by mburkert - November 7, 2015

Call for Papers- The 2016 Grad Student Forum

The University of Oregon Graduate School is seeking individual, poster, and five-minute presentation proposals. The 7th annual Grad Forum will showcase UO’s graduate student research, scholarship, and creative expressions. This year’s Grad Forum themes revolve around ideas of interdisciplinary work, innovative research, and life in the Pacific Northwest. The 2016 Graduate Student Forum will take place on February 26, 2016 at the Ford Alumni Center.

Students may participate with:

Poster Submissions: Submit a 100 word abstract of your research. Posters will be presented on a 24 x 36 inch standard poster board
5 Minute Presentation Blitz Submissions: Submit a 100 word abstract of your research for a 5 minute presentation made to a broad audience.
Individual Submissions: Submit a 100 word abstract for a 12 minute presentation of your research
Group Panel Submissions: Submit a 300 word abstract with three to five other presenters with similar areas of research (but from different academic fields) for a group presentation.

Themes:

Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures, Crossing Frontiers: Language, migration, identity, and the synthesis of cultures
Breaking New Ground in the Sciences: Approaches to reproducibility and data management, shifting paradigms, and innovative research practices
Challenges for a New Generation of Leaders: Policy, scientific, and social approaches to emerging and continuing catastrophes
In Our Own Backyard: Pacific Northwest life, research and education, community and philanthropy
Ecology and Sustainability: Adaptation, succession, homeostasis, and planning

Proposals for posters, individual panel presentations, and/or 5 minute presentation blitzes are due Friday, December 18, 2015. Apply at this website

Proposals for group panels are due Friday, January 8, 2016. Apply at this website

For more information, see the Graduate Forum website

by mburkert - November 2, 2015

SOJC Book Launch- Data Journalism: Inside the Global Future

The School of Journalism and Communication will be hosting a book launch for Data Journalism: Inside the Global Future, co-edited by University of Oregon’s own Damian Radcliffe. The book launch will be held in 141 Allen Hall on Thursday, November 19 starting at 4:15 pm. There will be a public presentation showcasing studies from the volume featuring:

Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

nicole dahmen

Nicole Smith Dahmen, Assitant Professor of Visual Communication at the University of Oregon.

A reception will follow in Allen Hall Heart starting at 5:15 pm.

“Recent advances in digital technologies are allowing data journalists to find and tell stories in new and visually exciting ways, often working in collaboration with developers, statisticians and designers. It’s a new frontier for many newsrooms, but not without its own teething pains. This much anticipated follow-up volume to the bestselling Data Journalism: Mapping the future features 30 chapters from journalists, developers and academics on both sides of the Atlantic and further afield. It is an essential primer for wannabe data hacks and others interested in the trade.” –Amazon

by mburkert - October 28, 2015

Alumni Update, October 2015

Ryan Eanes:

Ryan Eanes is currently an assistant professor at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland in the Department of Business Management. Ryan focuses on digital marketing with special interests related to consumer consumption, smartphones, and the psychology of place.

Check out Ryan’s blog!

Emily McGinn:

Emily Mcginn is finishing her Postdoc at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. She will be moving to Atlanta in January to begin a new job as the Digital Humanities Coordinator for the University of Georgia’s DigiLab.

Check out the digital humanities website that Emily ran last summer!

Bryce Peake:

Bryce Peake has recently moved to the East Coast where he is now a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research on Wikipedia’s misogyny was republished by Wikipedia signpost, and has become central to the discussion of sexism in the New York Times and The Atlantic. Bryce is continuing his work in new media with several forthcoming peer reviewed articles and a new teaching resource!

Check out Bryce’s website!

by mburkert - October 28, 2015

NMCC Open House: 9:30-10:30 at the DSC, 142 Knight Library

by mburkert - October 28, 2015

Department of Art Lecture Series- Chris Coleman

Come see University of Denver’s art professor Chris Coleman lecture on “Emerging Terrains” this Thursday, October 29 at 6:00 pm in Lawrence 115.

“‘I believe in using art to create disruptions from daily life. Sometimes these disruptions are subtle, and sometimes enveloping. My art is always looking outward, unearthing the problematic and seeking possible pathways for positive forward movement. The question becomes how do I apply my digital media creation, creative coding, mechanical engineering, and sculptural skills towards answering challenges we face? How do the outcomes interrogate big picture perspectives and offer ways forward that are on some level practical? These are the challenges of the Critical Arts Engineer. The Critical Arts Engineer must have a deep understanding of many technological tools and methods of making, combined with a very critical look at what those tools offer, how they shape what is produced, and how they convey particular concepts; the concepts themselves being critical looks at our world in structural, political, and systemic terms.’ – Chris Coleman

Chris Coleman was born in West Virginia, and he received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo, New York. His work includes sculptures, videos, creative coding and interactive installations. Coleman has had his work in exhibitions and festivals in more than 20 countries including Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, Finland, the U.A.E., Italy, Germany, France, China, the UK, Latvia, and across North America. His open source software project developed with Ali Momeni, called Maxuino, has been downloaded more than 50,000 times by users in over 120 countries and is used globally in physical computing classrooms. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado and is an Associate Professor and the Director of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver.”- U of O Calendar Entry

“Unclaimed”, Interactive Installation, 2015
part of the Denver Biennial of the Americas “Now? Now!” Exhibition at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art
Curated by Lauren Wright

For more from Professor Chris Coleman, see his personal website, where he posts his latest projects. You can also find more information at his course website.

by mburkert - October 27, 2015

October Prof Pick: John Russell

John Russell is a Scholarly Communication Librarian in the UO Libraries. As a member of the Digital Scholarship Center, he helps support new models of scholarly publishing and does outreach, consulting, and teaching for digital scholarship. This term, John is teaching LIB 607: Digital Scholarship Methods. The course is an introductory survey for graduate students that covers a range of topics: data visualization, maps, “distant reading” of texts, and how digital scholarship changes the way scholars think about publishing and teaching. “I try to set up the course so that students get some sense of digital scholarship as it is practiced (through reading scholarly articles) and get some experience working with tools and approaches commonly used by digital scholars. My hope is that the students in this class will try something that strikes them, that gets them engaged enough that they want to investigate more.”

Here’s what John recommends to people new to digital scholarship:

Learn the command line: “Part of this is my own bias – I use a Linux laptop at home and I like working in the Terminal – but there are some very simple, yet very powerful, commands that allow one to, for example, do quick word counts, see words in context across files, or convert files from one format to another. Learning to work on the command line also instills good practices for file naming, helps students understand how their computers are structured, and broadens ones horizons beyond GUI-oriented software. Prof. William Turkel has a series of tutorials that he uses to teach digital scholarship to his students; I also recommend _The Linux Command Line_ by William Shotts and its companion website

Try R: “I love R – it does everything. You can scrape websites, search and save Tweets, make maps, visualize your data, and do statistical analyses. Matthew Jockers has published a book on doing text analysis with R (requires UO proxy to access) which is an important contribution to literary digital scholarship. For beginners, I recommend Code School’s “Try R” tutorial.”

Network: “Digital scholarship is very much about community. There are lots of people on campus who know how to do amazing things and who are also more than happy to help others learn to do amazing things, too. Come to NMCC events (like the open house) and ask people what they are working on. Visit the Digital Scholarship Center and tell me what you want to learn – maybe I can help, or I can connect you to people on campus who have similar interests. Fulfill the requirements for the New Media & Culture certificate because you will meet with like-minded faculty and graduate students from different disciplines who will challenge you and point you in fascinating directions.”

Are you a UO faculty member interested in getting involved with NMCC and/or being our next Prof Picks feature? If so, please contact us!

by mburkert - October 8, 2015

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

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology is seeking “contributions to a peer-reviewed open call issue featuring research on gender, new media and technology. We 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.”

To learn more about the call for papers, visit their website!

Submissions should be no more than 5,000 words, including notes and citations, and are due by February 1, 2016 to editor@adanewmedia.org. Attach your submission as a Word document and use “Ada Open Call Contribution” as your subject line. In the body of your message, please include:

Your name and a short bio
50 word abstract of your submission
5 keywords or subject tags
Your preferred email address
Citation style used

Ada is part of the Fembot Collective. To see more of their projects, visit their website.

by mburkert - October 7, 2015

September Shelfie: Tara Burke

I currently help operate and construct visual designs and special productions for music festivals across the country. I recently came back from a summer working at Electric Forest Festival in Michigan, Forecastle in Kentucky and Summer Meltdown Festival in Washington. I ran the operations for special productions of electric forest, which involved participating for the world record group hug. In Forecastle, I was apart of the visual design production team and at Summer Meltdown Festival I was lead volunteer coordinator for 200 volunteers. Having an understanding of new media and culture is essential to the creative events management field and really gives the chance to showcase the multilayers and hats worn by arts managers.

Discovery of NMCC:

I discovered the New Media and Culture certificate when I was beginning my graduate degree through Arts Administration this past Fall. As an arts management student who is interested in community arts program, I felt that NMCC would allow for more diversification in my skillset through field of arts management and diversify my branding when curating event productions.

I was excited to collaborate and engage in discourse with students of all mediums. As an arts management students, I am particularly interested in arts programming and creative event curation, and the opportunity to hear all different students use media studies in their own concentrations was exciting. The New Media and Culture Certificate seemed like a great avenue to explore classes outside of my concentration of study while still being able to bridge connections and see crossovers of disciplines.

I was very attracted to the student group participations and dynamics in my certificate course of study thus far. I am interested in more counter culture forms of engagement through ritual and radical community gatherings, and to be able to offer a diverse perspective to those who have never been exposed to these forms of engagement was exciting and refreshing. One of my biggest achievements from last fall was getting my literary book review submitted to an academic journal that was accepted this summer and will be coming out later in the year through a virtual literary review site. I felt this was excellent experience I may not have been exposed to without being interested in the NMCC. Check out upcoming classes for the Fall 2015!

Useful Resource for new media students:

The Digital Scholarship Center:

The most useful resource for myself for NMCC is the research librarians. I recently discovered them when focusing on research for my fellowship in assisting an AAD faculty member and I couldn’t be happier. These librarians have full understanding and access to the capacity of the library, both on and off web. They are extremely helpful when navigating the complex search engines and helping to narrow down and decipher good content. I do not know how I survived this long without knowing about this resource! They are wealth and information and should be utilized as such when conducting your research methods and construction of your thesis.

What My Year Looks Like.

This year I am hoping to hone in more of my graphic design skills and branding as an arts manager. NMCC offers great course content on all of this and coupled with my classes from AAD focusing on Adobe Suite, I am excited to create enough content for future contracts and job opportunities in creative event design and curation.

I am currently working with an AAD faculty member as a publication coordinator and research for two upcoming book projects. One book will focus on a case studies of performing arts venues and management styles, and the other will focus more on topics surrounding megaregionalism and public planning, policy and management surrounding the cultural policies of these regions. You will be able to find me at the following places: the library, the yoga studio or at home with my cat Bagherra.

Influential Reads

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning)

Media Industries, Work and Life-Mark Deuz– from the European Journal of Communication

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

by mburkert - October 6, 2015

September Prof Picks Feature: Michael Allan

Dr. Michael Allan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Oregon, and an associated faculty member of the New Media and Culture Certificate. He received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Dr. Allan primarily focuses on topics such as world literature, film and visual culture, and the history of reading for his research. His book, In the Shadows of World Literature, examines how traditions and practices in world literature affect the very act of reading and is to be published by Princeton University in April.

Dr. Allan will be teaching a course this fall in the Comparative Literature department titled “Transmedial Aesthetics,” which will explore how we read in relation to different forms of media. Students will read works from different nations, traditions, and languages in order to gain a better understanding of key problems in the field and the ability to critically analyze different types of media through various writing assignments. Authors read for the course will include Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Galloway, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, and Marshall McLuhan. The following is a description of the course, courtesy of Dr. Allan:

“Common as it is to think of textual form in relation to language, history and culture, in what ways does attention to media transform how we read? This course takes seriously what it means to compare across media and expands critical methods beyond textual form. With explorations ranging from discourse analysis and phenomenology to structuralism and objected-oriented-ontology, we will draw together media historians, cultural theorists and new media scholars to consider a number of key questions: How does an image differ from a picture? What is the relation between text and world? How does perspective relate to frame? How does the interface relate to phenomenology? Each week takes a key aspect of media aesthetics to move beyond analysis based on language and culture towards a consideration of networks, reflexivity and the senses. The course will pair together readings with films, photographs and videos, all with the goal of collapsing the boundaries of theory and practice. Reading back and forth across history, we will consider media’s past and future in an effort to enact comparativism not only as a translational and transnational model of inquiry, but as the groundwork for transmedial aesthetics.”

You can find more information about Dr. Allan, his research, and his recently offered courses here.

Are you a UO faculty member interested in getting involved with NMCC and/or being our next Prof Picks feature? If so, please contact us!

by mburkert - September 28, 2015

Welcome to the 2015-2016 NMCC Blog!

Welcome to the 2015-2016 New Media and Culture Certificate blog! We are excited to start a new media-filled year!

Are you interested in digital technology, collaboration, or new approaches to scholarship? If so, consider adding the New Media and Culture certificate to your degree! The certificate can be pursued by any graduate student in any department. It is a flexible program that offers a way to diversify yourself within your field without adding additional time to your degree.

For those interested in learning more about the certificate, please see our website for the director’s welcome and the answer to “Why NMCC?”. On our site, you can also find an FAQ, associated faculty, a list of new media classes offered Fall 2015, and application materials should you wish to apply.

If you have additional questions about the program, do not hesitate to email us at nmcc@uoregon.edu. You can also follow our other social media accounts for updates about events and opportunities!

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

Stay tuned to our blog for more information. In the meantime, we look forward to welcoming you to the program!