Kat Piecing Together Our Guide (photo by Maasa Lebus)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since August 2016, the following researchers have contributed to An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past: Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Maasa Lebus, Evan Locke, Danielle Morgan, and Jentery Sayers, based on research by Nina Belojevic, Nicole Clouston, Laura Dosky, Devon Elliott, Jonathan O. Johnson, Shaun Macpherson, Kaitlynn McQueston, Victoria Murawski, William J. Turkel, and Zaqir Virani. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

Early Sketch for the Guide (by Danielle)

Project Status

This project is ongoing, and completion is expected in 2017. An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past will be available in print and also electronically (open access). To follow the project as it progresses, see the stream of posts below.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image for this post, of Kat, Tiffany, Teddie, and Jentery working on Chapter 1 of our Illustrated Guide, also by Danielle.

Below is an extensive summary of everything the MLab has been up to since October 2014, including links to additional reading. Thanks to everyone who has supported us along the way! We really appreciate it, and we’re looking forward to 2017.

OCTOBER 2014

Announcement for the “What Is a Dissertation?” Event, to which the MLab Contributed, by HASTAC and the Futures Initiative at CUNY

MLab at Michigan: Jentery visited the University of Michigan for a one-day conference titled, “Data, Social Justice, and the Humanities,” to deliver a talk, “‘The Data Knows You Better Than You Do’ and Other Constructions.” The presentation focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and its entanglements with social justice and computational culture. During the talk, Jentery mentioned a number of related projects that also engage social justice and the IoT. These projects include Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, Wyld Collective, Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets), “Circuit Bending Videogames” (by the MLab’s Nina Belojevic), Seattle Attic, Double Union, Free Geek, and Machine Project.

MLab + #remixthediss: We joined HASTAC and The Futures Initiative at CUNY for “What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media.” In the lab, we had people from various parts of UVic discuss their perspectives on models for the doctoral dissertation, and we considered how those models might be enacted.

MLab on the Cover of Nexus: The MLab was featured in a news story profiling local makerspaces to highlight the growing popularity of DIY cultures in Greater Victoria. The cover story was published in issue 25.4 of Camosun College’s student newspaper, Nexus. In the article, Nina and Jentery offer their perspective on DIY movements and how the MLab offers a unique space for cross-disciplinary collaboration at UVic.

NOVEMBER 2014

Slide from Jentery’s talk at the Scholars’ Lab (University of Virginia)

MLab at “Seeing the Past”: Jentery visited Niagara-on-the-Lake for a conference organized by Kevin Kee, Karen Flindall, and Bill Turkel, titled “Seeing the Past: Augmented Reality and Computer Vision.” At the event, Jentery circulated a draft of his essay, “Bringing Trouvé to Light: Using Computer Vision to Speculate about Victorian Media,” for an edited collection of publications from the conference.

MLab at UVA: Jentery visited the University of Virginia to give a talk, “Remaking Victorian Miniatures: Speculative Stitches Between 2D and 3D,” in which he discussed the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History project and, more specifically, remaking old technologies in the context of Victorian media studies. His presentation took place at the Scholars’ Lab (in Alderman Library), a humanities lab that’s inspired the MLab.

Praxis Award: With the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the MLab announced the winners of the 2014-15 Digital Humanities Praxis Innovation Award at the University of Victoria (UVic): Elizabeth Bassett (MA, English) and Nadia Timperio (MA, English).

DECEMBER 2014

Screen grab of the WECS website at UVic

MLab WECS Talk: Nina and Jentery gave a talk for the Women in Engineering and Computer Science (WECS) speaker series at UVic about their experiences working at the MLab.

JANUARY 2015

MLab Process Poster (by Nicole Clouston, Danielle Morgan, and Victoria Murawski) of Modelling and Fabricating a Skull Jewelry Piece (1867)

MLab at MLA 2015: Several members of the MLab team presented at the 2015 Modern Language Association convention in Vancouver. Nina and Shaun contributed to “Critical DH: Interventions in Scholarly Communications and Publishing,” and Jentery presented on the topic of “Transduction Literacies” for the “Making Writing” panel. He also gave a talk titled, “Warped Modernisms,” for the “Making as Method” panel on critical making, literature, and culture. Both of these talks corresponded with the MLab’s research on the intersections of making (broadly understood) with writing and composition.

CFP for Making Humanities Matter: Informed by the MLab’s research, Jentery issued a call for papers for a new volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, eds.) titled, Making Humanities Matter, with the University of Minnesota Press. In 2016, the manuscript for the edited collection was completed and submitted to the press for publication.

Structured-Light 3D Scanner Arrives: After the arrival of some new research equipment over the holidays, the MLab started experimenting with an HDI 120 3D Scanner. The scanner, which can digitize objects up to 60 microns in resolution using blue-LED, structured-light technology, has since been put to the task of digitizing wooden models for the MLab’s Early Wearables Kit as well as other materials for various scholarly projects, including MLab collaborations with several memory institutions in Canada.

Dene Grigar at the MLab: Dene Grigar (Creative Media and Digital Culture, Washington State University, Vancouver) dropped by the MLab to talk with us about histories of making in the humanities as well as the practice of preserving electronic literature and new media.

FEBRUARY 2015

Lisa Nakamura Speaking at PACTAC in Collaboration with the MLab and UVic Digital Humanities Committee

UVic Hosts Lisa Nakamura: The Digital Humanities Committee at UVic had the pleasure of hosting a public Lansdowne lecture by Lisa Nakamura; it was titled, “Media Archaeology from the Margins: Race, Gender, and Indigenous Labor.” Also, as part of a collaboration between the MLab, the DH Committee, and the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC), Nakamura conducted a public PACTAC seminar on “The Digital Afterlife of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Theory and Activism on Social Media.” She also took time to talk with each MLab researcher about their research interests, inspiring us to pursue exciting new directions in media and cultural studies.

MLab Collaborates with CFUV Women’s Collective: In collaboration with the CFUV Radio Women’s Collective, Nina and Shaun conducted an Arduino workshop titled, “Making Media Art as Feminist Practice.” Participants learned to build simple circuits that sense environmental input and translate it into visual output. The workshop aimed to explore feminist media art and practices and their relationship to circuit design; participants also discussed technical practice in women’s histories of technology and computing.

MLab Gets Milling: Among some of the new equipment received by the MLab, the SRM-20 desktop milling machine was a welcome addition. The machine employs subtractive manufacturing with a highly precise mechanical drilling resolution. It turned out to be the perfect tool for cutting jewelry pieces in the Early Wearables Kit.

MLab at University of South Carolina: Jentery visited the University of South Carolina to give a talk on “The Digging Condition” (also the working title of his monograph in progress), in which he discussed various theories of materiality and ephemerality after the so-called “material turn” in media studies. Drawing from a sound studies perspective, his talk emphasized what we can learn from negotiations with materials over time.

MLab in The Nonhuman Turn: Published in February 2015, Richard Grusin‘s edited collection, The Nonhuman Turn, included Rebekah Sheldon’s chapter, “Object-Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism,” which treats the Kits for Cultural History as an alternative to distant reading. Thanks, Rebekah!

MARCH 2015

Sample Computer Vision Work from Jentery’s “Reading Facades” Course with Architect, Andrea Johnson (University of Minnesota School of Architecture, College of Design)

MLab at IdeaFest: Along with five other speakers, MLab researchers participated in a panel titled, “Humanities in a Lab Coat,” during UVic’s IdeaFest event. The panel showcased the MLab as a collaborative humanities research lab, together with other initiatives and spaces on campus: The Humanities Computing and Media Centre, The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, The Digital Language Learning Lab, The Speech Research Lab, and The Sociolinguistics Research Lab.

MLab Hosts Garnet Hertz: Garnet Hertz visited from Emily Carr University to give a lecture on his studio work in electronic art and industrial design. The lecture was sponsored by the MLab in partnership with PACTAC. The MLab also had the privilege of playing with clay in Hertz’s prototyping workshop.

Programming Workshop: As part of our “Hello World” series with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, we offered a workshop on programming (in Python 3) for the arts and humanities.

MLab Hosts Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: Sponsored by the MLab, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier from UVic’s Department of Anthropology gave a talk on campus discussing her research on alternative networks of music production and circulation in Cuba.

MLab on “Critical Making”: For Roger Whitson‘s webinar lecture series, “Critical Making in Digital Humanities,” Jentery gave a talk titled, “Where Are the Politics?”, on combining critical making with social justice research. Other speakers in the series included Kari Kraus, Lori Emerson, Garnet Hertz, Amaranth Borsuk, and Matt Ratto.

MLab at Minnesota’s School of Architecture: As part of the University of Minnesota’s “Architecture as Catalyst” workshop series, Jentery co-taught a week-long course with architect, Andrea Johnson. It was titled, “Reading Facades: Integrating Human and Computer Vision” (syllabus). While at Minnesota, Jentery also gave a talk in the School of Architecture and College of Design: “Human-Machine Vision: A Post-Cinematic Approach.” At the end of the week, architecture students in Johnson and Jentery’s course presented their work (a combination of models, renderings, prototypes, and vision scripts) during a public exhibition, resulting in some wonderful documentation compiled by Johnson.

APRIL 2015

A Photo from the Digital Fabrication Lab’s First Few Days

Fab Lab Opens Its Doors: In a collaboration between the Departments of English and Visual Arts, the new Digital Fabrication Lab (DFL) officially opened for use as a research facility. The DFL’s opening was a significant announcement; as a computer numerical control (CNC) lab with a base in the humanities, it is the first of its kind in North America. Since April, it has been gradually integrated into collaborative research on media history, material culture studies, sculpture, and experimental art conducted by both the MLab and Visual Arts.

MLab at Waterloo: Drawing from critical theories informing the MLab’s various prototyping methods, Jentery gave the keynote at the University of Waterloo’s Experimental Digital Media (XDM) symposium, “Feedback, Fedback, Feedforward.” The event exhibited student projects exploring the intersections of art and information communication technologies. With faculty such as Beth Coleman, Aimée Morrison, and Marcel O’Gorman, Waterloo’s XDM program has deeply inspired the MLab’s research, and the “Feedback, Fedback, Feedforward” event was a highlight of 2015.

MLab + Shakespeare: Jentery visited Vancouver to give an invited talk at the Shakespeare Association of America‘s annual meeting. He presented during a panel titled, “The Way We Think Now: Shakespearean Studies in the Digital Turn,” which was organized by Ellen MacKay. Pointing to various examples from the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History, Jentery spoke about “Prototyping the Inaccessible.”

MLab at Stanford: Jentery visited Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages to give a talk titled, “Prototyping and Pedagogy in the Humanities,” where he discussed the role of prototyping in humanities teaching and research. During the talk, he connected the MLab’s methods and culture with changes in his own pedagogy. For instance, the MLab’s prototyping work heavily influenced the design of “What’s in a Game?” (a UVic digital humanities course about prototyping indie games).

MLab at UCLA: Jentery visited the University of California, Los Angeles to attend “Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities,” with keynotes delivered by Jonathan Sterne and Kiri Miller. In the Charles E. Young Research Library, Jentery took part in a panel titled, “Mapping Sound,” alongside Gaye Theresa Johnson, Peter McMurry, and moderator, Tamara Levitz. There, he presented material from the MLab’s Crocodile Cafe Exhibit. During his visit, he also met with several students conducting research in sound studies and ethnomusicology.

MAY 2015

The MLab Appears in The Ring

The Kits and DFL in The Ring: The MLab’s Kits for Cultural History and the new Digital Fabrication Lab appeared in an article written by Tara Sharpe for The Ring, UVic’s community newspaper. The article, “Makerspaces Matter,” was published both online and in print.

MLab at the BC Library Conference: Jentery had the opportunity to discuss the MLab’s humanities infrastructure at the 2015 BC Library Conference in Vancouver. He also fielded a variety of questions about the potential role of makerspaces in libraries.

Sharing Our Inventory: The MLab decided to publish a record of our inventory for public access. In a collective effort, Kat, Danielle, Nina, Shaun, and Jentery organized and compiled an MLab infrastructure list into a pretty handy spreadsheet.

JUNE 2015

Shaun Taking Photographs during the MLab’s 2015 DHSI Course

MLab at DHSI 2015: The MLab team revised their syllabus for “Physical Computing and Fabrication in the Humanities” at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The week-long course was taught by Nina, Shaun, Devon, and Jentery, and it concluded with an exhibit of programmable media designed by the students.

MLab at Union College: Union College in Schenectady, New York hosted the Engineering and Liberal Education Symposium, which focused on the intersection of engineering and the liberal arts. For the first session, “Exploring the Aesthetic and Humanistic Dimensions of Maker Culture,” Jentery presented a talk titled “Prototyping as Inquiry” to outline the relationship between the Kits for Cultural History and Fluxkits from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

JULY 2015

Danielle and Jentery’s Initial Experiment with CNC Machine Spindles

MLab Goes to School: At the Port Townsend School of Woodworking in Washington, Danielle and Jentery attended a workshop, “Beginning Digital Design and Fabrication.” During the course they learned about the digital fabrication techniques and software used in a three-way axis CNC router system. They also learned more about how woodworkers, engineers, and other practitioners are using fabrication techniques as part of their work.

MLab in CTheory Books: For the CTheory publication, Conversations in Critical Making, Garnet Hertz interviewed Jentery about the MLab, prototyping, and humanities approaches to science and technology studies. The interview appeared in the book as a chapter titled, “Humanities and Critical Approaches to Technology.” Hertz also interviewed Phoebe Sengers, Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Ratto, and Alexander Galloway.

How Did They Make That?: Inspired by the work of Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities, UCLA), Tiffany published, “How Did They Make That?: For Undergraduate Projects.” It addressed an important gap in media studies and digital humanities research.

MLab on CFUV: UVic’s radio station, CFUV, interviewed Nina about her media practice and work in the MLab.

SEPTEMBER 2015

Photos of the 2014-15 and 2015-16 MLab Teams

MLab Farewells and Hellos: This year the MLab said goodbye to assistant directors, Nina Belojevic and Shaun McPherson, both of whom were part of the team since the lab’s opening in 2012. With their departures, the MLab welcomed the addition of several new team members: Tiffany Chan, Liam Cline, Victoria Murawski, Nadia Timperio and me (Teddie Brock). Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz and Danielle Morgan continued with the team from 2014-15.

OCTOBER 2015

Nina and Jentery Participating in Vibrant Lives at Arizona State University (with Stjepan Rajko, front left, and Matt Delmont and Jessica Rajko, front right)

MLab on UVic Homepage and CBC Radio: The MLab’s Kits for Cultural History were featured on UVic’s homepage along with a short article and demonstration video produced by the MLab team. Later in the month, Jentery made a radio appearance on CBC’s All Points West to discuss the Early Wearables Kit with host, Robyn Burns.

MLab Hosts Tanja Carstensen: Tanja Carstensen is a sociologist and post-doctoral researcher with the Work-Gender Technology research group at the Hamburg University of Technology. She visited UVic to present her talk, “Gender, Makerspaces, and Laboratory Culture.” In her lecture, she analysed how makerspaces and digital fabrication labs could potentially renegotiate power and gender relations in regards to technology. She also addressed some ongoing social problems facing makerspaces.

MLab in SRC: In the journal, Scholarly Research and Communication (Issue 6.3, 2015), Jentery published “Why Fabricate?”, which outlines the MLab’s research on the relevance of fabrication techniques to humanities inquiry and cultural criticism.

MLab and Vibrant Lives at ASU: At Arizona State University, Nina and Jentery participated in the interdisciplinary performance, Vibrant Lives, at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts with Jessica Rajko, Jacqueline Wernimont, Eileen Standley, and Stjepan Rajko, among others. The project critically engages with design and movement to explore “data shed” and the connections between bodies, technologies, and information. This trip was a highlight for the MLab team in 2015. It was also a wonderful opportunity for us to collaborate with our amazing colleagues at ASU.

MLab at Brandeis and URI: Hosted by John Unsworth and Deb Sarlin, Jentery visited Brandeis University to deliver a talk about pedagogical practice in academic makerspaces. Immediately after this talk, he also gave a talk at the University of Rhode Island (URI) titled, “Teaching and Learning Across Makerspaces and Classrooms,” on invitation from Karim Boughida (Dean, URI Libraries).

MLab at Rutgers: Danielle had the opportunity to present the Early Wearables Kit at Rutgers University-Camden during the “Kits, Plans, and Schematics” media arts exhibit, curated by Helen J. Burgess, James J. Brown, Jr., Robert A. Emmons, Jr., and David M. Rieder. Throughout the exhibit, participants were encouraged to interact with the artists’ and researchers’ projects. Danielle designed the MLab’s portion of the exhibit and also delivered a brief introduction to the Kit.

NOVEMBER 2015

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (Special Issue, “Kits, Plans, Schematics”)

MLab Presents “Prototyping the Past”: Tiffany, Danielle, Kat, Victoria, and Jentery discussed the Early Wearables Kit during a panel at the University of Victoria. Along with the Kit, the team discussed the MLab’s approaches to rapid prototyping and media history.

MLab Goes to Middle School: Kat and Jentery conducted a hands-on workshop for students at Arbutus Middle School. To illustrate objects as both bits and atoms, they had students use laser-cut parts to arrange and build 3D models of animals. They also borrowed material from Hannah Perner-Wilson’s Kit of No Parts to explain the concepts and practices of prototyping.

MLab Launches Early Wearables Repo: The MLab released the Early Wearables Kit repository on Github for public access. The repo contains 3D models of the skull stick-pin, the mechanism, and the box built for the kits as well as historical illustrations, a guide, essays, assembly instructions, and metadata.

MLab in Hyperrhiz: The new media and net art journal, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, published the Early Wearables Kit in their “Kits, Plans, Schematics” issue, edited by Helen J. Burgess and David M. Rieder. The publication consisted of a critical essay (by Jentery), process posters, a video, a GitHub repository, and an about page.

DECEMBER 2015

Tiffany Programming an Optophone to Turn Text into Audible Tones

MLab at CUNY Graduate Center: On invitation from Patrik Svensson, Jentery attended the “Digging Deep: Ecosystems, Institutions and Processes for Critical Making” event at CUNY Graduate Center, where he contributed to a session with Anne Balsamo, Matt Ratto, Natalie Jeremijenko, Allison Burtch, Cathy Davidson, and Shannon Mattern.

MLab at the Sorbonne: Jentery spoke with students at the University of Paris-Sorbonne about prototyping the past. Katy Masuga‘s students read and responsed to one of Jentery’s manuscripts.

MLab Hosts Artist Lecture: The MLab sponsored a guest artist lecture by Jesse Colin Jackson (Electronic Art and Design at the University of California). His talk, “Pixels in the Material World: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Marching Cubes,” explored unit-based architectural models in digital visualization.

Programming an Optophone: Tiffany started programming a reading optophone to translate text into audible tones for a new kit about Mary Jameson and the history of optical character recognition. This work involved a combination of a Raspberry Pi with Python and OpenCV.

JANUARY 2016

Andrew Stauffer (UVA) Recording on Wire in the Lab with Danielle and Kat

MLab in Visible Language: The design and visual communication journal, Visible Language, published Jentery’s article, “Prototyping The Past” (Volume 49, Issue 3), which draws on the MLab’s Early Wearables Kit to articulate a methodology and case study for combining media history with rapid prototyping techniques.

MLab at MLA 2016: During the 2016 Modern Language Association convention in Austin, Jentery gave a talk titled, “Computer Vision as a Public Act: On Digital Humanities and Algocracy,” and facilitated the panel, “Care and Repair: Designing Digital Scholarship.” These events corresponded with the MLab’s ongoing research on physical computing and maintenance, respectively. In October 2016, Rebecca Ricks (NYU-ITP) responded to Jentery’s computer vision talk with a piece on the “algorithmic gaze.”

MLab at INKE 2016: At the 2016 INKE conference in Whistler, BC, Jentery followed up on “Why Fabricate?” with a paper on how a care and repair paradigm could inform the practice and culture of digital studies. Later in the year, Matthew Huculak and Lisa Goddard followed Jentery’s paper with their article in dh + lib.

Andrew Stauffer at the MLab: While visiting UVic to give an excellent talk on his “Book Traces” project, Andrew Stauffer (English, University of Virginia) dropped by the MLab and gave our magnetic recording kit a try.

Remaking Parts a Scanner: Kat made significant progress with our 3D scanner, demonstrating how it could be combined with CNC techniques to remake parts of old phones, which were central to our research on early magnetic recording.

FEBRUARY 2016

Figure Illustrating the Lab’s Research Process; Presented during Jentery’s Talk for UVic Anthropology; Illustration by Danielle

Web Design Workshop: As part of our “Hello World” series with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, we offered a free, public workshop on how to make simple websites with Markdown and Git.

MLab and UVic Anthropology: Jentery presented the MLab’s Early Wearables Kit for UVic Anthropology’s Graduate Colloquium. He also had an opportunity to talk with UVic Anthropology students about their research, including research involving media history and material culture.

MARCH 2016

The Humanities in a Labcoat Team at IdeaFest 2016: Alexandra D’Arcy (Linguistics), in left image, with, from left to right, Stewart Arneil (HCMC), Alyssa Arbuckle (ETCL), Daniel Sondheim (ETCL), Jentery, Alexandra D’Arcy (Linguistics), Sonya Bird (Linguistics), and Catherine Caws (French), in right image

MLab at IdeaFest: The MLab presented at UVic’s annual IdeaFest research festival during a panel titled, “A New Labcoat in the Humanities,” which showcased how the humanities engage in collaborative, hands-on research.

MLab at Cornell: On invitation from the Society for the Humanities, Jentery visited Cornell University to give a public lecture on “Prototyping Absence, Remaking Old Media,” based on the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History project. He also had an opportunity to attend a meeting of 2015-16 Society Fellows with Timothy Murray and many others.

MLab at Syracuse: Following his visit to Cornell, Jentery gave another MLab-based talk, this time at Syracuse (on invitation from Patrick Berry), for Writing, English, Digital Humanities, Composition and Culture, Libraries, and the Humanities Center there. The talk addressed the intersections of writing, prototyping, and pedagogy, drawing on student research at UVic. Here’s an abstract. While at Syracuse, Jentery also conducted a Scalar workshop and visited the amazing Belfer Audio Archive to listen to their collections and have a conversation with Jenny Doctor (Director of the Archive). Patrick Williams (Syracuse University Libraries) followed Jentery’s talk with “Reflecting on Networks,” which also discusses the work of Lori Emerson and Clay Spinuzzi, both of whom recently visited Syracuse, too.

UVic Hosts Julie Flanders: With support from UVic’s Digital Humanities Committee, Julie Flanders (English and Digital Scholarship, Northeastern University) presented a series of Lansdowne lectures at UVic, including a talk titled, “Building Otherwise: Gender, Race, and Otherness in the Digital Humanities.” During her visit, Flanders visited the MLab, and we discussed our various projects with her.

MLab + ETCL Host Daniela Rosner: With the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at UVic, the MLab hosted Daniela Rosner (Human-Centred Design and Engineering, University of Washington), who gave an inspiring lecture on “Imaginative Interventions: Design as Inquiry.” Her talk walked us through a series of case studies in critical design and making as forms of social inquiry to generate new understandings of design products and practices. Rosner also visited both labs and spoke with researchers there. We were quite excited to have Rosner on campus; she’s inspired the MLab for some time now.

Reading Optophone in the DRC: Tiffany, Victoria, and Jentery wrote “Remaking Optophones: An Exercise in Maintenance Studies” for the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) at the University of Michigan. The Reading Optophone Kit is the MLab’s third volume in the Kits for Cultural History series.

APRIL 2016

Jentery on Hawai’i Public Radio Talking about MLab Research with Bytemarks Cafe; from left to right, Burt Lum, Larry Denneau, Ken Dehoff, Richard Wainscoat, Eugene Magnier, Jentery, Ryan Ozawa, Burl Burlingame; image care of Bytemarks Cafe

MLab at SCMS 2016: For the annual Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference, Jentery presented MLab research in Atlanta on a panel organized by Virginia Kuhn (USC Cinematic Arts). His talk was titled, “From Accessing to Prototyping Media History,” and the panel was about the “Work of Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproducibility.”

MLab in the A DH Companion: With Kari Kraus, Bethany Nowviskie, William J. Turkel, and Devon Elliott, Jentery published “Between Bits and Atoms: Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication in the Humanities” as Chapter 1 in A New Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Several arguments in that chapter correspond with the MLab’s approach to media history and theory, and they also speak to why work by Kraus, Nowviskie, Turkel, and Elliott has so deeply informed the MLab since its opening in 2012.

MLab at Washington State: On invitation from the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, Jentery visited Washington State University to talk about “Remaking Old Media across the Disciplines” and also discuss the challenges of conducting archival research in Science and Technology Studies. While he was there, he conducted a workshop on low-tech prototyping, or prototyping without digital tools, with support from Kim Christen and Trevor Bond.

MLab at the University of Hawai’i: At the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, Jentery gave two Dai Ho Chun Distinguished Lectures on prototpying the past and media history, both of which drew from the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History. He also appeared on Hawai’i Public Radio, talking with the hosts of Bytemarks Café about the MLab’s research. The hosts, Burt Lum and Ryan Ozawa, were especially interested in the Lab’s Early Wearables project. While he was on the Hawai’i campus, Jentery visited with faculty, staff, and students in Digital Arts and Humanities, including David Goldberg (American Studies) and Rich Rath (History), who also supported his visit.

MAY 2016

Kat and Danielle’s View of UW’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, Where They Presented MLab Research

MLab for The Lab Book: Darren Wershler interviewed Tiffany and Jentery for the Lab Book project, which Wershler is writing with Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka. The interview is titled, “Prototyping the Past: The Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria,” and it discusses the MLab’s research, projects, and infrastructure.

MLab at HASTAC 2016: Tiffany and Jentery both presented during HASTAC 2016 at Arizona State University (ASU). For her talk, Tiffany discussed the MLab’s research on the optophone, emphasizing how the process of prototyping reveals historical absences and also points to ignored labour practices. For the panel, “Critical Design and Deviant Critique,” with Kim Knight (U. of Texas at Dallas), Padmini Ray Murray (Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology), and Jacqueline Wernimont (ASU), Jentery discussed the relationship between design, labour, and knowledge production in prototyping projects.

MLab at the University of Washington: Kat and Danielle attended the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the University of Washington (UW) to give a talk on the Kits for Cultural History. The title of their talk was “Technology off the Page,” and they presented on a panel with students from Informatics, Near Eastern Studies, Geology, Human Centered Design and Engineering, Linguistics, Theater, and Art History.

Prototyping in an English Graduate Seminar: For English 508: “Prototyping Texts” at UVic, Tiffany demonstrated how prototyping happens in the classroom and applies to historical and cultural research in English. She created a portfolio, titled “Act Natural: Prototyping Autodidactism, Forging the Self.” It performs various critiques of Dale Carnegie and involves experiments with type, print, HTML, and bots. Later in 2016, Annette Vee (English, Pittsburgh) mentioned Tiffany’s persuasive prototyping work in the MLA’s Digital Pedagogy project.

JUNE 2016

Kat and Danielle after Installing “Jacob: Recording on Wire” in the Audain Gallery; Photograph of a Repurposed Wall-Mounted Phone that Played Historical Audio throughout the Exhibition

MLab in UVic’s Audain Gallery: With contributions from Jentery, Tiffany, and me (Teddie), Danielle and Kat installed “Jacob: Recording on Wire” in UVic’s Audain Gallery. The exhibition involved three public demonstrations of early magnetic recording, drawing materials from the MLab’s second volume in the Kits for Cultural History series. It was received with great enthusiasm from many attendees who had the opportunity to impress their own voices onto piano wire suspended across the gallery. The Martlet also covered the exhibition, interviewing Danielle and Jentery about it.

MLab at DHSI 2016: For DHSI 2016, Tiffany, Danielle, Kat, and Jentery developed a new version of their course on Physical Computing + Fabrication, which they co-taught during the second week of the event. The MLab had participants prototype their own projects using a variety of tools and method, including experimental electronics, 3D modelling, laser cutting, photogrammetry, and structured light scanning. At the end of the week, students had the opportunity to showcase their projects to the the rest of the DHSI community. To support the MLab, Agisoft provided all Physical Computing + Fabrication students with temporary licenses to use PhotoScan for their photogrammetry research. After the course, Carrie Schroeder (Religious and Classical Studies, University of the Pacific) published a detailed write-up sharing what she learned. Mark Sample (Digital Studies, Davidson) also published a repo for his Physical Computing + Fabrication project, “Alt_NC_Bathroom.”

Sounding Out the Optophone: As a result of her programming and electronics research on the history of optical character recognition, Tiffany produced a video demonstrating how reading optophones scanned type. This process is very difficult to discern when studying archival materials alone. Tiffany’s video renders it much easier to understand.

JULY 2016

Slide from Tiffany’s Talk at DH 2016: Early Iteration of Our Reading Optophone Prototype

MLab at DH 2016 in Poland: For the annual Digital Humanities conference, Tiffany gave a talk on “Designing for Difficulty” (slides) in Kraków, Poland. It discussed how the MLab prototypes historical absences by combining CNC and 3D modelling techniques with labour studies and media theory. This talk was the MLab’s first long paper on prototyping at the annual DH conference.

MLab Compiles Early Magnetic Recording Repo: The MLab compiled and later released version 1.1 of the Early Magnetic Recording Kit (the second volume in the Kits for Cultural History series) as a public repository on GitHub, with contributions from Kat, Danielle, Jentery, Tiffany, Victoria, and me (Teddie).

MLab Releases the Optophone Repo: The MLab released version 1.1 of the Optophone Kit (the third volume in the Kits for Cultural History series) as a public repository on GitHub, with contributions from Tiffany, Kat, Danielle, Victoria, and Jentery.

Scanner in the Library: With support from UVic Special Collections (especially Matt Huculak), Tiffany experimented with 3D scanning various books, manuscripts, and other materials, including cuneiform from 2150BCE. She later wrote a report on her findings as part of a directed study in UVic English.

AUGUST 2016

One of Danielle’s Early Layout Sketches for An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past

MLab in Doing Digital Humanities: Nicole and Jentery published a chapter, “Fabrication and Research-Creation in the Arts and Humanities,” in Doing Digital Humanities, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens. In the chapter, Nicole and Jentery underscore the creative and experimental uses of CNC machines, which are usually treated as technologies for replicating objects or models that already exist in the world.

Let the Illustrated Guide Begin: Danielle, Jentery, and Tiffany began working on the MLab’s Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past, the Lab’s collaborative project for 2016-17. The Lab is aiming to release the Guide in print by September 2017, with contributions from Danielle, Jentery, Tiffany, Kat, Maasa, Evan, and me (Teddie). More from us very soon!

Post by Teddie Brock, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, physcomp, fabrication, and exhibits tags. Featured image of Katherine Goertz and the “Jacob: Recording on Wire” exhibit care of Danielle Morgan.

September 2012

View of the Maker Lab from outside its front door

The MLab Opens Its Doors: When the MLab first opened in September 2012, there was already a burgeoning team, including lab director, Jentery Sayers; MVP Director, Stephen Ross; and HASTAC scholars, Alex Christie, Mikka Jacobsen, Shaun Macpherson, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa. These members brought their diverse skills and research backgrounds to the MLab, and all were committed to expanding not only the work of the MLab itself, but also the idea of a space for collaborative humanities work.

October 2012

Shaun and Mikka working on the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit in the MLab

Projects Begin: October marked the beginning of many of the MLab’s major projects for the 2012–13 academic year, including the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit, the Year of Ulysses project (with the Modernist Versions Project), and The Crocodile Cafe Exhibit. In the best possible way, these projects differed significantly, sparking some exciting interdisciplinary research in the MLab.

November 2012

Shaun at the “Hello World” workshop on visual programming

“Hello World” Series Launches: As an extension of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and with support from the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the MLab launched a series of educational workshops, starting with Shaun’s “Max/MSP: An Introduction to Visual Programming,” followed closely by “Collating Your Texts: Using Juxta to Identify Textual Variants,” which was facilitated by Stephen Ross and Matt Huculak. From the start, these workshops brought people from across campus into the MLab to see what we were doing and how. Given its success, this series has continued into the 2014-15 academic year.

December 2012

In the MLab, a poster for the “Long-Term Thinking” panel

MLab Co-Organizes Panel with George Dyson: With the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the MLab co-organized a panel on “Long-Term Thinking with Technologies,” which speculated about how technologies, new media, and culture might change in the future. The panel featured notable science historian, George Dyson, together with Barbara Bordalejo (English, U. of Saskatchewan), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Anthropology), Jeffrey Foss (Philosophy), David Leach (Writing), Victoria Wyatt (History in Art), and Jentery. During his visit to Victoria, Dyson also received an Honorary Doctor of Laws and gave the President’s Distinguished Lecture.

January 2013

Tweet from Aaron Mauro, announcing the ETCL’s HASTAC panel

HASTAC Scholars Panel Brown Bag Speakers Series: Alex and Jana participated in the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory‘s Brown Bag Speaker Series, discussing their research as graduate students working in humanities lab environments.

MLab at MLA: Jentery travelled to Boston for the 2013 Modern Language Association‘s annual convention. There, building upon some MLab projects for example material, he facilitated “Digital Scholarly Composition with Scalar” for the “Get Started in Digital Humanities” workshop. He also presented “Linked Open Data for New Modernist Studies” during the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) panel titled, “Open Sesame.” This talk was based on research he was conducting with Stephen Ross and the Modernist Versions Project. Travis Brown (Maryland), Johanna Drucker (UCLA), Eric Rochester (UVa), Geoffrey Rockwell (Alberta), and Susan Schreibman (Trinity College, Dublin) also presented on the ACH panel, with Susan Brown (Guelph) presiding.

February 2013

Katie Tanigawa facilitates a “Hello World” workshop in the MLab

“Hello World” Workshops Continue: The “Hello World” workshops continued in the new year with “How to Data Model an Object,” facilitated by Jana in January, and “Visualizing Data Using XML and the Mandala Browser,” by Katie T. in February.

MLab Mentioned in Watters’s ELI Keynote: With a focus on campus makerspaces, educational technology researcher, Audrey Watters, mentioned the MLab in her keynote at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting.

March 2013

In the MLab, posters for March 2013 talks by Tanya Clement and Bethany Nowviskie at UVic

Tanya Clement’s “Hello World” Workshop: The fifth of seven workshops in the 2012-13 “Hello World” series, titled “Distant Listening: Discovering Sound Patterns with ProseVis,” was facilitated by visiting scholar, Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin). Clement also gave an outstanding talk on campus that day.

Bethany Nowviskie Visits UVic: As a part of UVic’s Lansdowne Lecture series, and hosted in conjunction with the University’s Digital Humanities Committee, Bethany Nowviskie (Director of Digital Research and Scholarship, University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab) gave a compelling talk, “Praxis Makes Perfect: New Models for Learning in the Humanities.” She also facilitated the sixth 2012-13 “Hello World” workshop in McPherson Library, where she guided a packed room through Neatline, an exhibit-building tool developed at the Scholars’ Lab.

April 2013

Nina and Alex presenting at HASTAC 2013 in Toronto

HASTAC Presentations: A number of MLab members, including Nina, Alex, Jentery, and Katie, presented at the HASTAC conference at York University (the first HASTAC conference in Canada), giving papers as well as co-organizing a pop-up makerspace with the Ontario Augmented Reality Network (OARN) and Western University’s Lab for Humanistic Fabrication.

MLab CFUV Interviews: Jentery was invited to speak on “Post Everything,” a program on UVic’s campus radio station, CFUV. During the interview, he talked about 3D printing, physical computing, and other forms of fabrication and how they open up new avenues of inquiry in humanities research. Meanwhile, Shaun was invited to speak about his graduate research on the intersections of maker culture, critical theory, and the cultural construction of interfaces on CFUV’s “Beyond the Jargon.”

MLab participates in Day of DH 2013: Several MLab members participated in Day of DH 2013, an annual event in which DH practitioners from around the world offer a snapshot of the DH-related projects they are working on. Shaun blogged about desktop fabrication and planning a popup makerspace at HASTAC 2013; Katie T. wrote about working with Alex to create geo-temporal maps of James Joyce’s Dublin; Nina wrote about her Hyperlit prototype and creating a project portfolio; Arthur wrote about 3D modelling a stereoscope; Jana wrote about tagging the poems of Audrey Alexandra Brown; and Jentery wrote about planning the HASTAC trip, organizing a Public Humanities lecture series with Nina, and prepping for his upcoming photogrammetry workshop.

Final “Hello World” Workshop: The “Hello World” workshop series ended on a high note with “Stitching 2D into 3D: An Introduction to Photogrammetry,” which Jentery facilitated. This session explored the possibilities of 3D modeling and printing for historical research.

May 2013

SSHRC Storytellers from left to right: Shaun, Adèle, Katie T., and Arthur (top row), Mikka and Jana (bottom row)

MLab Team Wins SSHRC Video Contest: MLab team members Adèle, Nina, Alex, Arthur, Mikka, Shaun, Jana, and Katie T. won the SSHRC “Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers” contest with their video, “Recovering the Local: A Digital Literary Exhibit on Audrey Alexandra Brown.” The SSHRC video contest included a prize of $3,000 per winning team.

The Long Now of Ulysses Launch: After months of development, the Long Now of Ulysses exhibit began. With support from the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, the University of Victoria Library, and the University of Victoria Art Collections, graduate students from Stephen’s English 560 seminar on the modernist novel and Jentery’s English 507 seminar on digital literary studies developed and launched the exhibit online and at the Maltwood Gallery in McPherson Library. For Editing Modernism in Canada, Amanda Hansen published a short piece on the exhibit, and several local news outlets covered the event.

The MLab’s Website Goes Live: After months of writing, organizing, editing, backing-up, re-editing, re-backing up, and arguing about web design, the Maker Lab site went live at last! Since its launch, the site has been visited by people in over 100 different countries, with thousands of pageviews per month.

IJLM Publication: Jentery, the MLab, and seven students from the 2012 English 507 graduate seminar on digital literary studies saw their co-authored Scalar article, “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications,” published by MIT Press in the peer-reviewed venue, International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM). The piece demonstrated how Scalar can be used as both a multimodal pedagogical tool and a research platform, and it included commentary and analysis written by all the authors.

June 2013

Edward Jones-Imhotep (center) and Jacqueline Wernimont (right) building a 3D printer at DHSI

MLab Participates in DHSI 2013: Many MLab members participated in workshops at the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), hosted by UVic every year. Jentery co-taught the “Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication” course with William J. Turkel and Devon Elliott.

MLab Presents at Congress 2013: Adèle, Nina, Alex, Jana, Stephen, Jentery, and Katie T. presented during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, “Canada’s largest academic gathering,” held at UVic during the first week of June.

MLab Gets Mentions: The MLab was mentioned on several notable websites: Maker Bridges mentioned it in a post on “Makerspaces in Academia;” Steven E. Jones mentioned the MLab and embedded an MLab video on the website for his book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities; and ProfHacker mentioned Jentery’s presentation, “Portable, Tacit, Temporary: Popup Makerspaces in the Humanities,” which he gave at the “DH Innovations: Lab Based Environments in the Humanities” symposium at Vancouver Island University.

July 2013

Photograph of Brian Croxall taken during the “From 2D to 3D” workshop at DH 2013 in Nebraska

MLab at DH 2013: At the annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, Jentery presented a paper (“Made to Make: Expanding Digital Humanities through Desktop Fabrication”) and facilitated a workshop (“From 2D to 3D: An Introduction to Desktop Fabrication”). Both featured the MLab’s desktop fabrication research and were conducted in collaboration with Devon Elliott (Western University) and Jeremy Boggs (University of Virginia).

Rhetoric Society of America Interviews Jentery: Focusing on the topic of makerspaces, John W. Pell with the Rhetoric Society of Amercia interviewed Jentery about the MLab and its “collaborative, embodied work” for The Blogora.

August 2013

Slide from Jentery’s TEMiC 2013 talk at UBCO

MLab at TEMiC 2013: Jentery gave a talk titled, “Editing, Annotating, and Discovering Historical Audio,” at the Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) 2013 meeting hosted by the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. This talk was based in part on some of the MLab’s scholarly exhibit research, including its work with historical audio.

September 2013

Image from Belojevic and Johnson’s HyperLit project, which was awarded the 2012-13 Praxis Award

MLab Team Members Win Praxis Awards: Nina, Alex, Jon, and Katie T. each received the Digital Humanities Praxis Innovation Award for demonstrating “scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication” with their collaborative projects, “HyperLit: A Gameful Design Model for a Social Edition” (Nina and Jon) and “Dislocating Ulysses“ (Alex and Katie).

MLab Welcomes New Team Members: The MLab’s second year welcomed the addition of several new team members, while many previous members remained. The new members were Patrick Close, Laura Dosky, Jon Johnson, Stefan Krescy, Nancy McWhirter, Katie McQueston, Keddy Pavlik, Zaqir Virani, and Karly Wilson.

MLab at the University of Kansas: Jentery was one of the keynote speakers at the Digital Humanities Forum 2013 hosted by the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. He gave a talk titled, “Fabrications, or How to Lie with Computer Vision.” During the talk, he walked audiences through the MLab’s Z-Axis research with Implementing New Knowledge Environments and the Modernist Versions Project.

Alex and Katie Present at MSA: Alex and Katie T. presented at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Brighton during a roundtable session on modernism and interdisciplinarity.

MLab Hosts merritt kopas: As a part of the “Building Public Humanities” project, and with support from the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, merritt kopas came to UVic to give a talk and workshop. Both the workshop and the talk were full of interested students and profs from across the disciplines.

MLab Awarded SSHRC Insight Grant: In perhaps the biggest news of the year for the MLab, Jentery Sayers, in collaboration with William J. Turkel (Western University), received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant. The Grant was awarded to fund “Humanities Physical Computing and Fabrication for Cultural History” for four years (2013-17). Work began almost immediately on the Kits for Cultural History, the primary project supported by the grant.

Nina and Jentery Present at INKE NYU: Nina and Jentery traveled to New York University to present their paper, “Prototyping Personas for Open, Networked Peer Review,” at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments conference. A revised and developed version of this talk was later published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. 

MLab Video Included in North Carolina State Syllabus: A video project led by Shaun and produced with other members of the MLab was included in the course syllabus (under the section “Making”) for Paul Fyfe’s Fall 2013 ENG582-003 course (“Studies in Digital Humanities”) at North Carolina State University.

MLab Mentioned in Prince George Citizen: In an article about the Two Rivers Gallery, the Prince George Citizen cited the MLab as an example of a growing “global movement” of labs and spaces devoted to research projects and explorations that utilize a maker approach.

October 2013

“Tinkering with Scholarship” piece in the Times Colonist

MLab in the Times Colonist: The MLab was featured in a Times Colonist article titled, “Tinkering With Scholarship.” The article was part of a series of pieces written on UVic research; it describes how the MLab blends humanities research with the collaborative makerspace model.

MLab Team Members Start Working on NANO Special Issue: MLab team members Adèle, Alex, Jana, Stephen, Jentery, and Katie T. were invited by New American Notes Online (or NANO) to be the guest editors of a special issue on digital humanities and public humanities.

Jentery Presents in Seattle: Jentery traveled to Seattle as the keynote speaker for the TYCA-PNW & Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association Joint Annual Conference. His talk, “Why Do Makerspaces Matter for the Humanities? For Writing Centers?,” discussed the practicalities and appeal of maker culture beyond its trendy status.

MLab Inspires UWGB Course: Taking the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History project as the “inspiration” for a project called “Cultural History Kit,” Chuck Rybak developed an assignment for a class he taught through the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay’s Commons for the Digital and Public Humanities.

Laura Publishes “Digital Publishing in Analog” with MediaCommons: In this piece, Laura describes the importance of maintaining an awareness of the “analog” materials that underscore much digital scholarship and research, including the MLab’s work on scholarly exhibits.

November 2013

Nina and Shaun presenting during the WHA conference at UC San Diego

Nina and Shaun Present at WHA Conference: Nina and Shaun travelled to the University of California, San Diego for the Western Humanities Alliance (WHA) Annual Meeting, where they gave a lightning presentation that featured an electronic poster and early prototype of the Kits for Cultural History Early Wearables project.

UVic Torch Mentions Maker Lab: UVic’s alumni magazine, Torch, mentioned the MLab in their Autumn 2013 issue. The article features the Victoria Makerspace and the MLab showing how the maker ethos can be applied to academia.

Sayers and Dietrich Published in Digital Studies: The online journal, Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, published “After the Document Model for Scholarly Communication: Some Considerations for Authoring with Rich Media,” an article by Jentery and Craig Dietrich (Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California). The article discusses the platforms, ThoughtMesh and Scalar, and how each can be utilized for digital communications that expand our understanding of scholarship.

MLab Hosts Lynne Siemens: For the second part of the “Building Public Humanities” series, presented by the MLab in conjunction with the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, Lynne Siemens gave a workshop on “Public Humanities Project Management.” It was well-attended by graduate students interested in gaining insight into what it takes to develop, define, plan, and manage public projects.

More Nods for MLab Projects: The Z-Axis research was mentioned in Whitney Trettien’s blog post “Towards a Prototype of Digital Harmony” on the relation of digital editions to maps, and Ryan Hunt mentioned the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History in “An Introduction to Maker Culture for Historians,” as an example of the effective applications of maker culture in academic settings.

December 2013

A warped map, by Katie and Alex, from the Z-Axis project

Katie T.’s “Mudbox” Post Selected by DHNow: Katie T.’s piece, “Warping the City: Joyce in a Mudbox,” which describes the Z-Axis project, received an Editors’ Choice at Digital Humanities Now.

MLab in “Faces of UVic” Video: Jentery was invited to speak about his research and the MLab’s projects in UVic’s YouTube series, “Faces of UVic Research.” In the video, Jentery discusses the ways that the explorations of technology undertaken in the MLab help to further historical research.

January 2014

Nicole, Alex, Karly, Stefan, Zaqir, Emma, Laura, and Nina at the Paper Speaker workshop

Katie M. Conducts a Paper Speaker Workshop: During the MLab’s “Hello World” series, Katie M.’s “DIY Paper Speaker” workshop guided participants through how to build a speaker out of paper and copper coil, as well as a simple amplifier circuit. Using her well-designed instruction manual, workshop participants were soon filling the room with the tinny sounds of paper-amplified tunes.

Jentery Publishes “Making the Perfect Record” in American Literature: With support from Duke University Press, Jentery published “Making the Perfect Record” (open access) in the journal, American Literature. The article draws from his research on early magnetic recording, and it was part of a special issue on new media and literature. It was authored and published in Scalar, and it ultimately influenced how the MLab approached its various Scalar projects.

February 2014

Photograph taken by Alex during the MLab’s trip to INKE Whistler

MLab Researchers Present at INKE Whistler Conference: Nina, Alex, Stephen, Jentery, and our colleagues at the ETCL all traveled to beautiful Whistler, BC, for the annual INKE gathering, where everyone also gave a talk. The title of this year’s gathering was “Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing.”

MLab Co-Hosts Doran Larson: As a part of the “Building Public Humanities” project, and with help from the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, Hamilton College’s Doran Larson came to UVic to deliver his presentation, “Bearing Digital Witness: The Humanities and the American Prison Complex.” The talk centred on social justice issues in the U.S. prison system and described his book project, an edited collection of 71 essays written by inmates in the American prison system.

“Hello World” Series Welcomes Ed Chang: Drew University’s Edmond Y. Chang was sponsored by both the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory and the MLab to give a talk titled, “Queer Games, Straight Design,” as well as a workshop on “Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality,” which explored strategies for using video games in the classroom to talk about race, sexuality, gender, and power. Both the talk and workshop featured fascinating and engaging discussions.

Davidson and Jagoda Mention the MLab: With Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago), Cathy N. Davidson (Graduate Center, CUNY)—who is a co-founder of HASTAC and member of President Obama’s National Humanities Council—mentioned the MLab while discussing digital humanities innovations. In particular, Jagoda and Davidson cited the MLab as an example of how the “lab” model has led to “renewed public interest—and confidence—in the academic humanities.”

March 2014

Katie M., Keddy, and Heather at IdeaFest 2014

“Book Nerds in a Lab”: MLab Does Ideafest: Taking the opportunity to connect with people across campus and the larger Victoria community, MLab participated in Ideafest 2014, UVic’s annual “festival of research.” Team members from the MLab’s different research projects—Z-Axis, Kits for Cultural History, and the Year of Ulysses (YoU)—displayed their work and discussed it with some of the 4,000+ attendees of the week-long event.

MLab Receives CFI/FCI Support: March 2014 was brimming with good news. From the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) / Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation (FCI)’s  John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the MLab received support for its research proposal, “The Makerspace for Desktop Fabrication and Physical Computing in the Humanities.” This proposal was created in partnership with the Department of English at UVic and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

Kits for Cultural History at SCMS: Jentery traveled to Seattle for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ (SCMS) annual conference, where he gave a paper titled, “Kits for Cultural History: Applied Approaches to Old Media and Mechanisms,” and participated in a panel (with Anne Balsamo, Shannon Mattern, Paulina Mickiewicz, and Patrik Svensson) titled, “From Libraries to Labs: Spaces of Media Access, Making, and Learning.”

 April 2014

Nina, Shaun, and Katie in the Barranco District of Lima

MLab team at HASTAC 2014 in Lima: Nina, Katie M., Shaun, and Jentery traveled to Lima, Peru, for the sixth annual HASTAC conference in Lima, Peru. Fun was had, ceviche was consumed, and the team hosted a popup makerspace, “Whose Hand am I Holding, Anyway?” Nina and Jentery also presented a paper, “Making a Kit for Cultural History,” in which they discussed the conceptual framework for the Early Wearables Kit.

MLab Featured in University Affairs: University Affairs (UA), Canada’s leading journal providing information “about and for Canada’s universities,” published a feature article about the MLab in both its print and online editions. The piece, “Exploring the Humanities Through Unique Makerspaces,” describes the lab as a pioneer in the “blending [of] ‘makerspace ethos’ with the humanities.”

Nina and Shaun’s CFUV Interview: Nina and Shaun were invited for an interview with CFUV’s show, “Doers, Makers, Thinkers.” In the interview, they discussed how their graduate research was shaped by their work at the MLab.

MLab Referenced by SUNYIT: SUNYIT at Utica/Rome’s MakeIT initiative listed the MLab in a list of resources of “Making Across Disciplines.” The MLab is listed alongside the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the California College of the Arts, among others.

May 2014

In 2014, the MLab received support from the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund

MLab Receives BCKDF Support: More good news! The MLab was awarded a British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund grant for “The Makerspace for Desktop Fabrication and Physical Computing in the Humanities.” As with the CFI/FCI award, the proposal was created in partnership with the Department of English at UVic and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

June 2014

Visual summary of Jentery’s ETUG keynote by Jason Toal and Tracy Kelly

MLab at ETUG: Traveling to Langara College in Vancouver for the Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) spring workshop, Jentery gave the keynote, “Make, Not Brand: DIY Making after Big Data.” The well-attended talk discussed the concept of “make” beyond the brand, including its origins in DIY culture.

Devon, Jentery, and Bill Teach at DHSI: For the second year, Devon, Jentery, and Bill taught the week-long course, “Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication for Humanists,” at the 2014 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria. Participants in the course gained knowledge and hands-on experience with 3D printing, Max/MSP, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other physical computing tools and technologies. The class even built a MAME cabinet! At the end of the course, Nina and Shaun were invited to join Devon and Jentery to teach physical computing at DHSI 2015.

July 2014

Screen grab of the “Around DH in 80 Days” project, which features the MLab

MLab Gets Mentioned in “Around DH”: The MLab team was absolutely honoured to be featured as Day 27 of “Around DH in 80 Days.” Edited by Alex Gil, the post describes how the MLab “affords its team of graduate students and faculty opportunities to build projects through various modes of knowing by doing.”

Alex Presents at DH 2014 in Switzerland: Alex traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland for DH 2014, where he presented a paper co-written with the INKE-MVP research team. The paper was titled, “Modeling How Modernists Wrote the City.”

MLab Team Publishes Special Issue of NANO: New American Notes Online (NANO) invited members of the MLab to act as guest editors of a special issue: “Digital Humanities, Public Humanities.” Adèle, Alex, Jana, Jentery, and Katie T. all participated in circulating the CFP, selecting from the submissions, providing feedback, editing, and writing the special issue’s introduction. Additionally, Nina’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies,” was selected for publication in the issue.

Year of Ulysses E-Book Published on UVicSpace: Stefan—MLab team member and lead researcher on the Year of Ulysses (YoU) project with the Modernist Versions Project—edited the Twitter conversations around the online, serialized release of Joyce’s Ulysses into an elegant e-book. In total, the book (licensed with Creative Commons) represents over thirteen thousand tweets organized into conversations around each chapter of Joyce’s novel.

August 2014

Materials from the MLab’s prototyping space, including anodized aluminum laser cut with the MLab logo

MLab Makes Room for More Machines: As the MLab entered its third year, it began the process of expanding operations on the Kits for Cultural History project, which included new CNC equipment for prototyping and production. (More details on this front soon!)

September 2014

From the MLab’s Trouvé repo, an image of an illuminated fish experiment

Gustave Trouvé Gets Github: As part of the Kits for Cultural History, Danielle Morgan and the MLab team created a public Github repository of images cropped from Georges Barral’s 1891 biography of Trouvé, Histoire D’Un Inventeur. Danielle also translated the image captions from the original French into English.

Nina and Shaun Named Assistant Directors of the MLab: Congratulations to MLab team members, Nina and Shaun, who were named Assistant Directors of the MLab! Also, a special welcome to new team members, Nicole Clouston, Katherine Goertz, and Danielle Morgan, all of whom are working on the Kits for Cultural History.

Stephen and Jentery Published in Literature Compass: Stephen and Jentery’s article, “Modernism Meets Digital Humanities,” was published in Literature Compass. The article surveys digital humanities approaches to modernism and includes references to the Z-Axis project.

CUNY Mentions Nina’s Publication: In its announcement of the publication of the special issue of New American Notes Online (NANO), City Tech’s website draws specific attention to Nina’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies.” Calling Nina’s essay a “highlight” of the issue, the post writes that she “hacks into Nintendo Entertainment Systems to try to reconfigure play potential.”

MLab Included in Growing List of Syllabi and Resource Lists: As the new school year rolled around, many instructors around the world included the MLab’s website and the work of MLab researchers in their course syllabi and resource lists. These included mentions by Steven E. Jones, for his Media and Culture course at Loyola; Ashley Blacquiere, for his History of Videogame Design course at UVic; Melissa Bailar, for her Introduction to Digital Humanities graduate seminar at Rice; and Steph Ceraso, for her Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Additionally, UCSB’s Alan Liu listed work done by Alex, Katie T., Jana, Stephen, and Jentery in his DH Toybox for students.

Nina and Jentery Published in JEP: Nina and Jentery’s article, “Peer Review Personas,” was published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP). The article presents a prototype that is currently under development by Implementing New Knowledge Environments.

The “Hello World” Series Continues: At the month’s end, the MLab announced it will be conducting a weekend workshop, “Introduction to Programming and Python 3 in the Arts and Humanities,” with support from the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. The workshop will take place during the first weekend of March 2015.

Today

This piece is the 120th piece published at maker.uvic.ca since its launch during our first year. Here’s to 100+ more! Thanks, everyone.

Post by Shaun Macpherson and Karly Wilson, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, physcomp, fabrication, versioning, and exhibits tags. Featured image of Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, and Shaun Macpherson care of the Maker Lab.

Photograph of the Early Wearables Kit, care of Danielle Morgan

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

Kits for Cultural History is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jentery Sayers and William J. Turkel are the project’s principal investigators. With Sayers and Turkel, Nina Belojevic, Nicole Clouston, Shaun Macpherson, and Katie McQueston, together with Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Alex Christie, Laura Dosky, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Jon Johnson, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, and Zaqir Virani, have contributed to the project. The research is being conducted in the MLab in partnership with the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication at Western University. The researchers are based in departments of English, history, and visual arts, as well as the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought program at UVic.

Project Status

This project is ongoing, with substantial support through at least April 2017. During the 2013-14 academic year, early prototypes were developed for three different kits: an early wearables kit (on late 19th-century electric jewellery by Gustave Trouvé), an early video games kit (on William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two), and an early wire recorder kit. During 2014-15, the team expanded development of the early wearables kit, producing replicas of Trouvé’s electric jewellery, modelling and manufacturing cases for the kit, gathering contextual materials, and articulating the kit’s scholarly apparatus. In 2015-16, the team completed and exhibited its early magnetic recording kit and also began developing its early optophonics kit. By 2018, the MLab will circulate a number of these open-source kits, which will be archived, peer-reviewed, and distributed online and by post. Several publications, including “Prototyping the Past” (Visible Language), “Kits for Cultural History, or Fluxkits for Scholarly Communication” (Hyperrhiz),  and “Why Fabricate?” (SRC), have already emerged from the project.

To stay in the loop with the Kits for Cultural History, follow the stream of posts below. We do our best to regularly publish logs of our work, and we are currently presenting this research at universities and conferences. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with suggestions.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the projects tag. Images in this post care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and Jentery Sayers. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

Here’s a video recording of the talk (thank you, ETUG!), and below the video are my notes, which are much more condensed and easier to scan than the video. (Confession: I revised them just a touch for the purposes of this post.)

Making: A Response to Big Data: The resurgence of maker cultures (or attention to maker cultures) may be productively understood in relation to all the current buzz about big data, which is anchored in abstraction: the abstraction of reading into usage statistics, of literature into graphical expressions, of social relations into network visualizations, of everyday activity into quantified selves, of people’s bodies by computer vision. Put differently, big data compresses the voluminous and multiple into the communicable and comprehensible. Meanwhile, maker cultures tend to build situated and small. Instead of addressing grand challenges and big questions, they often underscore how the particulars of context influence technological development, interaction, and epistemologies. Additionally, they usually focus on some physical mess at hand, in contrast to big data’s frequent attention to screens. By extension, while big data is usually invested in processing power and data visualization, maker cultures invest in obsolescence, waste, demanufacturing, and reuse—in the discards and leftovers of people’s computing projects.

If we want to further understand such distinctions or differences between big data and maker cultures, then the following concepts might prove useful: scale (e.g., micro, macro, distant, and close), productivity (e.g., play, automation, and “not reading”), materiality (e.g., software, platforms, and bodies), modality (e.g., hands-on, vision, and scanning), and rhetoric (e.g., digging, revealing, and hacking). For example, what are the politics of scale? Of thinking big or small? How are data and making intertwined with assumptions about efficiency? About what’s being generated during a time of austerity? What is the stuff of computational methods, and to what extent is it visible to audiences? What modes of knowledge production are privileged or even fetishized when we use certain technologies? And how are these modes communicated to broader publics? Such gestures prompt us to unpack how the technologies we make, use, and hack are culturally embedded. And they are the kinds of questions we routinely ask in the Maker Lab. For now, though, I want to focus on the perceptions of both big data and maker cultures in post-secondary education. My primary question is why making now, in a big data moment.

Graph care of Maker Media and Intel

Making Is a Hobby: If we locate big data and making in post-secondary education, then we will likely see another curious tension: big data is rendered scientific or rigorous while do-it-yourself making is relegated to an elective or hobby. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent market study by Maker Media and Intel (see graph above) suggests that “makers” are far more likely to identify as hobbyists or tinkerers than educators or academics. To be sure, there are numerous social and cultural factors that help explain this tendency, and we might want to put some pressure on who, exactly, Maker Media and Intel surveyed. But one possible explanation for making-as-hobby is how it’s branded—how maker cultures are communicated, represented, and sold to audiences during, say, a moment when big data research is growing in popularity.  

Make Is a Brand: When people hear the word “make,” they often think of Make, the brand. More precisely, Maker Media has the following brands: MAKE magazine, Maker Faire, Maker Shed, and makezine.com. While these brands do significant work to build and foster maker cultures around the world, they are not free from criticism, including criticism from academics and educators. For instance, they generally frame making as an affluent leisure practice (see Hertz), or they appeal to hobbyists who actually have the time and materials to make stuff (e.g., on the weekends or after school). Additionally, they rarely address directly how different forms of making are gendered (see Powell). Here, consider the ways in which building robots and weaving wearables are culturally embedded and normed. What’s more, it is difficult to parse Make as a brand from the economic or possessive individualism it enables (see Sadowski and Manson). In many Make materials, there’s not a small degree of bootstrap narrative or Macgyver-style DIY. These materials are conducive to a sort of romantic withdrawal from material conditions, and they can be easily rendered instrumentalist (see Morozov). Finally, the Make brand is not inclined to deeply historicize making through a longer legacy of—for example—weaving, fibreculture, and embodied labor (see Gajjala). As such, educators and researchers might draw from the enthusiasm and curiosity that pervades Make while asking how to better integrate making into collaborative, collective, cultural, and self-reflexive work. In the context of post-secondary education, we might ask how to blend critical and immersive practices when making things, and to what effects on our relations to, for instance, big data.

Spitboy and UoA flyer care of this visual history

Make Is Not a Brand: In more recent histories of DIY (and to be sure, many not-so-recent ones, too), we can find examples of such a blend, perhaps peripheral (or even antagonistic) to the Make brand. These histories have deeply influenced the work we’re doing in the Maker Lab, and they are not really about branding or marketing creative activity. Instead, they are about collective organization through shared acts of composition, hacking, performance, and reflection. For instance, in handmade electronic music, there’s an investment in approaching technology as a personal or cultural history (see Rodgers) as well as something that can be hacked or repurposed (see Collins). Making electronic music by hand frequently advocates working backwards (or reverse engineering), documenting what works and what doesn’t, and bending electronics toward new expressions. In materials, you also find many self-aware (and often humorous) tutorials, which suggest that technical education need not be bland or decontextualized in its didacticism. It can self-reflexively represent the culture from which it emerges, avoiding both technological instrumentalism and determinism in the process.

Additionally, in DIY publishing and zine-making cultures, the “yourself” in DIY is largely collectivist in character (see QZAP, Cometbus, and the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library). Many zines anchored in, say, punk or riot grrrl scenes spend significant time attending to the everyday of those scenes—to the cultural practices or otherwise overlooked people involved in making scenes happen. There’s a heightened sense of audience, and the writing is usually autobiographical or immersive in style, with an investment in self-awareness, affect, creativity, and humor. Like the Spitboy and UoA flyer above, these zines are typically arranged or designed by hand; composed through a combination of images, type, cursive, and manuscript; xeroxed; traded for other zines; and (when sold) kept cheap and affordable. You will also find them circulating in many not-for-profit music venues (see 924 Gilman St.), where space is recognized as something that’s value-laden and thus constructed (not given or abstract). Some of these venues are formalized (see the Vera Project), while others begin and congeal in people’s homes (e.g., Dick St. in Greensboro, NC), with flexible or pop-up architecture that affords the same space multiple functions.

Comparable to the DIY publishing of zines, not-for-profit venues and house shows emphasize experimentation and personal experience over expertise. The point is to get work in circulation and build a presence around a certain idea, belief, style, or emerging genre. There’s also a rather ambivalent relationship with technology, which—on the one hand—supports the expression and transmission of DIY aesthetics while—on the other hand—is not the end goal, fetish, or focus of such expression and transmission. The key, then, is framing a technology as something that’s central to making art and culture, rather than subordinating it tool-like to a means of mechanical or digital reproduction (see Rancière). More recently, we see similar impulses in DIY-inflected projects such as Forest Ambassador, Free Geek Vancouver, and Open3DP. Each of these projects appears deeply aware of how technologies are culturally embedded, and each also has a distinct impulse toward blending immersion with critical and creative endeavors. If there’s even a semblance of branding, then it’s subordinated to the project’s mission, its interests or ethos, and the needs or expectations of its audience(s).

Image care of Jon O. Johnson and Shaun Macpherson

The Relevance of Making in a Big Data Moment: Inspired by these recent histories and projects, and based on my own experiences with the Maker Lab, our “Hello World” workshops (supported by the DHSI), our Kits for Cultural History project, and teaching Digital Humanities courses at UVic, I have found that prompting people to make things in post-secondary education contexts—and especially in the humanities, which inform my perspectives here—has the following implications:

Learning about and through the platforms we frequently relegate to consumer technologies. If instructors and learners treat technologies as made or constructed things, then they are less likely to reduce them to delivery mechanisms or opaque objects. One byproduct of this emphasis is an attention to the roles that technologies play in scholarly practice and communication. Another is the opportunity to treat technologies historically, as part of post-secondary education’s cultural history. What technologies have been made for education, and why? By whom? Where did they go, and why were they adopted?

Blending tendencies toward abstraction with embodied knowledge. Encouraging people to learn by proxy, through manual trial and error, with hardware and electronics, or in situ for a particular project underscores why place and bodies matter in a big data moment, which is often represented by code, symbolic logic, data visualization, usage statistics, software, and screen-based interfaces. It can also get people thinking about how bodies or embodied activities are expressed as data (e.g., what’s lost in the translation? how is the data used? how does the multiple or heterogeneous function at scale?).

Combining learning through lectures with learning in collaborative workshops. It’s difficult to facilitate making in post-secondary education through lectures alone. Collaborative workshops (e.g., building a circuit, programming a microcontroller, or constructing a 3D model) also give people opportunities to openly bring their “hobbies” into learning spaces such as classrooms and talk about why their hobbies are relevant. During Digital Humanities 250 (“Things to Think With”) last semester, students and I often discussed the relationships between hobbyist and academic learning, and how learning gets categorized as such.

Routinely asking where and under what assumptions technologies function. Instead of speaking about “Technology” with a capital “T,” maker cultures tend to ask where stuff comes from, how it’s advertised, to whom, by whom, and where it goes. On our campuses, such impulses can spark some necessary conversations about labor, manufacturing, social justice, and planned obsolescence, especially during a moment when people spend a lot of time staring at graphs, screens, and whiz-bang applications.

Integrating immersion and experimentation into the humanities. With a focus on what changes over time, trial-and-error experimentation can do a lot for humanities research. In many of my courses at UVic, as well as in the Maker Lab, we keep research logs, which allow people to document and ultimately reflect upon what worked and what did not. This attention to iterative development can also help people translate—for others—how they made and unmade things, how certain platforms or mechanisms function, and how this idea became that one. It’s also useful for reverse engineering popular media and technologies (including graphical expressions) in order to better understand how they make arguments.

To be sure, we have much to learn from big data research, which is still relatively new to the humanities. But balancing it with other approaches to technologies—including the practices of many DIY maker cultures—can render it even more persuasive and robust. Doing so can also highlight how the abstract and the situated, the macro and micro, the big and small operate recursively (rather than dichotomously or in opposition). Of course, as with any act of making something, there’s no escaping alienation or abstraction. But escape need not be the point. The point of making things in post-secondary education is (among others) to become more aware of how both processes and products are culturally embedded, how they change over time, and how—in a big data moment—they become abstracted from everyday life in the first place. Beyond Make the brand, we have many DIY histories, cultures, and collectives that can inform our next steps.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace category, with the news, physcomp, and fabrication tags. Primary image for this post care of Jentery Sayers and Shaun Macpherson. 

Students across the University of Victoria are invited to submit projects (emerging from their courses of study) that demonstrate innovation in how digital research, learning, and scholarly communication are designed, practiced, expressed, and imagined in the context of the Humanities. Project types and formats of all sorts, from all areas and degrees of expertise, are welcome, from the technical to the theoretical to the creative. Successful projects will combine critical approaches to a given problem with technological or computational methods, broadly understood.

Award

Per academic year, up to three awards consisting of an award certificate and a Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) registration will be issued (valued at up to $3750 annually). Past or future participation in the DHSI in no way influences the status of an application or the decisions of the review committee.

Eligibility

Undergraduate or graduate students who have taken a course anchored in digital research and scholarly communication with a Humanities focus (e.g., DHUM 150, 250, 350, or 450; English 507, 508, or 509; TS 200, 300, or 400; as well as a number of variable content courses across the institution) are eligible for this award. Individuals or teams (no more than three students), from any department, program, or minor at the University of Victoria, may apply. Projects corresponding with any stage of development (from modelling, prototyping, data-gathering, and designing to encoding, programming, implementation, and end-use) are eligible, as long as they meet the learning outcomes or expectations of the course in which they were made.

Format

Projects may assume a variety of formats and media types, including (but not limited to): video, audio, text, image, website, and physical object, or MOV, MPEG, JPG, PNG, TIFF, DOC(X), RTF, HTML, MP3, WAV, CSS, MD, XML, JSON, and OBJ. In the rare case that the review committee is unable to open or access a given format, they will contact the applicants, requesting either an alternative format or instructions for how to access the format in question. Of course, projects (such as websites) may blend media types and formats.

Criteria

Successful projects will, at a minimum, meet the following criteria:
* Completed within the course of study for an undergraduate or graduate class in any department at the University of Victoria;
* Meets the course’s stated learning outcomes or expectations (determined by the course’s instructor(s));
* Demonstrates an innovative use of digital technologies for research, teaching, learning, or communication; and
* Blends a critical approach to an identified problem or question with technological or computational methods.

Review Committee

The review committee for this award includes a representative each from the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the Maker Lab in the Humanities, UVic Libraries, and the Technology and Society Interdisciplinary Minor Program.

Submission Procedure

All applications should be submitted via email to UVicDHAward@gmail.com and include the following:
* Names, departments, and email addresses for all applicants (no more than three students per application);
* Title of the project;
* A URL for the project or, if under 10 MB, the project in the form of an attachment;
* An abstract for the project (no more than 250 words);
* In the CC field, the email address of the faculty member who taught the course in which the project was made;
* The syllabus and/or website for the course in which the project was made; and
* This sentence: “This project met the learning expectations/outcomes for [Course Title, Number, and Semester], taught by [Instructor’s Name].”

In the case that a physical object is submitted, applicants should email UVicDHAward@gmail.com to make special arrangements for delivery. The review committee in no way assumes that digital research, learning, and scholarly communication can be expressed solely via a screen. Please note: 1) faculty members should NOT submit letters of support for any application, 2) projects do not need to be revised beyond their original state of submission (to the faculty member teaching the originating course at hand), and 3) applications can be submitted at any point during the academic year, especially if students plan to graduate prior to the application deadline.

Deadline (2013-14 Academic Year)

All projects for the 2013-14 academic year must be received, via email to UVicDHAward@gmail.com, by 11:59pm, 1 September 2014.

Questions?

Please email UVicDHAward@gmail.com with any questions or concerns you have, especially in the case where this call is not clear about any criteria or procedures.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson, recipients of the 2012-13 Praxis Innovation Award.

Book Nerds in a Lab: Making Things in the Humanities
Presented by the Department of English at the University of Victoria
Thursday, March 6th (3:30pm – 5:00pm), Hickman (HHB) 116

What does it mean to make things in the humanities? To conduct applied humanities research? To weld artistic practice with the study of literature and history? Join us to chat with over 15 student and faculty researchers about the collaborative projects they are building in UVic’s Maker Lab. This event will begin with a brief presentation by Stephen Ross (Director, Modernist Versions Project) and Jentery Sayers (Director, Maker Lab in the Humanities) on the role of making things in the humanities. We will then transition into two rounds of four concurrent demonstrations:

“Hello World! Building an LED Circuit” (with Nina Belojevic and Katie McQueston): Work with researchers from the Kits for Cultural History project to not only build a simple LED circuit but also learn more about the legacies of “wearable technologies.” During this demonstration, we’ll provide participants with the materials they need to make a simple circuit and explore wearables.

“Warping Historical Maps” (with Adèle Barclay, Alex Christie, and Katie Tanigawa): With researchers from the MVP and INKE teams, learn more about how historical maps can be digitally manipulated to express literary representations of early 20th-century cities (including Dublin and Paris). Also learn more about how 3D modelling software is being integrated into humanities research.

“Making Analog Audio” (with Laura Dosky, Jon Johnson, and Zaqir Virani): Ever wonder how sound was recorded before the emergence of digital technologies? With members of the Kits for Cultural History team, see how early magnetic recording and sound transduction worked by constructing a low-tech recording device using everyday materials.

“Remaking Ulysses with Twitter” (with Stefan Krecsy and Jentery Sayers): For scholars of literature and language, Twitter is increasingly becoming a research tool. During this demonstration, learn more about the MVP’s “Year of Ulysses” project, its use of Twitter to facilitate public discussions of the novel, and several ways to gather and express Twitter data.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture, YearOfUly, and ZAxis categories, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of the University of Victoria.

Edmond Y. Chang is an Assistant Professor of English at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His areas of interest include technoculture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, video games, popular culture, and contemporary American literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and his dissertation is entitled “Technoqueer: Re/con/figuring Posthuman Narratives.” He has extensive teaching experience at the university level and won the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award in 2011 and the UW Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009.

“Queer Games, Straight Design” | Monday, March 10th, 1:30pm, David Turpin Building A104

Is it possible to create a queer video game? What constitutes a queer video game? And are video games already queer? This presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games beyond queerness as window dressing, as simply LGBT-skinned plot, character, or subtext. In other words, video games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. This presentation explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness, and more importantly, imagines the queer possibilities in queergaming—the happy accidents, glitches, workarounds, even failures that open up alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames. In other words, how might we imagine ways of playing against the grain and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well?

“Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality” | Monday, March 10th, 3:30pm, Maker Lab in the Humanities

Video games are not perfect magic circles of play, they are not completely separate from the “real world,” and for many game scholars, it is the intersection of game, developers, players, and the dominant culture that demands attention. In this workshop, we will take up “close playing” to look at and unpack race, gender, and sexuality in games. Close playing, akin to close reading, requires critical attention to game narrative, game mechanics, game design, and play as both an embodied and social experience. Close playing also requires a certain distance from the game and from play, a conscious disruption of the interactive and immersive fantasy. Close play reveals that the magic circle is always, already blurred or broken.

Registration is required for this workshop, which is limited to ten participants. To register, simply send an email to maker@uvic.ca.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the HelloWorld category, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of Jon Johnson.

A poster for the event is below, and the talk—“Bearing Digital Witness: The Humanities and the American Prison Complex”—is open to the public. Please spread the word (poster included) to anyone who might be interested.

See you on Tuesday the 25th at 11:30am in ECS 108, everyone! We are thrilled about this event and want to thank Doran Larson for taking the time to visit us.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the BuildingPH project, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson.

A key element of our project is providing audiences with the necessary historical, cultural, and military origins of the Tennis for Two game, which dates back to 1958. I have been grappling with the challenge of how—through a process of designing a kit and reconstructing a videogame—we can (if at all) better understand and communicate the working assumptions and procedures that informed the game’s composition. For example, in the case of Tennis for Two, it is important to attend to the socioeconomic politics of war in the 1940s and ’50s, the development of radar systems and surveillance in the U.S., and the vexed relations between university laboratories, computation, and nuclear nonproliferation at the time.

At the moment, my primary question is how—when producing cultural criticism about old technologies—some hands-on engagement with historical materials fosters a distinct and recognizable form of knowledge. Returning for a second to what both Nina and Shaun suggest, how do we better understand the affordances or scholarly benefits of exploratory, multimodal approaches? And, without being reactionary, how does a “materials first” mode of learning-through-doing inform a long tradition of media theory and technology studies?

In grappling with these questions, I’m studying work by Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Matt Ratto, and Friedrich Kittler (among others). If we want the Tennis for Two kit to facilitate experimental approaches to history and material culture, then it is worth considering how exactly tacit engagements with technologies prompts cultural critique. It is also worth asking what exactly something like “critical making” entails. In what follows, I catalogue and respond to a few ideas about making and building in the humanities in order to better situate them in the context of our Kits for Cultural History project.

Defining Critical Making

In “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Matt Ratto suggests that critical making stems from a “desire to theoretically and pragmatically connect two modes of engagement with the world that are often held separate—critical thinking, typically understood as conceptually and linguistically based, and physical ‘making,’ goal-based material work” (Ratto 253). Here, Ratto’s definition satisfies our desire to blend the processes of critical engagement with the process of making. And later in the article, he elaborates on critical making:

A critical making project involves three stages, analytically though not functionally separable. The project may start from any of these. One stage involves the review of relevant literature and compilation of useful concepts and theories. This is mined for specific ideas that can be metaphorically “mapped” to material prototypes, and explored through fabrication. In another stage, groups of scholars, students, and/or stakeholders jointly design and build technical prototypes. Rather than being purposive or fully functional devices, prototype development is used to extend knowledge and skills in relevant technical areas as well as to provide the means for conceptual exploration. A third stage involves an iterative process of reconfiguration and conversation, and reflection begins. This process involves wrestling with the technical prototypes, exploring the various configurations and alternative possibilities, and using them to express, critique, and extend relevant concepts, theories, and models. (Ratto 253)

This elaboration satisfies most of the requirements we have in place for the kits. To be sure, all of us involved in the project have undertaken a process of reviewing relevant literature, useful concepts, and applicable theories. What’s more, our work on the kits constitutes conceptual exploration, knowledge expansion, and critical reflection, even if—at times–many of our ideas actually emerge from the process of making (rather than being mapped or projected onto the materials at hand).

To Ratto’s compelling work, I wonder if we could add the question of how the Kits for Cultural History (in particular) and making-based projects (in general) could better speak to audiences outside of the academy, or to people who are simply not interested in academic research. This suggestion is not to imply that our kits cannot include theory or deep historicism. Instead, it is to gesture toward the possibility that the kits could be meaningful for audiences who have no knowledge of (or investment in) the theoretical work privileged by many academics. By extension, could this desire to engage audiences beyond our campuses help us resist the binaries of reading/making, thinking/doing, and mind/body?

Chasing Spectres

Elsewhere, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler argues that “media always already provide the appearances of specters” (Kittler 12), and that any media will contain “unavoidable traces” (8) of makers or authors. In the case of the Kits for Cultural History, if we are reconstructing technological experiments through exploratory means, then we are also chasing spectres. As Kittler suggests, “media always already provide the appearances of specters” (12)—say, the trace of the subject’s voice projected through a gramophone, or the photograph of a long deceased relative, or the faint hint of otherwise invisible labour. In the case of our kits, we are trying to take Kittler’s observation a step further by attending (as best we can) to how spectres are generated through mechanisms, procedures, and transduction in the history of electronics. How to achieve this attention through an embodied critical practice that augments our reading and writing—or how to chase the spectral through making—remains a significant challenge for our ongoing work.

Comparing Building with Writing

As we unpack these ideas through the kits project, it will be interesting to see how our discussions and conceptions of making develop and change. As Ramsay and Rockwell claim in “Developing Things: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” if “the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship” (83). Ramsay and Rockwell suggest that language or writing is not in and of itself critical or scholarly. That said, can we think of building, making, or tinkering in similar terms? When reanimating old tech or reconstructing technological experiments, might there be a kind of “intervention” that could be recognized as scholarly? An intervention that wouldn’t necessarily demand justification or explanation through writing?

In the Lab, Shaun, Katie and I have been getting our hands dirty with some old technologies in order to prototype Tennis for Two, a process whereby I have gained a better sense of how electronic displays and oscillation actually work (some spectres included). While Shaun’s prior experiences in circuit-bending, tinkering, and electrical work have proven useful, soon enough we will be headed into territory largely unfamiliar to us. As we continue to engage and tackle these questions and materials, it will be interesting to discuss how the processes of making facilitate historical research and cultural criticism. After all, building and making are integral to the kits project. But how exactly learning happens through building and doing, or just what scholarly interventions might occur through making, is a question that still demands further consideration and development.

Post by Jon Johnson, attached to the KitsForCulture category, with the physcomp and fabrication tag. Image for this post care of Jon Johnson.