Events
PREVIOUS EVENTS
October 28, 2020
David Parisi
Infrastructures of Digital Touch
Public Lecture | Zoom Recording
5:30–6:30pm Eastern Time
Efforts to digitize touch—to transform it into a sense capable of being captured, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed by computers—reach back to the 1960s. The widespread proliferation of these haptic human-computer interfaces, we have been told by their proponents, would eventually help restore balance to the mediated sensorium, giving touch back its vital powers as an epistemological agent.
Thus far, however, attempts to design technologies that could meet this lofty goal of mediating touch have generally fallen short. Researchers and product developers continue to struggle with a range of practical infrastructural challenges posed by haptics, including the materiality of the human tactile system, the accuracy of the various actuators responsible for generating haptic sensations, network latency issues, and the compatibility of haptic data with data encoded for the senses of seeing and hearing. This talk examines the haptics industry’s attempts to overcome these challenges by creating a new set of normative infrastructures for digital touch.
David Parisi is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston whose research explores the past, present, and possible futures of touch technologies. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows how electric shock, experimental psychology, cybernetics, aesthetics, telemanipulation robotics, and virtual reality each participated in a reconceptualization of touch necessary for its integration into contemporary computing technologies. His writing on tactility has appeared in publications such as Logic, TechCrunch, Open!, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, New Media & Society, Convergence, and Game Studies. Parisi is also a member of the recently established Haptics Industry Forum.
NOVEMBER 11TH, 2019
RICHARD WELLER
DESIGNING A PLANET
Public Lecture
Monday 11th November from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
79 5th Avenue Room D1618Â (Entrance is from 14th Street)
With both despair and optimism, Richard Weller examines the idea that humanity is the first species in evolutionary history to self-consciously design a planet. The lecture touches on mythology, politics, nature, design and conservation as well as the representation of data and ideas.
Richard Weller is the Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Meyerson Chair of Urbanism, and co-executive director of the McHarg Center at The University of Pennsylvania. He has published over 100 academic papers and six books, and his creative work has received numerous awards in international design competitions and been exhibited in major museums. In 2017 and 2018, Weller was named by DesignIntelligence as one of North America’s most admired teachers of design. His research has focused on scenario planning for cities, megaregions, and nations and most recently, on global flashpoints between biodiversity and urban growth.
DECEMBER 4TH 2018
JUSTIN FARRELLÂ
BLENDING DATA SCIENCE WITH QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Public Lecture
Tuesday 4th December from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Orozco Room A712 (66 West 12th Street)
For more information, please visit https://blogs.newschool.edu/integrative-phd/. For any questions or queries, please contact integrativephd@newschool.edu
D907Â (6 E 16th Street)
FEBRUARY 16TH 2018
ALEXANDER GALLOWAY
Seminar (in collaboration with GIDEST)
Friday 16th February from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
http://www.gidest.org/events/2018/2/16/alexander-galloway
JODI’S INFRASTRUCTURE
In his GIDEST seminar, Alexander Galloway asks “What does it mean to talk about digital media?” Digital aesthetics, he argues, can refer to the medium of the digital, that is, all the tools and technologies that populate contemporary life. At the same time, digital aesthetics can refer to context, that is, a digital context or a net condition—the latter being the title of an influential 1999 net art exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Artists have their own particular ideas about digital aesthetics as do computer scientists, and sometimes these ideas overlap and sometimes they don’t.
Can digitality be beautiful? It depends on many complicated things, not least of them the definitions of digitality and beauty. Alex’s GIDEST presentation will explore digital aesthetics through an examination of the materiality of contemporary media in the hopes of answering the question: what kind of medium is the computer?
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. A professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, he is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014), and, with Eugene Thacker and MacKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2013), which forms part of his Allegories of Control trilogy, along with Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004) and Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006) .
This event is co-sponsored with the Integrative PhD Fellowship Program.
NOVEMBER 1ST 2017
KATHERINE HAYLES
THINKING DESIGN THROUGH UNTHOUGHT: THE POWER OF THE COGNITIVE NONCONSCIOUS
Public Lecture
Wednesday 1st November from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
University Center, Lecture Hall – UL105 (63 5th Ave.)
N. Katherine Hayles (Author and Director) teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her print book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2012.
Her other books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines, which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. She is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University, and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles.
 WORKSHOP
Wednesday, Nov 1st from 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Wolff Room D1103Â (6 E 16th Street)
SEPTEMBER 20TH 2017
JOHANNA DRUCKER
VISUALIZATION AND KNOWLEDGE: MODELLING, DISCOVERY, DISPLAY
Public Lecture
Wed. September 20 from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
63Â 5th Ave, UL 105
WORKSHOP
Wed. September 20 from 3:00 – 4:40 PM
6 E 16th Street, D1618
APRIL 19TH 2017
KIERAN HEALY
SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Public Lecture
Wed. April 19 from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
68 5th Ave, Orientation Room – M 104
Kieran Healy informally examines how social science, and especially sociology, has been affected by the rise of social media. New social media platforms disintermediate communication, make people more visible, and encourage public life to be measured. They tend to move the discipline from a situation where some people self-consciously do “public sociology” to one where most sociologists unselfconsciously do sociology in public. Healy discusses the character of such “latently public” work, the role of data and data visualization in it, and the opportunities and difficulties it creates.
Kieran Healy is Associate Professor in Sociology and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. His research focuses on the moral order of market societies. In particular he is interested in the relationship between measurement and social classification, and the link between them in markets for things ranging from human organs to consumer credit. He also works on techniques and methods for data visualization, and problems in social theory.
WORKSHOP
Wed. April 19 from 4:00 – 5:50 PM
6 E 16th Street, D 1103
OCTOBER 26TH 2016
RACHELÂ SAGNERÂ BUURMA
HOW TO THINK LIKE A HUMANIST ABOUT INFORMATION
Public Lecture
Wed. Oct. 26 from 6:00 – 7:30 PM
University Center, Lecture Hall – UL105 (63 5th Ave.)
The methods and practices of the humanities and humanistic social science disciplines have the power to transform our understanding of information and computation, while computational methods and quantitative approaches now offer new paths for inquiry in these disciplines. This talk will show how. Examples drawn from work at the intersection of information science and humanistic text-based study will act as touchstones for a series of key questions in this emerging area. How can we grapple with the questions of scale raised by access to large digitized and born-digital corpora? Â How is our thinking about standards of evidence enriched by the encounter between longstanding models of evidence in the humanities and qualitative social sciences and the assumptions and affordances of computational methods and quantitative approaches? How are ideas about the representation and transformation of text being refreshed by theories and practices of algorithmic transformation? And what new histories and models of knowledge production do we need in order to contextualize this kind of work within our disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge worlds?
Rachel Sagner Buurma is an associate professor in the Department of English Literature at Swarthmore College. She works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture, the history of the novel, twentieth-century Anglo-American literary criticism, and contemporary North American literature. Right now she is especially interested in the history and theory of literary research (especially practices of knowledge organization like indexing, excerpting, and note-taking), pasts and and presents of collaborative work, and the intersection of literary-critical inquiry and information science.
WORKSHOP
Wed. Oct. 26 from 4:00 – 5:30
Wolff Conference Room – D1103 (6 East 16th St.)
This workshop will offer an informal introduction to some of the new methods of “distant reading” currently available across digital humanities and humanistic social sciences, along with a discussion about how one begins to employ them in research projects of various scales. We will focus on practical questions, including: How does one find time in graduate school to develop expertise in traditional disciplinary methods while also learning to borrow from the methods of other disciplines? In a context in which new digital tools, computational methods, and programming languages seem to emerge every day, how to you make decisions about what to learn? What are the different kinds of opportunities available to learn about and learn to use these methods? And – perhaps most crucially – how can you develop the kinds of inter- and intra- institutional and interpersonal connections this work can require? How do you discover what potential collaborators in other disciplines and/or institutions will find valuable about your own expertise and disciplinary methods? How do you connect with such collaborators, and how do you create the basis for successful collaborations? How do you learn to speak the language of another discipline well enough to find collaborators and to successfully complete a project?
