“She’s Geeky” conference in Bay Area – and call for volunteers

From the “She’s Geeky” organizers:

Dear She’s Geeky Women,

We are really pleased to announce that Early Bird Registration is open for:

DC – November 13-14, 2009  Friday – Saturday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/annoucing-shes-geeky-dc-nov-13-14/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekydc.eventbrite.com/

Bay Area – January 29-31, 2010  Friday – Sunday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/shes-geeky-bay-area-3/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekybayarea3.eventbrite.com/

We are looking for Bay Area “Host/Organizing Team Members” – if you live in the Bay Area and would like to/are able to volunteer some time (up to several hours a week over the 12 weeks leading up to the event) to help us with outreach, marketing/PR, or event production please contact us at info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org and we’ll get back to you.

To make our vision of making it to at least 10 cities next year our goal is to raise $200,000 by the end of the year.  We have plans to meet with several dozen successful women in tech to ask them to contribute to this vision. If you know of any successful women you think might be interested in supporting the growth of She’s Geeky please let us know. We will also be launching a Grassroots Campaign and we are designing a special edition She’s Geeky T-Shirt that will be for this event.

Some things are new this year for our events:

• You can bring your daughters / young women you know. We have a special low price for young women so please take advantage of it and bring your daughters, nieces and young friends.   We currently don’t have the capacity to offer child care but are considering our options for providing this.

• We are now offering a Personal Brand Sponsorship Level at $50.  This rate is on top of the ticket you choose to purchase  and for this contribution your personal brand/blog name will be listed and linked to on our Event Announcement Pages for the event & your logo will be printed out and on display at the conference.

• Community Sponsorships of $250 and $500 are also available through registration.  The $250 level includes one full event ticket (all the days of the unConference) and the $500 level includes two full event tickets. These are for small companies and firms who want to support the event or for an individual if they choose.

Corporate Sponsorship is available for both events contact us to learn more – info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org

Thank you for your continued support and interest in She’s Geeky!

She’s Geeky convenes to inspire women technologists for the future and advance systemic change in tech culture, providing a space to create enduring communities that foster collaboration and innovation among women professional women working in Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
——————–

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1045856682682&mid=12cc97eG12e6f0G606069aG0

New Course for Spring: Digital Narratives

DIGITAL NARRATIVES:
DO-IT-YOURSELF TEXTS AND OTHER KINDS OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING

I290-13
CCN: 42875.
Time: Wed. 2-4*
Location: 110 South Hall

*May change — contact vanhouse@ischool and I’ll explain.

Current developments in multimedia technology are leading to increased use of a variety of media for representation for communication. These include still images, video, animation and audio as well as text.  A number of existing applications make it increasingly easy for people to develop their own multimodal “texts” without special expertise.  The question is: How are people using these resources? How can they be effectively used?  And how can these resources be better designed to support these efforts?

We will look at two common applications areas to investigate these questions:
(1)    Do It Yourself: construction and use of multimodal resources for showing, teaching, and learning in the field of do-it-yourself  (crafts, building, repair, and related activities without professional help); and
(2)    Digital story-telling, for personal/collective history but for other purposes as well.

MORE about the content of the course below.

WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR:

Graduate students interested in exploring the confluence of emerging technologies and narratives of various kinds. Could include students from the School of Information, Computer Science, Education, Art Practice, Architecture, Archeology, Film Studies, New Media…a wide variety of areas.   Grad students only unless and undergrad manages to convince us otherwise.

FACULTY:

Prof. Nancy Van House, School of Information: has done considerable work on digital personal and collective memory, visual studies, new media.

Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo Research: has a PhD in cognitive science. She works at Yahoo on various projects related to digital memory,  user-generated content, and digital resources for DIY (do-it-yourself.)

MORE ABOUT THE COURSE:

Our reasons for choosing these two areas:  there’s considerable interest, activity, and user-generated content in each.  This interest is likely to continue and grow (they aren’t current fads).

These areas share some similarities: they can benefit from both pre-existing and specially-constructed visual, audio, and textual resources.  Both are of considerable interest among non-professionals, as leisure activities.   Both have a narrative element to them, whether it’s the story of an event, or how to do something from beginning to end.  The audiences for both are more or less peers.

They differ in their goals, and the kinds of stories that they tell and information resources use and create.

Interestingly, these areas often overlap, as apprentices learn techniques and stories from their predecessors and mentors. In this way, traditions and practices continue and evolve.

Both can benefit from using technology to tell stories and track revisions. And both are likely to be intertextual, linking to and drawing on existing resources.

This is not a technology design course; we do not expect students to build new technologies, although we will explore the space of potential designs to address emerging creative needs and directions.  We will, as far as possible, rely on existing technologies.   However, these will be treated as prototypes; we will ask how these (or similar) technologies could be better designed to suit the understandings that emerge from this course.

Students don’t necessarily need to be interested in either of these application areas.  We’ll treat these areas as examples.  Students may well bring to the course other areas of interest that share some of these key elements.

READING AREAS MAY INCLUDE (with varying degrees of depth and emphasis)

•    Visual studies: what it is; what it says about the role of visual media in general, and contemporary developments.  The relationships among still images, video, and audio.
•    Visual epistemology: the relationship between the visual and text
•    “Visual psychology” (for lack of a better term) – deciding when and how visual media are most effective for different communicative needs/desires
•    Multimodality
•    Narrative and storytelling
•    Objects as carriers of content and symbolic meaning
•    Issues of publicness and media – e.g., images are both more fraught and more evocative than text
•    Procedural teaching and learning

TECHNOLOGIES

As noted, this is not a technology design course.  We will, as far as possible, rely on existing technologies.  However, existing technologies will be treated as prototypes; one issue will be how these (or similar) technologies could be better designed to suit the understandings that emerge from this course.

These will likely include:
•    Flickr and other photo (and video) sharing sites
•    YouTube and other video sharing sites
•    MemoryMiner or similar – software for constructing personal/family histories

This list is not exhaustive, but indicative.

STUDENT REQUIREMENTS:

•    Committed participation: reading and engaging with the course materials and topics
•    Some sort of major product:  probably a paper applying the concepts of he course to some area of interest.  One product could be a technology design: a prototype, or at least design requirements.

Great Source of Images: Life Magazine Archives

About 10 million images  from Life magazine’s photo archives are now available on Google image search.  (Add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive.)

The images go back as far as the 1850s.

Life documented the most important events of the era, as well as daily life.  For those of us growing up with Life magazine, it  would come every Tuesday, like clockwork, full of articles with some text and a lot of great photos.  Many of the great photographers worked for it — the Google announcement cites  Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White.

What was important for us was that it was always interesting, and always covered the most important events.

And, unlike TV, it’s images could be savored, and kept.

earth from Apollo mission on the way to the moon

Summer Program on Japanese Visual Culture in Tokyo

I wish I could do this!

 

 

ANNOUNCING: Summer Program on Japanese Visual Culture in Tokyo

For the sixth consecutive year, an exciting six-week Summer Program on Japanese Visual Culture will take place at the Tokyo Campus of Temple University Japan (TUJ), May 18 – June 29, 2009 (tentative dates).  This program consists of two coordinated courses: the first focuses on approaches to studying the richness and complexity of visual culture in Japan; the second allows students to develop modest visual projects (digital still, video or web) on selective 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, details, and application forms see:
http://www.temple.edu/studyabroad/programs/summer/japan/visual-anthro.html

Application deadline: February 16, 2009.

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

Workshops at IVSA 2009

From the IVSA list:

Workshops:  As with some earlier IVSA conferences, we are planning for the prospect of running postgraduate level workshops in practical Visual Sociology methodology linked to the 2009 conference.  These will be approx a week long, residential on the conference campus, with an introductory period on approaches led by notable exponents of visual information gathering practice, leading to a period documenting the conference itself in some visual manner, followed by time using the University of Cumbria’s excellent technical facilities to edit these pieces down to short pieces which can be published on the IVSA website.  Fuller details including costs etc. will be posted with the full listing of accepted panels early in 2009, but any indications of outline interest at this stage would be welcome.  If you are interested in being kept up to date with this planning, please contact Keren Basset on karen.bassett.ivsa2009@cumbria.ac.uk  putting ‘IVSA 2009 workshop enquiry’ in the header line.

I posted the call for papers earlier.

IVSA 2009 Conference Call

(I’ve excerpted from the longer call, which should appear shortly on the IVSA site.)

Clarification about the process: as I understand it (and as I recall from the 2007 conference), they try to organize panels and sessions by (1) asking people to propose panels and then (2) asking people to submit papers to/for specific panels; but papers that don’t fit can be submitted, too.

I organized a panel in 2007 on which Morgan Ames and I presented papers.  I directly invited some other people I knew to be doing relevant work who didn’t usually come to IVSA, and decided not to attend.  The conference organizers then sent the panel organizers the complete set of abstracts that had been submitted, for us to look for proposed papers that were (1) relevant and (2) of good quality, insofar as we could tell from the abstracts.  If I remember correctly, other people contacted me with directly later, with proposed papers.  So the panel ended up being a mix of people I knew and had invited, and people I didn’t know who submitted abstracts that I deemed appropriate.

I’m thinking about proposing a panel — haven’t decided what topic.

 

IVSA conference 2009, University of Cumbria, UK, July 22nd – 24th: 

‘Appreciating the views: how we’re looking at the social and visual landscape’

The 2009 International Visual Sociology Association conference will be held in the north-west UK region of Cumbria, probably better known as the English Lake District.  It’s being jointly hosted by the University of Cumbria and one of its Research Institutes, the Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research (CLEAR).  The conference will address two interrelated main themes; of subject – Landscape and the Environment, and of approach – the varied methodologies of visual enquiry.

Deadlines:

Call for Panels: Closing Date: 24th November 2008 (24.00 GMT)
Possible start points for panels might include:

Ideas and representations of the wild
Definitions of the urban and the rural
Visual dimensions in environmental politics
Changes in landscape use
Land based lives and occupations
Land based sports and activities
Landscape representation
Landscape and identity
Landscape as a representation of nationalism
Environment defined above concepts of nation
‘Act local think global’ – the politicised environment
Intersections between local and global landscape
Contested claims to the land – challenges to developments etc.
Landscape aesthetics and their appreciation – the sublime etc.
Landscape intervention – national parks etc.
Colonial and post-colonial mapping of identity
Landscape ideologies in advertising, film etc.
Creative interpretations of landscape and the environment

(This is of course not by any means an exhaustive list – remembering that we are a visually based organisation, we do actively expect ideas and themes which expand and enhance this kind of indicative perspective)

Panel organisers are expected to provide: a panel title, a 250 to 300 word summary / abstract expanding the intentions that inform their intended panel theme, their contact details, and a very brief simple identifying sentence on themselves / the panel chair. (i.e. “Attila is a project leader at the Pan-Asiatic Institute of Land Conquest, and has long standing research interests in travel and social anthropology”.

The full list of accepted panels and their organisers will appear on the IVSA website soon after this, along with the more detailed call for individual papers.

Call for Papers: First ‘open’ closing date: 19th January 2009 (24.00 GMT)

This first early date is intended to take account of the often extended administrative processes many academics face in seeking funding and approval for participation in events such as this. All papers received by this first date will be peer-reviewed, and responded to quickly. For those whose applications require consideration of publication the IVSA does run its own academic journal ‘Visual Studies’, and though all acceptance decisions rest with the editorial board suitably written up conference paper submissions in the visual field are encouraged and always welcomed.

Paper authors should provide a title for their paper, a 250 to 300 word abstract, any specific technical requirements, their contact details, and a brief identifying sentence on themselves (as in the call for panels above).

Paper submissions should be sent in the first instance to one of the nominated panel organisers. However, we will also plan space for a few general panels considering methodological, ethical and practical issues of good research, so should you feel your work is so individual that it cannot possibly fit any of the offered titles, you may send your submission as a word attachment in one email directly to Gordon Simpson and Karen Bassett …

 

Call for papers: Second ‘extended’ closing date: 28th April 2009 (24:00 GMT)

This second date is to allow scope for participation for those whose work may not be planned quite as far ahead as the ‘career academic’, such as the many postgraduate students working on projects which won’t be completed until later in the academic year – or of course those who may only come across the call for papers late. Submissions here will be subject to a quicker process of approval than full peer-review, and acceptance at this point will be subject to remaining available space within the conference schedule.

Paper authors should provide a title for their paper, a 250 to 300 word abstract, any specific technical requirements, their contact details, and a brief identifying sentence on themselves (as in the first call for papers above).

Second deadline submissions should be sent directly as a word attachment in one email to both to Gordon Simpson and Karen Bassett …

IVSA Conference

The International Visual Studies Association is meeting in Buenos Aires in Aug. I’m not going this year. Here’s the program. Papers are generally not written; presentations are accepted based on abstracts.

Call for Abstracts: Panel on New Image-Making and Sharing Technologies at IVSA

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

Flickr question

From Patti Bao, who is working on a project studying Flickr with me :

I just stumbled across this site: www.isthisyou.co.uk – where the site owners have been collecting photos from booths and streets and are looking to reunite them with their owners.  Think there’s a Flickr equivalent?  So far I’ve only managed to find this ( http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/foundphotos/) and that (http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/33289933@N00/), but neither of them are quite like Is This You?…

Anybody?

Studying Visual Culture in Japan: Summer ’07 Course

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)