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.

In 2013, Devon, Jentery, and Bill’s class experimented with different microcontrollers, and they collaboratively built a 3D printer. In 2014, Devon, Jentery, and Bill worked with students to emulate early videogames in original arcade cabinets, build another printer, and experiment with MaxMSP for interactive exhibits. In 2015, Nina, Shaun, Devon, and Jentery’s class built their own “metaphors in a box” using laser cut materials and microcontrollers. They also explored 3D modelling with SketchUp and photo-stitching with Agisoft Photoscan. (The 2015 syllabus is available on GitHub.) Finally, in 2016, Tiffany, Danielle, Jentery, and I (Kat) conducted workshops on Arduino, Agisoft Photoscan, 3D structured-light scanning, 123D Design, and 123D Make. Near the end of the week, students explored how they could use these tools to develop their own projects. (The 2016 syllabus is available on Github.)

DHSI student, Padmini Ray Murray, working on #box, a light-emitting heart corresponding with Twitter hashtags

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Physical Computing and Fabrication course at DHSI: Nina Belojevic, Tiffany Chan, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Shaun Macpherson, Danielle Morgan, Jentery Sayers, and Bill Turkel. The course was first taught by Devon and Bill in 2012. The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

A 3D printer built by students during DHSI 2013

Project Status

This project was completed in June 2016. The most recent version of our syllabus is available for download and reuse.

Post by Katherine Goertz, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image of Seamus and me scanning a spacecraft care of Danielle Morgan.

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.

Model and Manufacture of the Electro-Mobile Skull Stick Pin (image care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and Danielle Morgan)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Early Wearables Kit: Nina Belojevic, Tiffany Chan, Nicole Clouston, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Shaun Macpherson, Kaitlynn McQueston, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, Jentery Sayers, and William J. Turkel. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

The Kit Exhibited at Rutgers (image care of Danielle Morgan)

Project Status

This project was completed in October 2015 and exhibited at Rutgers University, with publications in Hyperrhiz and Visible Language and a CBC Radio interview that same year. The lab also created a public repository containing all files related to the kit. To learn more about the kit, see the stream of posts below. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a post or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Katherine Goertz, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and projects tags.

the ways that maintenance, care, and repair are negotiated—often collaboratively—in use and the meaning-making associated with use, rather than the meanings pre-specified by designers. In . . . case studies, we saw that the process of breakdown and repair was not something that device designers or event planners could effectively script ahead of time. Based on these observations, we argue that designers’ intentions to plan or divert such outcomes can often be rendered ineffective without accounting for the specific material, economic and cultural infrastructures that are at play in use. (Rosner and Ames 2014: 9)

In “Why Fabricate?” I was specifically interested in types of projects, such as historical prototyping projects, that may use care and repair as a paradigm for research. When juxtaposed with a make or break binary, a care and repair paradigm may imply that the creation or obsolescence of technologies matters less than their maintenance, that the novelty or datedness of media is less significant than how they are stewarded, or that the spectacle of digital technologies is flipped to examine their everydayness. How, indeed, is digital work quite routine? This emphasis on the everyday is rather common in media and technology studies, where narratives of creation and obsolescence are frequently associated with either lone inventor myths (as if technologies spring from genius minds) or avant-garde proclivities for ruptures, radical breaks, and the “new” (as opposed to iteration, incremental change, or redescription). For me, then, a care and repair paradigm prompts us to understand techniques such as digital fabrication and rapid prototyping in terms of remaking or reconstruction, and it may even involve some suspicion of innovating or breaking things. It also anchors creativity and critique in labor and infrastructure studies, without rendering “imagination” a bad word.

I appreciate Rosner and Ames’s description of negotiated endurance not only because it privileges situations over ideals but also for its emphasis on how the fine-grained dimensions of infrastructure and labor influence knowledge production. In this sense, it very much echoes existing work by Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledges), Susan Leigh Star (Standards and Their Stories), Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway), and McKenzie Wark (Molecular Red), as well as recent concerns about maker culture expressed by Debbie Chachra. For my purposes here, I also wonder if negotiated endurance enables ways to interpret two contemporary phenomena at once: “on-demand” economics premised on “curating” services and data, and the individualist or romantic innovation frequently informing most maker cultures. Given their widespread influence, both of these phenomena seem important to digital studies today.

For an example of the former (on-demand economics), we might refer to Uber or Airbnb, which owns no vehicles or real estate, respectively. Recently, at CUNY’s “Digging Deep” event, Allison Burtch observed that these companies manage to make nothing (2015: n. pag.). One consequence of this approach is that they displace the onus of care and repair onto their service providers, usually in the name of sharing or peer-to-peer networking. They also traffic almost entirely in what Manuel Castells calls the “space of flows,” which is distant from the “space of places” (see Castells 2010, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed.). That is, using networking applications, companies may now invest in real-time exchange (e.g., between driver and passenger) as an abstraction without having to invest in labor, lived time, infrastructure, or situated experience “on the ground.” As the Journalist’s Resource at Harvard suggests, the cultural consequences of these economic models for on-demand sharing are not yet clear (2015: n. pag.); however, they do point us to examples where using technologies to curate services may not be synonymous with caring for infrastructure and social relations.

In the case of Uber, for example, the Center for Economic and Policy Research observes that, even if “Uber drivers on average earn a gross premium of $6.00 an hour over the pay of drivers of traditional cabs . . . the key issue here is the use of the gross premium rather than a direct earnings comparison. The difficulty . . . is that we don’t know the costs incurred by Uber drivers, who use their own car” (2015: n. pag.). By extension, both drivers and passengers remain responsible for any risks involved. Reading the fine print of Uber’s terms and conditions, Stacy Perman writes: “[I]n effect, Uber says it’s neither an owner nor an operator, just a piece of software that connects riders to cars. Have a run-in with a driver? Not our problem, says Uber” (2015: n. pag.). From the perspective of negotiated endurance, Uber’s software designers cannot script how and to what effects riders are connected to cars and drivers. They can only facilitate the connection. Moments of breakdown—be they social, technical, or a blend of the two—also exceed or complicate the space of flows, situated such as they are in the space of places (on the ground, in the car, in lived social reality).

While on-demand economics likely have more severe or pressing implications for how we study emerging social relations and forms of exchange, romantic notions of innovation common across maker cultures are also significant for their influence within popular cultures. A few examples come to mind here: nostalgia for pre-digital living (e.g., a withdrawal from contemporary society via manual or mechanical technologies from the 19th century); certain brands of do-it-yourself (DIY) production anchored in bootstrapping and possessive individualism; fetishizing glitches as ways to break or critique systems in a reactionary fashion; the reduction of manufacturing or repair to weekend hobbyism (as opposed to a full-time occupation); or the reanimation of lone inventor myths (prototypically able-bodied, masculine, white, and male) through publications such as Make magazine. Of course, we can learn a lot about new techniques from reading various Make publications (e.g., Hartman’s wearables book or Igoe’s talking objects book). However, these publications are not really intended to prompt considerations of care and repair, including histories of care and repair. After all, they are Make books, not maintenance manuals.

Negotiated endurance helps us unpack these present-day paradigms of romantic, individualist innovation by moving beyond a desire for origin stories, articulating technical work as a collaborative social effort, privileging the stewardship of infrastructure over its creation or obsolescence, and steeping technologies in narratives of constant development, care, and change. Again, a lot of this is quite everyday. Nevertheless, as critical gestures, a care and repair paradigm (following Rosner and Ames) might allow us to engage contemporary issues (such as sharing economies and romantic nostalgia for pre-digital living) from multiple positions, including the positions of labor and infrastructure, while also asking what sort of ethos we wish to foster through work on technology and culture.

That said, during the last year or so I have been considering how to think small about negotiated endurance, gradually shifting from projects to practices motivated by care and repair. These practices inform the graduate seminar (“Prototyping Texts”) I am currently teaching at UVic, but also a lot of collaborative research in the MLab and elsewhere, with an emphasis on learning and experimenting with technologies. While I am still determining how to best articulate these practices, six of them are listed and described below. As ways to think small about negotiated endurance, they might be considered exercises in the routines of technology and culture.

Attribution Study: Inspired by well-established projects, such as The Orlando Project and INKE, attribution studies are incredibly informative ways to foreground the negotiated endurance of collaboration and collaboratively produced materials. Who is acknowledged and supported for their work, how, and where? How is the project’s infrastructure entangled with the people who contributed to it? While The Orlando Project and INKE are models for ethos and clarity here, matters of attribution are often mysterious when it comes to digital projects in and beyond the academy. Drawing people’s attention to these matters encourages them to account for who maintains the technologies and data that people regularly use. Here, work by scholars such as Lisa Rhody, including her recent talk at MLA 2016, have addressed these care and repair issues in detail.

Sourcing Exercise: While conducting media history research, sourcing exercises ask where component parts of a given technology come from, where they are manufactured, by whom, and in what conditions. Nina Belojevic’s article on circuit-bending demonstrates how such sourcing is in fact quite difficult to do, particularly when determining the origin of, say, chip manufacturing for electronics. Even when data sheets are available, replacement parts for many technologies are hard to acquire, and they are rarely, if ever, distributed by big-box stores such as Best Buy. As Belojevic suggests, one effect of sourcing exercises is an inquiry into labor and material conditions. Another is nudging digital studies beyond software and source code. And yet another is underscoring how the ontologies of devices are opaque at best. This opacity is only increased when we move from treating technologies as component parts to examining them as compositions of rare earth elements such as neodymium and yttrium.

Reverse-Engineering and Reassembly: Whereas reverse engineering is quite common in the sciences, it is less familiar to the humanities, with Anne Balsamo, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Kari Kraus, and William J. Turkel conducting some of the most compelling research on the topic, in addition to using reverse-engineering as a research technique. In terms of negotiated endurance, reverse-engineering necessarily involves considering how technologies break down, or can be broken down and demanufactured. More important, it highlights the spaces between parts. These spaces gesture toward the actions or behaviors involved in assembly and maintenance—how, if you will, things stay together. By using reverse-engineering as a research technique, then, we can demystify the infrastructural components we often inherit but also break them down to imagine what else they may have been and how they were, and continue to be, repaired. True, this may be considered a rather irreverent approach to history (e.g., the object is neither whole nor sacred). But reverse-engineering historical materials need not imply a lack of regard for them. That is, it can be done deliberately, with care and stewardship in mind.

Shift in Modality: When working with technologies, especially digital technologies, what needs to be repaired is rarely obvious or easy to perceive. As goes the vernacular, breakdown surprises (or frustrates) us. Shifting the modalities through which we interpret technologies may facilitate insight into these surprises. Here, Shintaro Miyazaki’s “Sounds from a Coil” is informative. Instead of treating phones as objects at which we stare, or as instruments for conversation, it sonifies their electromagnetic emissions, which might otherwise be ignored. What’s so compelling about Miyazaki’s experiment is not that he reveals something that’s hidden. It’s that he demonstrates how technologies are entangled with the senses, and thus how meaning-making with technologies is intertwined with how they are perceived.

Change Histories: Version control systems such as Git are sparking new research about how repositories, as well as books, articles, and code, are iteratively developed. In short, with a given repository, we can access the final product together with its change history. Of course, change histories do not happen automatically. Ideally, they involve considerations of metadata, including time-stamps, attributions, and descriptions of change (or “commits”); and if they are done for collaborative projects, then they can document and share how those projects were written, edited, formatted, and, indeed, maintained before and after public release. A survey of digital humanities projects using GitHub offers a foundation for studying this maintenance and speaking to its oft-ignored role in the field.

The Five-Year Plan: In both the MLab and the classroom, I have benefited immensely from articulating (with students and other researchers) five-year-plans for projects, including writing projects. In five years, how will people access these materials? In what formats? Via what mechanisms? With more time and support, what would we change or revise? How could it be improved? How could it be more accessible? What aspects could be more persuasive? What should we document for future reference, or for future audiences? These sorts of questions are familiar territory in writing and information studies, especially approaches based in the composition of portfolios. That said, I have found them helpful for thinking beyond a given semester, academic year, funding cycle, or research outcome. While it is certainly important to act upon responses to these questions, the first step is asking them, and humanities students (in particular) may not always be encouraged to ask them.

As I mentioned earlier, I am still struggling with how to best articulate these practices, but I hope those of you at INKE 2016 find them informative as ways to think small about negotiated endurance, or to move from make or break binary to a care and repair paradigm. And as we proceed with work at the intersection of technology and culture, a related issue is—echoing a question recently posed by Alan Liu during the “Care and Repair” panel at the 2016 MLA convention—how much care and repair work we can maintain, ethically or humanely, over time. To engage this issue, digital studies might turn to the long, long history of care and repair paradigms in cultural criticism, including Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading” (see Touching Feeling (2002)), to approach the maintenance of digital projects from social and ethical positions.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured images care of a Sears catalog.

Iteration 1: Gears and motors

The first design emerged from discussions between Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, and me. At this point, we had little more than a handful of images of Trouvé’s “bijoux électriques.” In fact, our focus at the time was on creating a prototype of a Kit that recreated Trouvé’s illuminated jewels. (Nina and I had previously presented a version of the Kit with a prototype of an illuminated hairpin at the Western Humanities Alliance 2013 meeting at the University of California at San Diego, and she and Jentery presented another version of it at HASTAC 2014 in Lima, Peru.)

We originally conceived of a Kit with several jewelry pieces, including the illuminated hairpin and skull stick-pin. Katie first approached the stick-pin mechanism in the context of Trouvé’s watchmaking background. She used Cornell University’s Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) to design several gear system prototypes for the skull in sketch, digital model, and paper form. She then published her early sketches and ideas on the design. KMODDL’s library of geared systems was a useful resource for considering many different ways to think of how a geared system might work in the piece. It also provided detailed models that we adapted for prototyping purposes. (Below is an example of a paper prototype Katie constructed.)

Building on Katie’s work, Nicole Clouston adapted existing designs in the MLab for use in the skull and made several geared system models using CAD software. For the purposes of historical precision, she also hand-carved a version of the skull in basswood that we then digitized using a structured-light scanner. I adapted this scanned model to make room for the interior mechanisms and later fabricated versions of it using the MLab’s 3D printer, desktop miller, and laser cutter.

Iteration 2: Magnets

Once we printed a handful of gears and tried constructing the mechanism at scale, we realized our approach wasn’t going to work. Given the size of the skull (height: 9.2 cm, width: 1.5 cm, depth: 1.6 cm) on the original pin, the design required a tiny geared motor (comparable in size to the motors used to vibrate pagers or cell phones), which we do not believe was available during Trouvé’s time. We also did not have access to materials allowing us to make parts at that scale, and—perhaps most important—we also considered the assembly of the gear design too complex for the Kit‘s audiences to manage.

After some more research on Trouvé’s life and works, as well as conversations with William J. Turkel, Devon Elliott, and Edward Jones-Imhotep, we shifted our attention to telegraphy, which likely inspired Trouvé’s methods. For this design, I prototyped a simple telegraph sounder and—for comparative purposes—a solenoid switch as well.

The idea was that a small electromagnet could be placed inside the skull, and the jaw could act as the armature with a small hammer that, once attracted to the magnet, causes the action of the jaw to swing upwards towards the eye sockets. The added benefit of this mechanism is that the action of the magnet results in an audible “clack” sound, perfect for a teeth-gnashing motion and in many ways comparable to the sounds of a telegraph. I designed the solenoid circuit as well because it utilized the same amount of current as a telegraph sounder yet resulted in a slightly different behaviour. In the solenoid, a plunger is pulled into a magnetized shaft. With a plunger attached to the jaw, the solenoid allows for greater range of motion, meaning the jaw would be free to swing more, albeit at the cost of some of the clacking sound.

At this point, we used the MLab’s laser cutter and milling machine to rapidly prototype designs across a variety of materials. For the purposes of testing, I milled most of the parts in acrylic and installed a solenoid in the skull. Our first working prototype was complete!

Iteration 3: Interrupter Bell

While the solenoid skull worked, its mechanism was unreliable. (I credit this more to shoddy design on my part than to the feasibility of the actual mechanism.) In the interests of improving the prototype, the team felt compelled to return to the diagrams of Trouvé’s electro-mobile jewelry and consider new approaches. We also contacted the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose collection includes one of the only extant electro-mobile stick-pins. The Museum kindly supplied us with additional information that allowed us to add some nuance to our approach. Here is a sketch of a prototype we developed after our conversations with the Museum.

But later, Devon Elliott, Jentery and I pieced together a third idea: a self-oscillating electromagnet configuration resembling that found in an interrupter bell, which is similar to a telegraph sounder. (See the public domain GIF below for an example.)

Animation that demonstrates the mechanism in an electric bell (image in the public domain).

In this version, the armature is replaced by the jaw, with a lever attached to the hinge that also controls the movement of the eyes. As long as the lever attached to the jaw is touching the pin (which is connected to a lead on the battery), the circuit is live, causing the magnet to attract the lever, which in turn forces the jaw closed and the eyes down. This force also breaks the circuit, thereby causing the magnet to stop attracting the lever. Thus there is an oscillation between an on and off or a “jaw-up” and “jaw-down” state. My most recent work on the skull involved making a large model of this electromagnetic mechanism and designing the lever system using CAD software. Images of both are below.

Conclusion

While this aspect of the Kits project is not quite complete, I feel proud of how it has progressed, not only due to the various insights afforded by the designs, but also because of the methodological approaches we developed in order to speculate about the particulars of media history. The work has amounted to a close reading of technology: in the absence of first-hand knowledge, we have taken an historically informed approach to deciphering a mechanism and experimenting with versions of it. Perhaps even more important, the Kits’ collaborative research model has proven both invaluable and absolutely necessary to creating prototypes that balance technical particulars with historical, cultural, creative, and conjectural methods.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images, sketches, and videos for this post care of Shaun Macpherson, Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, Danielle Morgan, and the Maker Lab, except where otherwise noted.

You can access my slides online (they may need a minute to load). I also created a Zotero collection for the talk, and—thanks to Marta Borowska and the XDM team—below are two videos of the event. In the first video, Beth Coleman introduces the XDM project exhibition, and the second video includes snapshots of that exhibition, with students offering overviews of their work. There is also a brief video with excerpts from my talk. Thank you, Marta!

I want to thank Beth Coleman, Marcel O’Gorman, the Critical Media Lab, and XDM in the Waterloo Department of English for hosting me. “Feedback, Fedback, Feedforward” was an exciting event, with such compelling research across an array of social and cultural issues. It is so refreshing to see experimental media happening in both the arts and humanities, and I really enjoyed spending time at Waterloo with like-minded practitioners. I returned to the MLab inspired.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news tag. Video and image care of XDM at Waterloo.

As I outlined in a previous post, we used examples of jewellery cases (or jewel caskets, as they were often called) from the Victorian period to inspire our design of the kit’s container. Since the content of the kit is electro-mobile jewellery, a jewellery box makes sense not only thematically but also for arranging small parts, intentionally structuring access to elements of the kit, and keeping everything secure. We began this process by sketching cases inspired by various jewel caskets.

Sketches of a Victorian jewel casket care of Nina Belojevic and the MLab

Once we decided what components we wanted to comprise the case, we began working through several iterations of the design in Rhino 3D. While creating the 3D model, we wanted to represent the aesthetic intricacies of a Victorian jewel casket, which could be manufactured using some of the CNC (computer numerical control) equipment we have in our Digital Fabrication Lab. Since such equipment can be difficult to access (e.g., due to costs, training, and matters of infrastructure), we also wanted to make it possible to render a simpler version of the box using hand tools. Although a simpler version may lack the intricacies of Victorian caskets, many details can be added to the base model during post-production. These details include illustrations, engravings, and hardware.

In fact, when designing our base model, we did not include the details for a finished box. As such, that model does not include any decorative elements. Its surfaces are rather minimalist, not Victorian, in their design. To this model we add engravings and other features corresponding with Victorian caskets. These features complement the guides for the early wearable kit, but—with the simple base model—we also want to encourage audiences to create their own variants or editions.

As you can see, the Rhino model comprises the basic elements of the case. It shows the rounded and beveled edges that follow a Victorian aesthetic, and it has been rendered to the size we require for the final kit. Again, details can be added during production and post-production: prior to fabrication, the desired box material can be selected; different types of silk or satin lining can be inserted; surface illustrations can be painted on or engraved; and hinges, ribbons, or knobs can easily be added.

For our first iteration, we decided to laser-cut the jewellery case with an Epilog Helix 40-watt laser. We cut the external components of the case from 6mm baltic birch, and the internal components consist of 3mm baltic birch.

While this prototype is a simpler, flattened version of the 3D model created in Rhino, such simplicity allows us to quickly construct materials that we can user-test with multiple audiences. Since we designed the case to encourage audiences to move through the kit in certain ways, explore it, immediately find some components, and search for other components, this user testing is essential to our research. For instance, we have included two “hidden” compartments in the bottom section of the kit. They hold historical materials and require some digging to locate. One compartment contains schematics and technical articles about the electric jewels from the period; the other compartment contains texts on jewellery etiquette as well as images of some of the women who modelled electro-mobile jewellery. User testing tells us whether these hidden compartments do in fact afford certain arguments about early wearables, or if the kit design should be revised and improved.

After cutting all the pieces, we stain them to give them a richer colour. Although we used baltic birch, which can be cut very easily with a laser, we wanted to follow the look of the Victorian jewel caskets we found, which mostly consisted of darker materials (often of lavish woods, such as mahogany and rosewood). To achieve a similar look, we chose a walnut wood stain. We then assembled the boxes using wood glue, clamps, and hinges.

We are currently finalizing all of the kit’s various parts, such as the guide, the milled skull, jewellery pin components, and an electromagnetic mechanism for moving the skull’s eyes and jaw.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

While we plan to manufacture physical kits that can be mailed, we will—as I suggested earlier in this post—also make available digital files for all components of the kit, including the case. We are eager to see not only how our audiences will engage the complete kit, but also how they might modify, realize, and construct the kit using the digital models, descriptions, and historical media we provide. After all, our goal is not to tell people how early wearables were built. It is to prompt them to prototype versions of history through today’s materials and technologies.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan. Sketches and videos created by Nina Belojevic.

Image Quality: When visually expressing a process, the quality of the image is as significant as the image’s content. It is important to pay attention to the resolution, exposure, colour, focus, and framing of images. These qualities play a significant role in the persuasiveness of the photograph. For instance, a high-quality image may hold people’s attention, allowing them to appreciate both the appearance of the image and the evidence it is presenting. The intent and attention paid by the photographer translates to the photograph and therefore to audiences. Intent and attention also influence a person’s trust in images. At the same time, experiments with quality (e.g., low-fidelity images) are opportunities for researchers to comment on visual documentation as a form of mediation or construction. Post-production especially accentuates the construction of images. During post-production, many aspects of a photograph can be altered using an editing tool such as Photoshop. These tools modify colour, reframe through cropping, remove dust, and also brighten. “Curves” and “Selective Colour” are two Photoshop tools I use often. “Curves” allows you to brighten or darken an image by dragging anchor points up or down the “Curve” line. “Selective Colour” lets you modify images that have a colour cast (i.e., an often unwanted tint affecting the entire image).

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Surroundings: While documenting a process such as prototyping (something we do often in the MLab), try to be aware of everything in the frame. Audiences will consider any object in the image—even objects in the background—a part of the content. Also keep in mind that some contextual objects can be helpful. A prototype beside the tool used to create it, or all composite parts of a prototype laid beside the assembled finished object, can help audiences better understand process. If you are documenting an interactive piece, then a photograph of someone engaging it can provide necessary contextual information about its scale and function.

Image care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

Design: Image placement shapes the arguments you make with visual media. The design may complement the actual process, or it may represent an ideal process. Scale creates a hierarchy, with larger images typically viewed as more significant. Their position within the design also alters how they are interpreted. For example, a design that depicts a process in a linear grid, with each image the same size, may convey a procedure or chronology while also arguing that each step is equally important. In contrast, a design with the finished prototype in the center, and process images radiating from it, may suggest that the product is more important than the process.

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Text: What text is included, not to mention how, are other important considerations. Unless it is an HTML “img alt” attribute describing images for people who listen to the web with screen readers, an in-depth textual explanation of an image is often superfluous. Too much description may stop audiences from investing time trying to understand images for themselves. An alternative strategy is the use of captions (under individual images or under the entire design). Captions provide a concise amount of contextual information to audiences, aiding their understanding of what is being depicted while still encouraging their own investigation (see example below). Your choice of typeface or font also influences the audience’s interpretation. The most convincing font choices allow audiences to focus on the message being communicated rather than the typeface used. The choice of font can be driven by the content of the medium, such as the use of a Victorian-inspired typeface for Victorian era content. This approach can be employed persuasively, but it often distracts audiences from the actual content of the text. In my own experience, I have found that the most effective approach is to choose a simple font that is easily read at the scale the image is being shown. Also, keep in mind that serif fonts are generally easier to read in print, and sans serif can be a better choice for online reading.

The skull model for the Trouvé pin, carved by Nicole Clouston, resting on the servo-driven turntable. The HDI 120 3D scanner uses structured-light, blue-LED technology to take high resolution images of the object as the turntable spins. Image care of the MLab.

Attribution: When presenting images it is important to include attribution. Who made it? Who is pictured? How is it licensed (e.g., Creative Commons license)? You should also get signed releases or permissions for images, where applicable. One strategy for presenting attributions in a manner that works with, rather than against, the design is to incorporate them in a manner similar to the rest of the textual information. In the poster below, information was given in text blocks with headings. Following this design, attributions fall seamlessly under the heading, “Team.” When presenting images individually, a caption is often an effective way to give attribution. If the image is circulated via a website or repository, then the domain itself may have licensing and attribution information that applies to all content.

Image Care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and the MLab

Medium: Among many options, visual documentation can be posted on a website, published in a booklet, and printed on a poster. Each of these media has particular strengths and connotations. Of course, people often combine approaches. Consider how you want audiences to experience the images and ultimately how your images function in relation to the process, product, and project. Odds are you will want your choice of media to complement the process depicted as well as the context in which the materials are displayed. Below are more details for using the web, posters, and booklets as visual media.

Online: Presenting images online via a blog or open repository may give viewers insight into your process as you are working on it. This form of documentation and circulation allows people to follow what is happening over time. Images online may also be accessible to a large audience who may not see the work in person. Online circulation may also increase the odds of people serendipitously discovering your work. If you publish your images online, consider whether you want to publish high-resolution versions. The resolution of your images may correspond with not only how you want others to use them but also what you are saying about the current status and applications of your research. Depending on the project, you may also want to consider restricting online access to your images, or keeping (some of) them offline altogether.

Poster: In tactile form, a poster brings digital images off the screen, allowing them to be presented alongside exhibited work. Showing audiences how the piece came to be, together with information about the decision-making process, will shape how they encounter your research. The way the poster is displayed may also complement the work. Here, you might want to construct relationships between the poster, the scale of the piece, its shape, and how the various elements came together. For example, a poster for a modular piece could be composed of articulated print elements, mimicking the way that piece became a cohesive whole. Also, if you are making a poster for a specific space, then—where possible—visit that space prior to mounting or installing the poster. This way you can get a sense of the space’s layout, acoustics, lighting, and capacity, all of which may affect how people interpret the poster.

Booklet: For many audiences, a booklet presented with a piece may be the most intimate and accessible experience of images. This approach may be especially appropriate if you are hoping to include sections of text or research alongside the images. In contrast to reading a poster (which can be awkward), a booklet is an approachable format to read. Audiences may also spend more time with it, and it may be placed with the piece, making it something people will likely experience after the piece itself. Booklets are often printed in multiples. Presenting more than one booklet with the piece allows several audience members to experience the documentation at once. The booklets can also be take-away items, or they could be mailed out, allowing for broader dissemination. The number of booklets that should be printed will depend on how you plan on using them. In my experience, when presenting in an exhibition context it is ideal to print fifty booklets if they are being given away and ten if they are not. Having extra copies to archive or replace damaged booklets is also useful, but I would caution against over-printing. Having a large stack of copies may prompt the audience to treat the booklet as disposable or insignificant.

Image care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

By being attentive to decisions made along the way, visual media can be a very persuasive approach to expressing your research, giving audiences a rich understanding of the composition process and supporting the argument you are making.

Post by Nicole Clouston, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, exhibits, and versioning tags.

During the week, we also archived all of our Physical Computing and Fabrication course materials with GitHub, including an index file containing the course outline, schedule, and notes. (You can download all of the course materials as a ZIP file.) See you at next year’s Institute, where the team is teaching the course again, with a twist.

Image 1: Yvonne, Jay, Brandon, Kuba, Kathleen, Aaron, and Andrew exhibiting their projects on Friday
Image 2: Kuba and Jay working on their prototypes, with Andrew in the background
Image 3: Physical computing and fabrication projects on display during Friday’s exhibit
Image 4: Padmini working with Brandon on #box, a light-emitting heart corresponding with Twitter hashtags
Image 5: Ethan’s gloom box
Image 6: Aaron’s 3D poetry display, in conversation with Margaret and Andrew’s work on Gertrude Stein
Image 7: Kyle and Tracey talking about their “Tilt Me House” project, with Jay in the background
Image 8: Looking inside Danielle’s remaking of Edison’s Black Maria movie production studio
Image 9: Jay’s weather monitor in progress
Image 10: Nina working with—from foreground to background—Ethan, Danielle, and Kathleen
Image 11: Shaun walking the class through how to trigger behaviours in Arduino

Shaun photographing the class on Friday

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Featured images for this post care of Jentery Sayers.