INVITATION TO HEX DIGITAL CULTURES SEMINAR SERIES:

NB Date change! The seminar will take place Tuesday 27/11

WHO: Dr. Hilde G. Corneliussen, Digital Culture, University of Bergen, Norway
Hilde G. Corneliussen is Associate Professor and lecturer in Digital Culture at University of Bergen. She holds a doctoral degree in Humanistic Informatics, and her research interests include gender and ICT, computer history, ICT education and computer games. Together with Jill Walker Rettberg she edited the anthology Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, MIT Press, 2008. Her latest book is within feminist technology studies, Gender-Technology Relations: Exploring Stability and Change, Palgrave Macmillan 2011.

LECTURE:
Corneliussen has focused on gender-technology relations in several studies, in a historical perspective and through interviews with computer students, in cultural discourses and in computer education. In this lecture she will explore the question of stability and change in gender-technology relations in a historical perspective. All over the western world we have heard the question “why so few women in computing” for nearly 30 years. In the same period we have seen massive changes in information and communication technology, as well as changes in terms of access and use. Today, information and communication technology has become a natural and integral part of our everyday lives and activities, in nearly all spheres of society. In light of these changes, could we not expect changes to also appear in gender-technology relations? The challenge of recruiting women to computer education seems to persist in large parts of the western world, thus we need to explore what affects men and women’s relationships with computer technology. How have gender-technology relations changed, and how can we understand the continuous low proportion of women in computer education?
Corneliussen will discuss examples of stability as well as change in the gender-technology relations in the period since 1980 until today. Among the examples you will meet cultural discourses warning women against being “sent back to the kitchen sink” unless they develop an interest for computers; recruitment initiatives inviting women to computer science because they are good at communicating with people; female computer experts presented as not-(masculine)-nerds; and computer competent women using femininity to surprise their environments.

LAB: In the lab session we will bring with us the focus on stability and change, as we will see a documentary about the women who worked with the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, built in the US during World War II. These women were pioneers in the computer world, programming the ENIAC without manuals. But they were not celebrated like the male engineers, they were cropped out of pictures of the machine, and later forgotten and rather interpreted as women “posed in front of the machine ‘to make it look good’”.  As these early stories about women’s relationships with computer technology are still not widely recognized, their stories represent important perspectives even for today’s discussion of gender-technology relations and how to interpret stability and change in these relations.

WHEN: 27 November kl. 15.15-18.00
15.15-16.45 Lecture + Q & A
** short break **
17.00-18.00 continues with film and discussion

WHERE? Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund. Room 201, in Kulturanatomen at Biskopsgatan 7.

HOW: Drop in. It is not mandatory to announce your participation ahead of time, but it is much appreciated! Please email: jessica.enevold@kultur.lu.se

Welcome!

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For all seminars in the series have a look in the archive:

HEX Digital Cultures Seminar

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

INVITATION TO HEX DIGITAL CULTURES SEMINAR SERIES:

WITH: Cornelius Puschmann, Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

LECTURE: The lecture will focus on the question of how scholarly communication is impacted by new forms of digital communication, such as blogs, wikis and Twitter. Cornelius Puschmann will present a number of recent studies showing the general acceptance and usage of new formats among scholars and proceed to qualitative assesments of communities that actively integrate the abovementioned tools into their workflows. The question of new now practices relate to traditional scientific communication will be tackled, followed by a discussion of future scenarios and the implications for scholars, policymakers and libraries.

LAB: The lab will focus on the characteristics of new formats of digital scholarly communication and on approaches to assessing the impact of these formats. We will combine group work in which you examine different platforms and formats and evaluate the visibility of researchers in a range of contexts with a critical discussion of possible negative aspects.

WHEN: 8 November kl. 13.15-16.00
13.15-14.45 Lecture + Q & A
** short break **
15.00-16.00 Exercises in the computer lab

WHERE? Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund. Room 117, in Wrangel Biskopsgatan 5, (next to Kulturanatomen) Lab in Kulturanatomen in room 022.

HOW: Drop in. It is not mandatory to announce your participation ahead of time, but it is much appreciated! Please email: sara.kjellberg@ub.lu.se

Welcome!

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For all seminars in the series have a look in the archive:

HEX Digital Cultures Seminar

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

INVITATION TO HEX DIGITAL CULTURES SEMINAR SERIES:

WITH: Lisbeth Klastrup who works as Associate Professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen, where she is affiliated with the Digital Culture and Communication and Media Research Groups. She has studied the culture and use of online worlds and social media format since 1999, and is currently working on a book on social network media.

LECTURE: What happens when people start friending their prime minister and politicians wash all their dirty laundry in front of a curious social media audience? In recent years, politicians and political parties have started to use social media extensively as part of their political campaigning in relation to local and national elections for parliament. What does “political life” in social media look like currently and historically, and how do users in fact engage with politics and politicians? Is there such a thing as a “political culture” in the social media sphere and if so, what does it look like? This lecture will discuss these questions and more, primarily based on the study of use of social media in Danish election campaigns from 2005 to 2011.

LAB: In the lab, we will follow up on the lecture, first by short group work where you discuss your own use of social media in a political context, and then followed by joint discussion and commentary.

WHEN? 4 October, 13.15–16.00
13.15-14.45 Lecture + Q & A
** short break **
15.00-16.00 Exercises in the computer lab

WHERE? Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund. Room 201, 1st floor, in Kulturanatomen at Biskopsgatan 7.

HOW: Drop in. It is not mandatory to announce your participation ahead of time, but it is much appreciated! Please email: jessica.enevold@kultur.lu.se

Welcome!

——————————————————————

For all seminars in the series have a look in the archive:

HEX Digital Cultures Seminar

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

HEX DIGITAL CULTURES SEMINAR SERIES AUTUMN 2012

–OCTOBER–

4/10
Lisbeth Klastrup, Associate Professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen - Friending the Prime Minister – The Culture and Use of Political Interaction on Social Media

–NOVEMBER–

8/11
Cornelius Puschmann, Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. - Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age: Exploring the Role of Social Media for Academic Communities (together with Kulturseminariet)

26/11 NB Date change to Tuseday 27/11
Hilde Corneliussen, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen - Title TBA

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For all seminars in the series have a look in the archive:

HEX Digital Cultures Seminar

If you have questions about the seminars contact: jessica.enevold@kultur.lu.se

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

INVITATION TO HEX DIGITAL CULTURES SEMINAR SERIES:

WHO Patrick T. Gavin and Ahmad M. Kamal, Faculty of Media and Information, University of Western Ontario, London, Kanada

WHAT: At the Confluence of Ideologies: Social Media, Sustained Critique

Abstract: Foucault argued that “the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism” (1988, 155). This “permanent criticism” is necessary because a “transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation” (155). The potential to realize “deep transformation” through the use of social media therefore necessitates a permanent critique of the technology’s various underlying ideologies. In this paper, we focus our critique on three specific ideologies that converge in many studies – whether celebratory or critical – of social media and its political efficacy: information, civil society, and democracy. We chose these three because they respectively presuppose what social media is about, whom it is for, and what it might accomplish.

The work of Day (2001a; 2001b; 2008) and Peters (1988) on the ideology of information demonstrate how capitalist, epistemological, liberal, and technocratic values are mobilized through a historical notion of information that acts as a totalizing, self-legitimizing trope. Information becomes at once an extensive yet narrow imperative colonizing social interaction and individual cognition. Dunn’s work on the ideology of democracy (2005, 2010) raises critique above the perennial debate over democracy’s best model (e.g., direct, deliberative, republican) by recognizing that democracy’s recent ascendancy as a political and rhetorical prerogative is contingent on its highly equivocal nature. Given democracy’s ambiguity, Post (2006) has argued that democracy is too shallow an ideology to redress the many injustices its proponents expect it to resolve, while Wood (2006) contends that it serves as ideological weapon for neo-imperialism. The ideology of democracy is arguably a detour on the path to social welfare and equality. The ideology of civil society underwrites both information networks and genuine democracy. Ehrenberg (1999) demonstrates its convoluted history and shakes it free of many celebratory assumptions. Perhaps most significantly, Ehrenberg reveals civil society as complicit in liberal policy. Meanwhile, the work of Mansbridge (1980) suggests that an overestimation of civil society obscures local exercises of coercion and exploitation.

Despite the importance of the aforementioned studies, they suffer drawbacks we hope to rectify. First, these analyses are usually done in isolation despite the interconnectedness of the concepts. Second, these studies either predate or ignore the introduction of new media, raising the question whether social media has since transformed these ideologies so as to require re-evaluation of the critiques of Day, Dunn, or Ehrenberg. Third, despite posing powerful rebuttals to the vaunted power of information, democracy, and civil society, the studies we draw upon have received limited uptake in popular, academic, and critical discourse. Bringing together all of these critiques in the present discussion on social media’s socio-political possibilities is important. It allows us to begin systematically unpacking the ideals that are now interwoven in both the rhetoric of “Facebook Revolutions,” “Twitter Uprisings,” and “Democracy 2.0,” and the more nuanced evaluations of social media’s transformative efficacy. By revisiting the critical analyses above we endeavor to engage in Foucault’s permanent critique, and thereby continue to scrutinize the assumptions in political discourse in the 21st century.

WHEN? April 27, 13.15–15

WHERE? Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund. Room 202, 1st floor, in Kulturanatomen at Biskopsgatan 7.

If you have any questions conserning the seminar, please contact  hanna.carlsson@kultur.lu.se

Welcome!

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

I torsdags besökte Syntjuntan Kulturanatomen och Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper. Syntjuntan är en ensemble kvinnliga tonsättare, musiker och instrumentbyggare som vill bidra till att öka kvinnors självförtroende och verka för att kvinnor tar den plats de behöver för att kunna genomföra sina idéer, utveckla sin musik och möta sin publik.

Workshopens deltagare fick sy ett instrument under sociala former, lära sig om teknik, elektronik och musik. HEXarna Jutta Haider, Robert Willim och Sara Kjellberg både deltog i och var med och anordnade workshopen.

Läs mer och kolla på bilder från torsdagens syntjunta

• Digitala-kulturer-bloggen: Workshop för att sy synt
• Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper: Syntjunta – hur syr man en synt och hur låter den?
• Sydsvenskans reportage: Syntmusik med nål och tråd
• Robert Willims blogg: Sewing circuits

Posted under Aktiviteter

VAD: Pågående forskning

VEM: Max Liljefors, Associate prof., Ph.D.
 Dept of Arts and Cultural Sciences. I samarbete med konstnären Conny Blom

Projektet förenar medicinsk, humanistisk och konstnärlig forskning, och handlar om att utforma och genomföra ett experiment inom magnetresonanstomografi (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI) vid Biomedicinskt Centrum (BMC) vid Lunds universitet, alternativt vid Norges Teknisk-Naturvetenskapliga Universitet, Trondheim, där vi har samarbete med projektet Picturing the Brain. Experimentet ska inte besvara någon medicinsk frågeställning, utan inriktas mot epistemologiska, estetiska och etiska implikationer av MRI och medicinsk MRI-forskning.

Beskrivning

Projektet har sprungit ur Max Liljefors VR-finansierade project ”Anatomy in the Expanded Field: Epistemology, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Contemporary Medical Imaging” (2011-2013). Hjärnskanningsbilder utgör en viktig del av medicinsk bildproduktion idag, och är dessutom det slags bilder som har rönt störst intresse utanför ett vetenskapligt sammanhang. Exempel är böcker som neurobiologen Carl Schoonovers Portraits of the Brain (2010), en populärvetenskaplig bilderbok av ”coffeetable-format” med MRI, PET och andra hjärnscanningsbilder, Youtube-kanaler dedikerade för hjärnfilmer från medicinska laboratorier, etc. Samtidigt ställer hjärnbilder och den medicinska forskning de används i grundläggande frågor om människan: hur definieras individualitet och frihet om all mental aktivitet beskrivs som synapser? Vilka former av genetisk och kemisk manipulation av individen är acceptabel och önskvärd? Hur regleras detta ekonomiskt och juridiskt? Står vi inför slutet av ”själens era”, och i början av ”hjärnans epok”? Nutida visualiseringar av hjärnan utgör del av dessa problematiseringar av människans väsen.

Projektets syfte är att applicera humanistiska och konstnärliga frågeställningar på MRI-teknologin. Konstnären Conny Blom har fått i uppdrag att studera MRI-apparaturens tekniska möjligheter och begränsningar och att sätta sig in i dess epistemologiska förutsättningar samt erforderliga forskningsmetodik.Syftet är att studera och perspektivera MRI-forskningens experimentdesign och metodologi såväl som de förutsättningar och begränsningar för forskningsfrågor som denna teknologi uppställer, från konstnärliga och humanistiska utgångspunkter.

Från att initialt haft MRI generellt som studieobjekt, har projektet nu fokuserat in på MRI-forskning om seendet, närmare bestämt forskning som syftar till att med MRI mäta hjärnaktiviteten under en seendeakt och att utifrån de uppmätta data rekonstruera de faktiska bilder som en person tittar på och upplever. (t.ex. Stanley, Li & Dan, 1999; Thirion, Duchesnay, Hubbard, Dubois, Poline & Dehaene, 2006; Naselaris, Prenger, Kay, Oliver & Gallant, 2009; Nishimoto, Vu, Naselaris, Benjamini, Yu, Gallant, 2011.) I korthet handlar det alltså om att överbrygga klyftan mellan objektivt registrerbar neural aktivitet och den subjektiva synupplevelsen, så att en dator ska kunna programmeras att skapa en ”avbild” av den specifika synupplevelse som ett visst mönster av hjärnaktivitet representerar. Intressant nog utgörs en vetenskaplig strategi för att uppnå detta av att försökspersonen först får se ett antal bilder (upp till tusentals) medan hans hjärnaktivitet registreras, så att en ”bank” av bilder med tillhörande hjärnmönster byggs upp i datorn, ibland tillsammans med en semantisk kategorisering av bildernas motiviska innehåll. Sedan matchar datorn det neurala mönster som en ny synupplevelse ger upphov till mot den i förväg upprättade ”bildbanken”, för att rekonstruera en så korrekt avbild av den nya synupplevelsen som möjligt. Vårt projekt inriktar sig på att undersöka och visa hur teknologiska, neurologiska, kulturella och estetiska aspekter inverkar på varandra i denna typ av MRI-forskning, t.ex. hur den teknologiska apparaturen styr hur seendeakten kan utformas; de arbiträra inslagen i tröskelnivån för vad som utgör ”matchning” mellan data; samt de subjektiva och kulturella faktorerna som spelar in i urvalet av bilder i bildbanken, deras motiv, beskärning, etc, samt i den semantiska kategoriseringen av bildmotiv – förutsättningar i strävan att uppnå en objektiv, neurologisk förståelse av mänskligt seende.

Posted under Aktuellt, Projekt

WHAT: Ongoing research projects

WHO: Robert Willim, Researcher and teacher in European Ethnology

The aim of the project is to further develop my (Robert Willim) work combining art with ethnographic cultural analysis, and to explore the interzone between art and science. Since 2003 I’ve worked parallel as an artist in order to find connections and disjunctures between art and science, between ethnography, cultural analysis and art. Working with Art Probes is an attempt to develop methods and theoretical understanding of themes that are closely connected to my ongoing research on cultural economy and postindustrial transformations of place, landscape and environment.

In three conference presentations during the spring I will take my point of departure in a number of my artworks, using them as art probes, relating them to my research. The probes are there to give inspiration, to provoke questions and to simultaneously and paradoxically instill framings and evoke new associations, to inspire me to continuously search for patterns as well as gaps and aporias.

The works/probes in question are Surreal Scania (2006), Elsewhereness (2008-) and Close to Nature (2011). The first two works were made together with video artist Anders Weberg. As part of the project Working with Art Probes I will also write a chapter for a coming book edited by anthropologists Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright. Working with Art Probes is a supplement to the research project Transformations of Ethnography, in which I work together with Tom O’Dell.

The conferences and the themes of the presentations are:

Designing and Transforming Capitalism, Aarhus University, February 9-10 2012.
Title of presentation: Coming Close? -Techno-Nature and The Longings for Intimacy.

Helsinki Photo Media, Aalto University Helsinki, March 29-30 2012
Title of presentation: In and out of Focus -The Cultural Dynamics of Mediation and Landscape.

Public Ethnography conference, Victoria, BC, Canada, June 1-2, 2012.
Title of presentation: Elsewhereness_ Evoking The Ethnographic and The Surreal.

Posted under Aktuellt, Projekt

INVITATION TO HEX DIGITAL CULTURES AND GAMES LECTURE AND LAB:

WHO: Dr. Olli Tapio Leino, City University of Hong Kong.

WHAT: How are computer games experienced as meaningful?  Playability and Experienced Significance.

Why are in-game monsters frightening? What is erotic about erotic Tetris? Are the decorative stickers with which the players can decorate their virtual cars in Need for Speed: Undercover (2008) a waste of (in-game) money? In short, how does significance emerge in computer game play? Furthermore, what is the role of technology in this signification, and, how do computer games compare to other forms of new media in this regard? While the answers to these kinds of questions related to interpretation and experience are presupposed by critique and analysis of computer games and other playable new media forms, they are seldom explicated in detail. In this lecture, I discuss the ways in which meaning emerges in interactions with playable media forms. I will discuss also the challenges these forms of signification pose to the paradigmatic methods of interpretation, analysis, and critique of new media.

Conceptualizing computer games through the traditional “game” metaphor has been at the heart of the emerging tradition of game studies for the past decade. Computer games have been described using concepts like “rules”, “winning” and “losing”. In this lecture, however, I argue that for understanding how significance emerges in computer game play, i.e. how and why players find details in computer games meaningful, the game metaphor is slightly problematic. This is because computer game play, more than “traditional” game play, is underpinned by the involvement of technology. Admittedly, computer game play, too, is a human practice, but it is a practice defined by the involvement of technological artefacts rather than rules governing human behavior. These technological artefacts, are not simply at the service of human players like pawns on a Monopoly board, but assume an active role alongside the human subject in co-shaping and transforming the experience of play.

To complement the game metaphor, I identify “playability” as an affordance of a kind of audience engagement characterized by a duality of freedom and responsibility. By introducing themes from existentialism and post-phenomenological philosophy into a game studies framework, I focus on the ways in which playable technological artefacts, like computer games, social media applications and electronic artworks offer themselves to be experienced as significant. Contrasting playability with “playfulness”, considered as a set of aesthetic strategies, constitutes a position from which contemporary computer games and other playable artefacts, and our attempts at making sense of them, can be related to preceding forms of art and culture like participatory and performative art on the one hand, and to the contemporary forms of interactive, perhaps playful but not necessarily playable, art and media on the other.  The ensuing lab session, led by Dr. Hanna Wirman and Dr. Olli Leino, we will look at examples that illustrate the themes of the lecture in more detail.

WHEN: Nov 15, 2011. 15 – 18

15.15-16.45 Lecture + Q & A
** small break **
17.00-18.00 Exercises in the computer lab

WHERE: Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund. Room 109, ground floor, to the left, in Kulturanatomen at Biskopsgatan 7 . The ensuing lab will be held at Biskopsgatan 7, in basement game labs 022 and 019. We’ll lead you there.

HOW: Drop in. It is not mandatory to announce your participation ahead of time, but it is much appreciated! Please email: jessica.enevold@kultur.lu.se

Welcome!

Jessica Enevold
Seminar coordinator HEX Digital Cultures and Games Series

Posted under Aktiviteter, HEX-seminarier

Ett halvår efter att HEX arrangerade Sveriges första Science Slam var det i går kväll dags för ett andra tillfälle, även det inför en engagerad publik på restaurang Carlssons trädgård. Fem forskare inom området Humaniora och Teologi mötte utmaningen att på kort tid och på ett engagerande, underhållande och inte minst tydligt och begripligt sätt förklara sina egna forskningsfrågor för publiken. I ännu högre grad än vid premiären utnyttjade forskarna möjligheten att använda valfri rekvisita, hjälpmedel och interaktion med publiken. Förutom olikheterna i själva presentationerna, bidrog även deltagarnas vitt skilda ämnesområden till en berikande variation:

Christer Eldh (Service management)

Kerstin Gidlöf (Kognitionsvetenskap)

Johanna Rosenqvist (Konsthistoria och visuella studier)

Olof Sundin (Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap)

Anna Clara Törnqvist (Litteraturvetenskap)

Även om det centrala i Science Slam är att erbjuda publiken levande och spännande inblickar i en rad nya ämnen och aktuella forskningsprojekt, så ingår det ju också ett tävlingsmoment i en Science Slam. Igår var det Kerstin Gidlöf, doktorand vid Filosofiska institutionen, som segrade efter att ha gett åhörarna en tankeställare kring hur vi ställs inför en oss ofta övermäktig mängd information, när vi ska lösa en så vardaglig och viktig uppgift som att inhandla livsmedel på ett sätt som motsvarar våra ambitioner om att finna bästa pris, kvalitet etc. Vi hoppas inom kort kunna presentera bilder från presentationen på HEX YouTube-kanal.

HEX-gruppen välkomnar synpunkter och önskemål som kan vara värdefulla inför kommande Science Slam-arrangemang.

Posted under Aktuellt