Nancy’s Blog

The excellent Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List posted this article from Inside Higher Ed: Double Dipping in Conference Papers — If you are going to give a talk at a scholarly meeting, do you need new material?

The paper is about political science. It reports on a study that found a considerable increase in duplicate presentations — the same title, presented at more than one conference — from zero in 1992.  Whereas faculty said they had been taught as grad students that this was unacceptable, current grad students responded to the question with “blank stares” — no idea that this practice might be controversial.

It gives the arguments pro and con. Pro: papers benefit from discussion and revision; audiences at any one conference presentation may be small. Con: getting credit for multiple scholarly products when it’s really the same one. And it notes that with “the ‘enormous pressure’ to present at scholarly meetings when possible …it is ‘unrealistic and undesirable’ to expect completely new work for each such event.”

It concludes that the solution is to be honest and clear about what you’re doing.

For our field, I think it reflects one more difficulty of multi-disciplinary work: different norms across different fields; the need to present the same research to different, non-overlapping audiences; and the academic credit system, wherein products are counted numerically.

Panel at International Visual Studies Association Conference, New York, Aug. 10-12:

New image-making and sharing technologies

Chair: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley)

New image-making and sharing technologies are transforming personal photography: digital cameras, cameraphones, and internet-based image sharing have rapidly permeated the world of personal photography. The ways in which non-expert users take up, re-interpret, and adapt new technologies (or fail to adopt them) are of interest in many fields of research: with new photography-related technologies, we have a case of widely-successful innovation. Personal photographers are using these new technologies in ways both continuous with prior purposes and practices, and in new ways. The changing technological and material bases of personal photography serve both to make visible previously taken-for-granted practices and uses of images, and to enable new ones.

On this panel, we will discuss these new technologies and such issues as: emerging uses of images; the changing (and persistent) place of personal photography in construction of identity and social relationships; the division between public and private, as private images become more public, intentionally or otherwise; the shift from individual to collective image making and use; the uses of cameraphone images; the changing nature of memory via image-making and archiving; and images in social networking, including on sites like MySpace.com and Flickr.com.

For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley) Email: vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu

IVSA meets in New York City, Aug 10-12. For the complete call and list of panels, see http://www.visualsociology.org/proposals.html

Nov 13-15.

http://newyorkercollegetour.com/berkeley.cfm

Call For Papers:

Bio[X]: New Iterations of Lively Bodies

Science Studies Graduate Student Conference

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

University of California, Santa Cruz

The UC Santa Cruz Science Studies Cluster and the UC Science, Technology and Society Network will be hosting a joint graduate student conference February 23^rd 2007 in Santa Cruz. We hope to provide an opportunity for advanced graduate students to present their research in Science Studies and establish networks across the Northern California UC campuses. Our theme is deliberately broad in order to bring graduate students from a multitude of disciplines into trans-disciplinary conversations.

We seek contributions that interrupt traditional realms of ‘bio.’ The theme Bio[X] stands for lively intra-actions of the biological, biosocial, biopolitical, bioethical, and biocapital. Our exploration of Bio[X] aims to address the scientific making of bodies and meanings that affect articulations of bodies and their materialities, mobilities, and tangibility. New iterations of lively bodies may include, but are not limited to, the following topics: the role of ‘new’ technologies in biological practices, the movement and constitution of whole and partial bodies across international and national boundaries, human/non-human determinations and relations, apparatuses of information development and codification, questions of temporality and material agency in biological practice, and governance and justice in the making of bodies and bodily practice.

The 1-day conference will consist of 5-6 panels, each with a faculty respondent. In order to leave plenty of time for discussion and feedback, please limit your presentation to 15 minutes. Please choose up to three themes from the following overlapping session titles that may apply to your paper topic:

Mobile Bodies and Trans-Regionalities
Trans, Species and Opportunities
Biocapital, Governance, and Justice
Classification Practices, Ontologies, and Ethics
Affects & Epistemes

The Politics of Liveliness

The submission deadline for abstracts is December 8^th 2006. Please send a 200-300 (max) word abstract, with your name, e-mail, institutional affiliation, and session selections to stsgrads@gmail.com. Also let us know about any media needs for your presentation. Any inquiries will be answered by e-mail to stsgrads@gmail.com. In urgent cases you may also call Mary Weaver at (831) 471-9216.

Could be interesting — my first reaction was that I want to bring my cat. They’ll be running buses from the AAA meetings.

The Multispecies Salon
A Special Event in conjunction with the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

Saturday, November 18 / 2:15-4:45 PM
Part I: Oakes Mural Room / Part II: Oakes Learning Center (UC Santa Cruz)

THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY is an age of mass extinction and global war. When human and non-human worlds unexpectedly collide—when red tides wreak havoc on marine fisheries, when “invasive species” remake protected ecosystems—new regimes of techno-scientific management have at tempted to restore predictable balances. This interactive forum will depart from sites of managed conflict to explore locations of biocultural hope. We envision new approaches to “biological anthropology,” approaches that position the writing of natural history within multiple cultural locations. The first part of the Multispecies Salon will be a roundtable workshop. We solicit an audience of provocateurs who will respond to the papers of the AAA Presidential Session titled “Speaking With/For Nature.” The papers—by Kimberly Tallbear (Native American DNA), Paige West (Tree Kangaroo Conservation), S. Eben Kirksey (Foam Frogs and Ecotractors), and Stefan Helmreich (How the Ocean Got Its Genome)—trace how discoveries about nature are being used to transform human social systems and cultured landscapes. Following Susan Leigh Star, we are interested in who lives and dies in the force fields generated by human/non-human mingling.

The second half of the Multispecies Salon will consist of a series of short playful interventions. Presenters will imagine new alliances between human and non-human agents, and future biopolitical worlds. Following a screening of clips from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, Susan Harding will lead a discussion of environmental evangelism in the age of high capitalism. Astrid Schrader will provoke us to think about the political implications of dinoflagellate ontology. Bears and salmon will interact in a joint presentation by Heather Swanson and Jacob Metcalf. Eduardo Kohn will talk of dogs and dreams. Canine companions will also appear in shorts read from Donna Haraway’s new work in progress, “Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter.”

For more information, please visit the website at: http://www.skyhighway.com/~multispecies_salon.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

I would love to do this myself — organized by Richard Chalfen.

ANNOUNCING: Summer Program on Japanese Visual Culture

For the fourth year, an exciting six-week Summer Program on Japanese Visual Culture will take place at the Tokyo Campus of Temple University Japan (TUJ), May 14 – June 29, 2007. This program consists of two coordinated courses: the first focusesn approaches to studying the richness and complexity of visual culture in Japan; the second allows students to develop odest visual projects (digital still, video or web) on elective topics immediately relevant to visual culture.
Instruction is in English. All course work will be supplemented with an active program of cultural events, trips
and lectures in and around Tokyo. Students live in Temple dormitories alongside Japanese students studying English at TUJ. This program grants course credits to both undergraduate and graduate students.

For additional information, see:
http://www.tuj.ac.jp/newsite/main/icjs/visual_anthropology02.html
http://www.temple.edu/studyabroad/programs/summer/japan/visual-anthro.html

For other descriptions, more details, and application forms, go to:
http://www.temple.edu/studyabroad/Programs/TUJ-Vis.%20Anthro/tuj-vis%20anthro1.htm

Application deadline: February 16, 2007.

R. Chalfen (rchalfen@temple.edu) and L. Powell (lindseypowell@msn.com)

Peter Merholz has sent out one last reminder about the IDEA Conference, “a conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds,” in Seattle, Oct 23-24.  What I especially like about the program is that it’s not the same people who seem to speak at every conference, and a wide range of organizations and kinds of information spaces are represented, including libraries and the National Park Service, as well as people doing information visualization and interaction design.

I’m not going, but if it were local I would definitely show up.  Looks very interesting.

We had a very successful workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing (PICS) at Ubicomp 2006. Cameraphone-related research from around the world.

In addition to talking about our work, we did a field trip at Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach with ZoneTag-enabled cameraphones. Pictures are on Flickr — we had 5 groups with Flickr userids pics2006a through e. I liked ZoneTags, but I quickly got frustrated with the tagging — although ZoneTags makes it fast by suggesting tags, it’s still slow, working through the different screens and checking/unchecking tags. I quickly stopped tagging and just hit “upload.” However, this wasn’t always a good idea. Tags and title persist across images, which is both good and bad — it saves work if you are re-using tags, but it led us to mis-tag and mis-title images when we just hit “upload” and didn’t go back through the tags.

My friend Peter Merholz is asking people to help get the word out about the IDEA conference in Seattle Oct 23-4. I think it sounds terrific and quite relevant to iSchools. Registration is very reasonable — $250-500 before Aug 27 — kudos to the organizers for that!

IDEA 2006 brings together a diverse set of designers, creators, and researchers addressing a fundamental challenge we’re facing today - how to let everyday people take true advantage of the overwhelming mass of information that floods their lives.

There are currently many different kinds of folks working in this space, but they typically don’t talk with one another. For this event, we’ve made an effort to invite presenters across a stunning array of disciplines - museum design, information visualization, librarians, environmental design, user research, engineering, interaction design, product strategy, and more.

It’s important to recognize that this is not airy-fairy theoretical stuff. These presenters are practitioners, people actually doing this cross-channel, cross-media work with complex information. A primary goal of this conference is to give you the confidence to cross boundaries and engage with a wide range of problems.