Category: University of Oregon

The NMCC is proud to announce our newest Omeka exhibit: Do People Dream of Silicone Soulmates? by Ken Hanson, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology.

Kenneth R. Hanson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon where he studies the cutting edge of technology and sexuality. His dissertation, The Silicone Self, is a digital ethnography of the love and sex doll community. The Silicone Self features content analysis of more than 100 social media sites;  posts, threads, and images from two leading doll community forums; and in-depth interview data with more than 40 doll community members. These members include owners, industry workers, partners of people who own dolls, and potential buyers. His research is informed by a strong queer theoretical lens that incorporates symbolic interactionism, poststructuralism, and intersectional frameworks. Empirically motivated and intellectually adventurous, his work leads him wherever sexuality and technology are willing to go.

Our other Omeka exhibits can be found on our website. And stay tuned for info about an NMCC Omeka virtual panel this winter!

The NMCC would like to welcome our newly admitted students: Teri Cheong, Becca Cudmore, and Molly McBride.

Teri is a doctoral student in the Department of English. Her research focuses on queer and disability studies, media representations, and Japanese culture and literature.

Becca is a doctoral student in Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication. Her research focuses on how scientific issues are framed in the media.

Molly is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on queer cultural production in the US, digitally-mediated communities, and the use of remote, digital methodologies.

Bailey Hilgren is a master’s student in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She holds a master’s degree in Historical Musicology from Florida State University and a B.A. in Music and Biology from Gustavus Adolphus College. Bailey’s primary engagement with NMCC has been related to her ongoing research project focused on activist data sonifications and data-driven art pieces that engage with climate science. Her thesis research at FSU explored several case studies including densely layered data-driven multimedia projects, interactive sonification tools housed online, and creative science communication sonifications that are short, easily digestible, and shareable on social media. Bailey is still grappling with questions about the usefulness of the climate sonifications in activating public action, their typical focus on totalizing Anthropocene narratives, and their unusually clear presentation of slow environmental violence within just a few minutes of sound. Though she thought this project was finished when she defended her last thesis, she’s finding that it continues to unfurl in exciting and unexpected ways.

Her current research at UO explores white supremacy as embedded in the construction of the soundscape of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. The project traces the ways that popular environmental conservation discourse, scientific publications, and state and national legislation have constructed and upheld the exclusionary idea of the Boundary Waters as a distinctly silent place. Bailey plans to reformulate this research into a collaborative multimedia project that explores sounds in the Boundary Waters that disrupt the dominant narrative of silent wilderness. She also hopes to extend the thesis into a larger study of sound/music, space, and power.

Her ongoing interests in new materialism and digital humanities continue to delight (and distract!) her. She has been sustained through these several unusual academic terms by going for soundwalks (an excellent Covid-19-specific soundwalk is here: https://newmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Soundwalk-from-Home_Covid19-version.pdf), sewing clothes from thrifted sheets and curtains, and watching cute animal videos.

A rather disjointed smorgasbord of Bailey’s current recommendations for new media or digital resources:

-Brian Foo’s “The Sound of Movement” (and his many other data-driven projects)

-Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

-UO Professor Jon Bellona’s music and media projects

-Milla Tiainen’s body of research on new materialism and (musical) performance studies

-Anahid Kassabian’s Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

-Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s art (and generally, Forensic Architecture projects)

-The richly sampled collage-style music of The Books

Mattie Burkert is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at UO. Her research investigates the London theater world of the long eighteenth century using a combination of archival and computational approaches. Her essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Philology, and the edited collection Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016). Her first book, titled Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2021.

As an Assistant Professor at Utah State University from 2016 to 2020, Burkert led a team that developed the NEH-funded London Stage Database. The project website enables queries into and exploratory statistical analysis of over 52,000 performance events recorded in London between 1659 and 1800. It is also a media archeological project that revives and revitalizes of the London Stage Information Bank, an electronic database of performance records created in the 1970s and previously thought lost. (You can read more about the legacy of the Information Bank in Digital Humanities Quarterly). In keeping with this history, the user interface design foregrounds the data’s numerous transformations, highlighting the invisible labor that went into the Information Bank’s original creation as well as the choices that informed the recovery process. The website launched in July 2019 and has been featured in The Economist and reviewed in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. Burkert plans to continue adding data and features to this project at UO and hopes to have the opportunity to mentor undergraduate and graduate researchers interested in working on it with her. She imagines a future in which this database, in combination with GIS locations of the London playhouses and visual search technologies, enables gaming and augmented reality experiences that immerse users in a vibrant and under-studied moment in the history of London’s entertainment industry.

Burkert is deeply invested in helping students leverage digital humanities methods to develop new forms of ethical, socially aware scholarship. In a forthcoming state-of-the-field essay, she traces the relationship between the increased attention to issues of identity, equity, and social justice in DH and a set of related methodological turns—away from rhetorics of scale, objectivity, and novelty, and towards an increased focus on the material specificity and social embeddedness of digital data, tools, devices, and infrastructures. This commitment informs her teaching, as well. At USU, she taught a graduate seminar on “The Deep Eighteenth Century” that was selected as a winner of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Competition. In that course, students collaborated to develop a public-facing digital exhibition using the web publishing platform Omeka. Curating materials from USU Special Collections and Archives as well as subscription databases, students created an interactive experience that explored the legacies of this period that continue to haunt the present—from the cultural violence enacted towards indigenous Americans forced to convert to Christianity, to the racist erasure of the Haitian Revolution from popular histories of political Enlightenment. During the 2020-21 academic year, Burkert is teaching undergraduate courses focused on the intersections of race and technology as part of the Digital Humanities minor, and she is grateful to be collaborating with librarians from the DREAM Lab to teach forty people WordPress simultaneously over Zoom (!). She is currently developing a co-taught course on surveillance and labor in the technology industries, as well as a graduate course on media archeology and recovery.

Burkert’s shelfie includes books by other faculty affiliated with the NMCC (Tara Fickle’s The Race Card and Dan Rosenberg’s co-authored Cartographies of Time) and another recent favorite, Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont’s edited collection Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (link is to an open-access e-book). Along similar lines, she also recommends the open-access edition of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism. In her free time, Burkert has been enjoying N. K. Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? and the HBO series Lovecraft Country.

Winter Course offerings for 2021 are posted below. They are also posted on our website. If you are curious if a course not listed on the website can count towards the certificate, please check out our course petition process or contact us at NMCC@uoregon.edu for more information.

As a reminder, in AY 2020-2021, the Common Seminar, “History and Theory of New Media,” will be taught in both Winter and Spring Term. In Winter, the course will be taught in the School of Journalism and Communication. In the Spring, it will be taught in the Department of Comparative Literature by NMCC Director, Dr. Colin Koopman.

Predict and Surveil: A Book Launch Conversation between author Sarah Brayne and Bruce Western. November 20, 2020, 2 pm (Central)/3 pm (Eastern Std)/12 PM (Pacific)

Join Oxford University Press on November 20, 2020, at 2 pm (Central Time) for a ZOOM conversation between Professors Sarah Brayne (UT-Austin) and Bruce Western (Columbia) to discuss Professor Brayne’s new book Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford University Press, 2020), moderated by Julian Go (U-Chicago). After the conversation, there will be a Q&A with the audience. The event is free and open to all. Register below to receive the zoom link the day of the event*

To sign up for the event visit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1u2wdwYrsGwsb4kI3bF_u2Bpg2xo8nLaZJX1FcXQ-UB31ww/viewform?gxids=7757

The UO Libraries presents the WordPress for Digital Humanists Workshop Series!

Have you been curious about WordPress, but not sure how to get started or hesitant to jump in? Are you wanting to setup a digital humanities project with WordPress and need technical knowledge? Join the UO Libraries in their 3 part workshop series. We’ll be diving into how to use WordPress via UO Blogs. For more information visit their website.

The Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon—in collaboration with the Oregon Humanities Center as well as with faculty at the University of Kansas and Koç University— is pleased to host a monthly webinar-style conversation series on Data Ethics.

The webinar will consist of two online meetings a month (~1hr). One meeting will be an internal/institutional online discussion meeting reserved to those institutionally affiliated people with an interest in data ethics. This first meeting will be a seminar style discussion based on assigned readings for the monthly topic; a second monthly public meeting (~1hr) will be reserved to welcome a speaker for a thorough discussion/talk of a topic in data ethics.

This webinar series is possible in part thanks to the generosity of the Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities as well as academic sponsorship opportunities from Ripple Labs Inc. at the University of Kansas.

For any questions regarding scheduling and registration please visit this webpage or contact Ramón Alvarado at ralvarad@uoregon.edu with subject line “data ethics webinar”.