Category: University of Oregon

Welcome back NMCC students and faculty affiliates!

At the beginnings of what promises to be a challenging school year, and after what was certainly a challenging summer, NMCC sends our students and faculty affiliates a note of welcome . We want to recognize that we return to a different campus this term, teaching and learning remotely, still reeling from weeks of wildfires, facing down the second wave of the pandemic, and enduring the unrelenting onslaught that is our contemporary political moment. We collectively hope that everyone is taking the time for self-care during these difficult times.

NMCC’s events and lectures will look a bit different this year as we won’t have on-campus visitors for at least Fall term (and quite possibly all year). However, we are hoping to present a series of videoconference lectures and workshops on topics ranging from AI to digital methods. If you have any ideas for speakers or topics for these kinds of events, please contact us at nmcc@uoregon.edu. We may even be able to help fund a speaker or event that you are interested in hosting. We are also hoping to hold our annual Data|Media|Digital Graduate Symposium in Winter or Spring term. If you have other ideas for ways of connecting with NMCC that would be valuable to you (maybe a dissertation workshop series?, new media talks from new UO faculty?), please reach out and we can help facilitate such events. Stay tuned to our blog, website, and social media for updates on these and future NMCC events.

As you get ready for your classes, we also want to draw your attention again to the list of NMCC-eligible courses. We updated this list over summer, so check it out to see if there’s a course of interest to you that can count toward your NMCC certificate

If you are receiving this email as a prospective NMCC student, know that the NMCC is here to support your interests and pursuits in digital technology, collaboration, or new approaches to scholarship. If you are consider adding the New Media and Culture certificate to your degree, reach out and let us know what questions you have. The New Media and Culture certificate is available to any graduate student in any department at all of UO’s colleges and schools. 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 a FAQ, associated faculty, a list of new media courses , and application materials should you wish to apply.

Lastly, Colin and Patrick just wanted to again introduce ourselves as the NMCC leadership. Colin Koopman (Professor & Department Head of Philosophy) is the current Director of NMCC. He works on data politics, most recently in his 2019 book How We Became Our Data. He is looking forward to teaching the NMCC required common seminar this Spring in a new partnership with the Comparative Literature Department (note that the common seminar will also be offered in Winter through the School of Journalism and Communication). Patrick Jones  (an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies in SOJC) is our social media coordinator and administrative assistant — he works on political technology, global media, and social movement politics.

Again, we welcome you all back and look forward to a fun, engaged year at the NMCC even under the circumstances.

NMCC is happy to announce the launch of a digital web exhibit platform we have set up for our students. Using Omeka, a leading open-source digital collections and design collection, we have created a hosted space for NMCC students to build a digital exhibit with the assistance of NMCC (and Digital Scholarship Center) staff.

We are launching with two just-finished exhibits by a pair of excellent NMCC graduate students.  The first exhibit, by NMCC and History of Art and Architecture Doctoral Student Emily Lawhead, is titled “‘Make a Shadow’: The Performative Arc of Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem #4.” It  traces the performative dimensions of a decade-long (1965-175) project by Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) in association with the international Fluxus Movement. The second, by NMCC Program Assistant and SOJC Doctoral Candidate Patrick Jones, is titled “Mechanized Secrecy: A Genealogy of Democratic Spaces.” It explores how the secret ballot reorganized the act of voting in the United States in the late 19th century.

For more information on our Omeka exhibits, visit our website.

Congratulations to our talented 2020 NMCC graduates, Julia Major (MA, Nonprofit Management) and Palita Chunsaengchan (PhD, Comparative Literature)! Julia’s favorite NMCC course was Media Archaeology with NMCC Director, Dr. Colin Koopman. She plans to pursue a career in Higher Ed after graduating this June. Dr. Chunsaengchan’s favorite course was Transmedial Aesthetics with Dr. Michael Allan. She will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota starting this fall. To learn more about our graduates and their research, visit our website.

Phil Duncan is a doctoral candidate in media studies at the University of Oregon. His research explores the environmental media industry, with a specific interest in technology’s influence on the production, distribution, and exhibition of natural history and science communication. This research has manifested in fieldwork at the United Nations headquarters, interviews with filmmakers from the Discovery Channel and the BBC Natural History Unit, and in-depth engagement with archival films and materials from the National Geographic, Library of Congress, and American Museum of Natural History archives. His work on the subject has been published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television and In Media Res. Additionally, Phil is currently co-editing a collection, The Wild: Image and Industry, that takes a transdisciplinary approach to political economy and the environmental humanities.

Phil’s dissertation, in part, engages the “old” media of 16mm film through the lens of new media studies. Specifically, this work is interested in the introduction of portable 16mm camera technology to the field of nature documentary filmmaking in the 1920s and 1930s. To aid in this work, Phil’s bookshelf currently houses thick omnibus collections of Nature Magazine, an outdoors magazine published in the early half of the 20th century. Of particular interest to his project are the advertisements for 16mm cameras targeted toward readers interested in pursuing nature filmmaking both vocationally and avocationally. Early findings suggest that the vocabularies developed to promote these technologies 100 years ago are still used today—in advertisements for GoPros, selfie sticks, camper vans, and sleeping bags.

For anyone interested in contemporary resources that engage with media, technology, and the natural world, Phil suggests:

● Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, Alenda Chang (2019)
● Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé, James Leo Cahill (2019)
● Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, Jennifer Fay (2018)
● Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis, eds. Benedetta Brevini and Graham Murdock (2017)
● Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography, Matthew Brower (2010)

The Digital Scholarship Center’s DREAM lab at the University Oregon will host the first of three workshops on WordPress for Digital Humanists on Friday, May 15 from 2-4. The workshop will focus on setting up website infrastructure. No experience with WordPress is necessary! For information or to register for the event visit the DSC website.

The Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media Minitrack at the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-54) is currently accepting paper proposals for the 2021 conference. The Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media minitrack seeks both empirical studies and theory-building papers. Theoretical papers should engage with or trouble foundational ideas, paradigms, and methods from realms such as technology studies and media studies. Empirical papers should draw on original studies of digital and social media that illustrate critical or ethical dimensions. Full paper submissions are due on June 15, 2020 by midnight HST (revised final manuscripts will be due September 22, 2020).

Please see the official minitrack CFP for more information, and feel free to contact the minitrack co-chairs Tonia Sutherland (tsuther@hawaii.edu), T.L. Cowan (tl.cowan@utoronto.ca), Jas Rault (jas.rault@utoronto.ca), and Kishonna Gray (unicorn@uic.edu) with any general questions, ideas, concerns, questions about alternate submission parameters, and/or problems with submitting your paper by the June 15th deadline.

Please know that the organizers are very sensitive to the realities of Covid-19 and are working with reviewers and conference organizers to allow for the most generous approach to our minitrack possible. They are also sensitive to the concerns of the local community in Hawaiʻi and are actively engaging conversations about how to best proceed with our minitrack while minimizing potential harm to island residents.

Thank you everyone for a successful second annual Data/Media/Digital Graduate Symposium! Last Friday, February 28^th, eight graduate students from five different departments presented work covering an array of topics that showed the amazing scope of research being done at UO on digital media and technology. A special thanks to our presenters Bailey Hilgren (Environmental Studies), Brandon Harris (Media Studies), Shiloh Deitz (Geography), Teresa Caprioglio (Media Studies), Mary McLevey (Philosophy), Spencer Cherasia (Media Studies), Valérie Simon (Philosophy), Gabriela Chitwood (History of Art and Architecture), and Patrick Jones (Media Studies).

Our thanks also go out to our co-organizers at UO Digital Humanities and the School of Journalism and Communication, as well as to our faculty presenters Max Foxman (Media Studies) and Ramón Alvarado (Philosophy), and our hosts at the Digital Scholarship Center.