The UCSB Social Computing Group held a workshop on Friday May 30th on the present and future of social computing with guests Joan DiMicco (IBM Collaborative User Experience Group), Tad Hirsch (MIT Media Lab), Peter Kollock (Sociology Dept., UCLA), Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia, Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium), and Nancy van House (School of Information, UC Berkeley). The workshop is a small-scale, by-invitation-only event designed to facilitate brainstorming.
The Transliteracies Paradigms Speaker Series, along with the UC Irvine Software Culture Speaker Series, recently sponsored a visit to UC Irvine by McKenzie Wark, author of GAM3R 7H3ORY and A Hacker Manifesto. Wark gave two lectures while at UCI, one on GAM3R 7H3ORY and another on his upcoming project, totality.tv Videos of these talks are available to Transliteracies members only.
In addition, Kim Knight had the opportunity to interview McKenzie Wark on his experiences publishing GAM3R 7H3ORY using the CommentPress commenting system for WordPress. Video of the interview is available to the general public.
“In the Beginning was the Word” is a Flash animation that visualizes the shifting dynamic of the “page” as historical interface. The project was collaboratively conceived and researched by the History of Reading Working Group and co-authored by William Warner and Kim Knight. The site for the animation includes an introductory essay by William Warner.
On Friday, February 8, Dr. Raymond Siemens gave a talk entitled “Converging Knowledge Domains and the Electronic Book.” This talk was the first Paradigms lecture of 2008 and the third in the overall series.
The video of Dr. Siemens’ talk is now available online for members of the Transliteracies Project.
The video files for the inaugural Paradigms lecture, “Quanta: Knowledge Organization for Interdisciplinary Research” by Rama Hoetzlein, are now available to the general public.
John Willinsky of the Department of Language and Literary Education, University of British Columbia, will be visiting with Alan Liu, UCSB English Department in South Hall 2509 on Wed., January 30th, 11-12:30, for an unstructured conversation about literacy, scholarly and public access to knowledge, and new media technologies. We invite others who might be interested to join us for an exchange of views and project briefings.
Convened for the Association for Computers and the Humanities by Rita Raley, who leads the Transliteracies research working group on New Reading Interfaces, this session at the MLA is focused on one of Transliteracies main research issues. Participants include (full abstracts online):
- “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, San Diego
- “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories,” Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
- “Reading Shaw’s Legible City,” Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
- “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book,” Sarah Jane Sloane, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins
- “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.
The New Reading Interfaces Working Group will convene on Saturday May 12th to showcase the research completed over the past year and to discuss the group’s direction for 2007-2008.
“Paradigms” is a focused lecture series that showcases important research approaches with the potential to influence the direction of the UC Transliteracies Project on online reading. Andrew Elfebein, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, will give the second in the series of Paradigms lectures on Thursday May 3rd at UCSB. Professor Elfenbein has been a leader in introducing the perspectives and methods of recent cognitive science to the study of literary texts. His important article on this topic, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,” appeared in PMLA 121.2 (2006) 484-500. (Read the Transliteracies Research Report about this article.) Elfenbein is an affiliate member of the U. Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences
Katrina Kimport of the Transliteracies Project reports on “Newspaper 2.0,” a workshop held on February 10, 2007, to explore challenges and opportunities in the new Internet-enabled newspaper marketplace. The workshop brought together journalists, scholars and leading thinkers who shared a common interest in the future of daily and weekly journals—with a particular interest in Santa Barbara as a region where new approaches might be explored. The workshop was sponsored by the UCSB Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) with supplementary sponsorship from the UC Transliteracies Project. It was hosted by Doc Searls, a CITS Research Fellow and journalist with feet in both the print and online domains. During the workshop, Kimport blogged news of the event on the Transliteracies site.
“Paradigms” is a focused lecture series that showcases important research approaches with the potential to influence the direction of the UC Transliteracies Project on online reading. Rama Hoetzlein, a Ph.D. student in the UC Santa Barbara Media Arts & Technology program, gave the first talk in the series on his Quanta system and “Knowledge Organization for Interdisciplinary Research.” Andrew Elfenbein of the University of Minnesota is next up with a talk on May 3, 2007, on the implications of recent research in cognitive psychology on online reading practices. (Videos of the talks are available to Transliteracies project participants.)
Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media in the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University, UK, reports on the Transliteracies Conference held at UC Santa Barbara on June 7-8, 2005 (article: “Transliteracy—Reading in the Digital Age”)
Transliteracies has been granted status as a University of California Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG) for 2005-2010, with total funding of $175,000 from the UC system and another $175,000 in cost sharing from UC Santa Barbara.
Transliteracies hosted the UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading on June 17-18, 2005. (conference materials | more photos)
