KEYNOTE: Thursday, April 23, 2015. 6-7pm,
Ford Lecture Hall,
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

The 11th annual art history research symposium “Bodies in the City: Otherness and Urbanism begins tomorrow with a keynote address by Doctor Sonal Khullar of the University of Washington. She will give a lecture titled “Scale Drawing: Globalization and Contemporary Art in South Asia.”

Doctor Sonal Khullar is an assistant professor of South Asian art at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research and teaching focuses on global histories of modern and contemporary art, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. Her first book, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990, will be published by the University of California Press in spring 2015.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE: 

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: 

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.

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!!

“Data Management for the Social Sciences”

Mondays, 4-4:50 p.m. in Knight Library (144 LIB)

Lib 607, CRN:33471

This spring the UO Libraries will be offering “Data Management for the Social Sciences”, a one-credit seminar taught by Victoria Mitchell and Jonathan Cain. This course will also be valuable for students in the Digital Humanities.

Data management is an integral part of the research process and has become a requirement for much grant funded research. This course will help students develop an understanding of data management requirements and guide students in the creation of a data management plan for their research project. Elements covered in the course include:

• File Management
• Metadata
• Intellectual Property and Ethical Considerations
• Digital Preservation & Access

Because assignments will be tailored to individual students’ projects, students are strongly encouraged to have a research project in mind when enrolling in the course.

For more information, contact Victoria Michell (vmitch@uoregon.edu) or Jonathan Cain (jocain@uoregon.edu)

“Types, Logic, Semantics, & Verification”
June 15-17

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: MARCH 16, 2015

Everyday life is subject to the quality of computer and system software. The more our society depends on computing systems for critical aspects of economy, defense, and government, the more software correctness and reliability becomes crucial. The focus of this summer school is the mix or interplay of theory and practice in program verification. The main aim is to enable participants to conduct research in the area, thereby contributing to improve software quality.

The goal of this program is to provide a unique opportunity for participants to understand the current landscape in programming language research. We will present a range of material, from foundational work on semantics and type theory to advanced program verification techniques, to experience with applying the theory.

Lectures will include discussions of basic theoretical tools such as proof theory, type theory, category theory and their connection to programming language semantics. The lectures will describe how these ideas can be applied to yield proved-correct software by introducing students and researchers to the ideas of software verification. The lectures will also introduce the participants to the use of the proof assistant Coq in order to provide machine-checked proofs of program correctness.

At all times, material will be presented at a tutorial level that will help graduate students and researchers understand the critical issues and open problems confronting the field. The hope is that students will be able to apply what they learn at the school in their own research. They believe that by doing so the school will have a broad impact on the next generation of software, programming language and software engineering researchers in industry and academia.

The course is open to anyone interested. Prerequisites are knowledge of programming languages at the level provided by an undergraduate survey course. The primary target group is first- or second-year graduate students. Post-doc researchers and faculty members who would like to conduct research on this topic or introduce new courses at their universities are also welcome.

For more details on registration, scheduling, organizers, and speakers for the summer school, please visit the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School website here.

Habitual New Media (COLT 607)

This term Professor Colin Koopman (Philosophy) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2014- 15 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics) have been teaching the seminar course Habitual New Media in the Department of Comparative Literature. This is course is intended to provide graduate students from a range of disciplines with an introduction to, and deeper engagement with, some of the major theoretical approaches to new media as an object of critical inquiry. In this course students  survey emerging themes of inquiry gaining importance across a range of contemporary disciplinary formations including not only new media studies, but also science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of technology and science, and political philosophy and social theory.

Bonnie Sheehey (PhD candidate in Philosophy), and Professor Koopman, have both generously agreed to share their thoughts on the new media seminar from the perspectives of a student and as a teacher of the course (respectively).

Bonnie Sheehey
PhD Candidate
Department of Philosophy

In COLT 607, “Habitual New Media,” professors Wendy Chun and Colin Koopman uniquely created a space for interdisciplinary inquiry into the ways in which new media invariably shape our present modes of habituation and the historical formation of our present selves. By weaving together a dynamic narrative through a critical engagement with theories of new media, the class was able to provide students from multiple disciplines with the opportunity to reflect on questions of temporality, sociality, and the possibility of political and ethical transformation in our networked spaces.

 The course nicely culminated in the interdisciplinary symposium “Living Data: Inhabiting New Media” by bringing together a set of scholars interested in the question of living data. The class was especially significant insofar as it afforded me the chance to engage and converse with students of diverse disciplinary backgrounds for whom the questions and concerns of new media are vital, live, and timely.

Colin Koopman
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy

Probably my own favorite readings in the course have been my co-teacher Wendy Chun’s book “Habitual New Media” (but we read the manuscript for it, as the book is still to be published) (you can hear a lecture by Wendy Chun about Habitual New Media here)  and books coming out of German Media Archaeology, including Markus Krajewski’s “Paper Machines” and Cornelia Vismann’s “Files”.

CASEY REAS:

ULTRACONCENTRATED: IMAGE, MEDIA, SOFTWARE

Thursday, February 26 at 6:00pm
Lawrence Hall, Room 115 1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR

Casey Reas is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited, screened, and performed his work internationally in galleries and museums around the world. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences, as well as a bachelors degree from the School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001, an open source programming language and environment created for visual artists.

Within the visual arts, software is a misunderstood medium. It’s dismissed by some and championed by others, but it remains an enigma to most. Certainly, software is the dominant tool for design and production, but it can be more.  Will software emerge as the next prominent art medium in the post-photographic world? What is a software studio? What is unique about working with software in the context of the visual arts? How does an artist learn to write software? Casey Reas has written custom software for over a decade to explore visual systems and emergent form. In this presentation, a hybrid of a screening and a presentation, he will share a selection from twelve years of work to address these questions.

March 6. 9:30 am to 12:30 pm. 
Knight Library Browsing Room

About: As some democratic governments, many autocracies, drug and human cartels, and terrorist groups are attacking professional journalists and independent citizen journalists in increasing numbers, this symposium will explore the possibilities and challenges that media and technology present in such environments.

All are welcome to attend this morning symposium to discuss how journalists and citizens may work together in the service of public interest and how technology may help us achieve new ways of reporting events and creating new narratives that push for and strengthen democracy globally.

Symposium organized by Gabriela Martinez: gmartine@uoregon.edu

Speakers: 

Danny O’Brien: International Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Madeleine Bair: Curator of the YouTube Human Rights Channel at Witness.

Gabriela Martinez: Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communications and the 2014-15 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar at the University of Oregon.

Endalk Chala: Co-founder of Ethiopia’s Zone-9 Bloggers and PhD student at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

Tewodroe Workneh: Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

Sponsors: 

University of Oregon, School of Journalism and Communication

Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics

UO Department of Philosophy

UO Office of International Affairs