie feature? Contact us!

CFP: Designs on eLearning 2015: Technology, Culture, Practice

Tuesday, September 15, 2015 – 7:00pmWednesday, September 16, 2015 – 7:00pm

Colleagues are invited to submit proposals for Designs on eLearning 2015: Technology, Culture, Practice, an international conference in partnership with University of the Arts London (UAL), Penn State University and Texas State University. The conference will be hosted at Central Saint Martins, UAL, London on 16 – 17 September, 2015.

Application deadline: 15 April 2015

Proposals can take the form of panel discussions, workshops or short paper presentations on the following themes:

• Cross-disciplinarity
• Understanding practice & culture
• Engaging students in digital spaces
• Digital identity
• Digital scholarship

About Del 2015

Designs on eLearning (DeL) is an international conference exploring the use of technology in art and design Higher Education. As digital technologies continue to transform the creative and pedagogic landscape, they face exciting possibilities and new challenges for the future of education. Themed Technology, Culture, Practice, DeL 2015 aims to explore forms of learning that take place in digital contexts within and beyond HE institutions.

You can find full details on the DeL 2015 website, or subscribe to the DeL mailing list.
Enquiries: Claudia Roeschmann, roeschmann@txstate.edu

Call for Applications: CENDARI Summer School 2015

The CENDARI project  invites applications to its second summer school, to be held  the 20-24th of July in Prague, Czech Republic, on the theme “Researching Medieval Culture in a Digital Environment.

The interdisciplinary five-day program is geared especially toward early-career historians and other scholars (doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows) in Medieval Studies as well as toward archivists, librarians, and e-scientists that engage with or specialise in this time period. No prior experience with digital research methods is required.  Participants will need their own laptops.

Through a number of hands-on sessions, participants will learn how to enhance their research with tools such as Abbreviationes, Classical Text Editor, and Manuscriptorium. They will also have the opportunity to experiment with the integrative CENDARI Virtual Research Environment.

Lectures on the fundamentals of Digital Humanities and its prospects for Medieval Studies as well as field trips to cultural heritage sites in Prague will complete the program. The school will be held at the attractive Old Town venue of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The Institute of Philosophy and the Collegium Europaeum are co-organisers of this event.

To apply, fill out the online application form here.

The closing date for applications is 15 April 2015.

Successful applicants will be notified of decision by 30 April and asked to accept a position or not by 15 May.


TRAVEL BURSARIES

A number of travel bursaries (€300) will be available on a competitive basis to early career researchers in order to defray the costs of attending the school. Funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research, bursaries can be applied for directly through the application form and will be awarded on the basis of the applicant’s ranking during the evaluation process.

For more information, contact info@cendari.eu

For specific questions related to the application process you may also contact:

Jakub Beneš: j.benes@bham.ac.uk

Ota Pavlíček: ota.pavlicek@ff.cuni.cz