TALK Session Proposal: What can ‘the conservatory’ learn from DH?

On hacker/maker blogs such as Hackaday or Adafruit, new DIY musical instruments built with common components (Arduinos, simple amplifiers, LEDs, etc.) pop up almost daily. It is well established that in a workshop setting building musical instruments is a wonderful teaching/exploration tool for learning the principles of electronics, but can these instruments in turn be used to teach music? I do believe that these homemade instruments can make excellent sandboxes that could be used as part of a music curriculum.

With that said, I want to create a conducted musical ensemble that scavenges, hacks, builds, composes, rehearses and performs on upcycled/hacked instruments.

Questions I wish to discuss are as follows:
What if the ‘collegiate music institutions’ supported the groundswell enthusiasm for sound/musical development present in the hacker/maker community?

How do you apply the concepts of ‘Talk, Make, Teach, and Play’ to the conventional conducted ensemble rubric of the conservatory?

What does the music school have to learn from DH and its best practices for using hands-on technology in the classroom environment?

Talk Session: Usability Testing and User Experience Design

I’d like to lead an open and informal discussion that allows both artists and art historians to share their experience creating digital projects. Specifically, I’d like to discuss participants’ challenges and successes creating intuitive interfaces that appeal to targeted audiences. Here are some questions to consider:

  • At what point or points did you do user interviews or testing for your project?
  • Did your target audience determine certain aspects of your project’s content and interface?
  • Is there more you wish you’d done (or would like to do) to increase your project’s utility and visibility?

The underlying theme of this talk session is to examine the importance of User Experience design and question how we can incorporate and customize certain commercial strategies to digital projects within the humanities.

Session proposal open educational resources

An informational session and discussion of the open textbook project, library e-material used to create  “course packs” , and open educational resources integrated into university syllabi–issues of open access, scholarly communication and copyright; issues of  educational quality and ownership

The Public Domain Artwork Reproduction and Its Metadata: Access, Dissemination, and Use

The Public Domain Artwork Reproduction and Its Metadata: Access, Dissemination, and Use

Co-Chairs: Christine Sundt, Editor, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation  and Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Past President, College Art Association

This proposed session looks at the question of how scholars use and access reproductions of public domain works of art  in print, online, and elsewhere. While works in the public domain are no longer under copyright , questions persist about how to take advantage of them. A related question is the subject of the metadata that documents the image and often accompanies reproductions, which has the potential to serve as a rich data mine for digital  scholars. Our hope is to have a frank discussion of what’s working for scholars, archivists, curators,  and artists and what points of confusion or uncertainty persist in order to help make these resources more broadly available.

TALK Session Proposal: Building a Community of Computing in the Arts Educators

Do you teach or are you interested in teaching digital media? Do you incorporate technology in your art? We want to build a Computing in the Arts community of educators. High schools in many states require no computing education beyond studying business suite software. However, high school students are savvy and enthusiastic digital media users. Computing in the Arts degree programs can harness this interest and experience, and facilitate both critical and creative thinking. Our main question for discussion is how do you combine art and technology in your work or curriculum? In exploring this synergy, there are many interesting bypaths to investigate such as how an artist’s sense of aesthetics compares to that of a computer scientist, or how to best foster collaboration between technologist and artist. Come share your thoughts and experiences!

Rebecca Bruce and I will both lead this session.

MAKE Session Proposal: Electric Origami

We experiment with combining art and technology in our classes at UNC Asheville.   Our projects focus on using technology for creative self-expression, and our classes include activities such as circuit bending, electric origami, microprocessor coding, 3D printing and milling.

In this make session, we will lead participants in creating electronically enhanced origami.  The project is suitable for beginners; both the folding pattern and the circuit are simple.  And the end product is a fun expression of the synergy of art and technology. Because of the hands-on nature of the session and material constraints, we will cap the session after the first 20 people to respond to this post.

Rebecca Bruce and I will both lead this session.

MAKE Session Proposal: Digital Humanities Best Practices

The start of a digital humanities project comes with many considerations, but what you might not think about are the legal complications that could arise later. In this session, we’ll work together to build a best practices document to serve as a guideline for scholars engaging in collaborative digital humanities work. Ideally, the document will ensure that deadlines, deliverables, and funds are clearly communicated, and that contract terms are transparent and mutually-acceptable. It will also address questions like: Who owns which aspects of the project? What kind of contract should be used, and what are the legal ramifications of collaborative work? With your help, we’ll make a document that solves problems.

Session Proposal: What are online resources good for?

This is an this as an open discussion of how users make use of (or don’t make use of) online art resources. What are online art resources good for? Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of online content providers, tools and resources for research and learning. Specifically: how do people use public online platforms for artwork search? What audiences do these platforms serve now, and why do we need them? What are the key challenges facing engagement with art online, and what do these emergent platforms need to grapple with in terms of accessibility, content, or structure?

Ellen Tani (Standford graduate student/Artsy) and I (also of Artsy) are proposing this and a few other sessions together. For this session, we’d love to interact with others involved in artwork search (in whatever capacity).

Workshop session proposal: Controlled Vocabularies and their applications in the classroom

How might the day-to-day considerations of creating and maintaining a controlled vocabulary translate to activities in the classroom? What might students learn from such exercises? On The Art Genome Project, we have a few activities we use in developing our own controlled vocabulary that we can share with participants, and would be interested to workshop other ideas.

Ellen Tani (Stanford graduate student/Art History instructor/Artsy Contributor) and I (also of Artsy) are proposing this session together.

Discussion Session Proposal: Digital Humanities: Imagining a Worst Case Scenario

It is something of a mantra in business that one should imagine the worst case scenario and prepare for it from both a logistical and an ethical standpoint. What if we apply this thought experiment to the digital humanities? Justified or not, digital humanities projects elicit fear and criticism from within and without the discipline — various working groups have warned of the dangers of siloed information and the neglect of physical archives, fellow humanities colleagues often see in the methods of DH an end to the narrative mode of history. We propose to anchor our conversation in a case study of one or more digital resources and come away with some clear proposals for avoiding a worst case scenario.

Ellen Tani and I are proposing to lead this session together.