Watch video of the talk here.
Scott B. Weingart is Carnegie Mellon University’s Digital Humanities Specialist. His research exists at the intersection of history of science, visual culture, communication, computational social science, and digital humanities.
Historical and modern illustrations are surprisingly effective lenses through which to explore overlaps between knowledge and practice. How we think about and communicate around knowledge co-evolves with the communities we form. Sometimes we unite as one Republic of Letters; at other times we are split between Two Cultures. Today, communities like HASTAC are symptoms and instigators of a turn away from the Hierarchy of Sciences. Weingart’s talk will untangle the thread of these turns over the last thousand years, and place them in our present context.
Livetweet Scott's talk using the hashtag #nets in addition to the #hastac2015 hashtag.
Watch video of the talk here.
Cezanne Charles and John Marshall are co-directors of rootoftwo, a hybrid design studio that makes social objects, experiences and works for the public realm. Cezanne is also the Director of Creative Industries for Creative Many, and John is an associate professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
The focus of their talk, Whithervanes, a Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS), consists of a network of sculptures in the form of five headless chickens presented on the highest points of five buildings. The Whithervanes track and measure the production of fear on the internet. When fear is encountered, the chickens respond by rotating away at increasing revolutions and are illuminated in different colours. This ‘early worrying system’ highlights how much our contemporary media, policy and political frameworks utilize fear as a persuasive method.
Their installation, THR_33 (Tea House for Robots), is comprised of a responsive environment and a group of robotically enhanced domestic appliances. It proposes that that as our appliances become smarter we might change the way we live and come to think of them.
Roopika Risam is an assistant professor of English and Secondary English Education at Salem State University. She researches intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them.
Her talk will focus on the points of contact between science, culture, technology, and power to examine the challenges, affordances, and limits of the Global South as a geographical and epistemological category for the digital humanities. She will consider how digital humanities already exist within a matrix of East, West, arts, and science and identify the stakes for making these connections legible in scholarly practice.
