Digital Media still in the lead in HUMlab-X. The cell phone reception stopped working in our faraday cage after one layer of tinfoil but the wireless still operates, with a mixed result, with two layers. The battle continues with the help of a group of art students in our investigation of the Anti-Digital Resistence.
Visiting Harvard Junior Fellow Jo Guldi will be giving a seminar in HUMlab on Tuesday 8 May at 13:15-15:00 entitled Mapping Time and Mapping Space: Scale, Time, and the Longue Durée, a Methodological Query for the Digital Humanities. This is a USSTE, Umeå Studies in Science, Technology and Environments seminar talk.
Abstract
If technologies of digital analysis allow us to sort larger numbers of books, performing “distant reading” over entire corpi at the same time, a new question of methodology arises: what sorts of longue-duree questions are suited to questions that happen over an immense scale of time and space? Which historical problems and methods meet each other to test our capacities as scholars of the digital?
Jo Guldi, a historian of political economy and information whose work ranges from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, will present initial findings from her new project, “The Long Land War,” a study of land reform movements, academic paper production, and pamphlet distribution that linked first-world modernists with developing-world revolutionaries in a conversation about land, history, and agency. Timelines, geoparsing, and image abstraction show how new scales of historical inquiry — ranging over continents and centuries — are enabled by the wide methods of the digital turn.
About the speaker
Jo Guldi is Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Boston, USA. and the author of Roads to Power: How Britain Invented the Infrastructure State (Harvard University Press, 2011)
Welcome to HUMlab and what should be a fascinating presentation.
We have started lunchtime sessions in the brand new HUMlab X on the soon-to-be-officially-opened Arts Campus. Today we screened the Danish produced documentary Good Copy Bad Copy. Students and some of the HUMlab staff enjoyed this provocative documentary from 2007 while enjoying free coffee and their own lunches.
This event was part of what we call Lunchtime Learnings, an informal series of seminars, screenings and talks we will be holding in HUMlab X over the coming months. We will announce the next one on this blog shortly.
One Monday and Tuesday this week HUMlab hosted a workshop entitled “Science Fiction Across Media: Alternative Histories, Alien Futures”.
An international workshop exploring the complex representation of natural and technological ecologies in science fiction in and across its varied media – novels, short stories, films, animation, comic books, computer games.
A broad range of topics were discussed by a fascinating group of people (really I know next to nothing about the theory behind science fiction, but I learned a lot as an observer at this event). The Twitter stream for the workshop is here. The workshop was organized by Finn Arne Jørgensen, who managed to put together an amazing event.
In the above images (from the top going from left to right) you can see a shot of the audience, then former HUMlab postdoc Fellow Lisa Swanstrom, now of Florida Atlantic University, delivering the keynote for the workshop (soon to be streamed online), then Joe Trotta, University of Gothenburg, followed by Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå University and then Tony Thorström, Uppsala University. Our very own Finn Arne Jørgensen is next and finally another audience shot.
Thanks to all the participants. A wonderful couple of days.
We will be starting a series of lunchtime talks and presentations in the new HUMlab X this Thursday at 13:00 with the screening of Good Copy Bad Copy. This is a documentary film made in 2007 that examines cultural production in the USA, Nigeria and Brazil in relation to digital media and intellectual property. The film will be followed by a short discussion. All are welcome.
HUMlab is a vibrant and diverse meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology, located at the very center of Umeå University.
