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A workshop with Professor Shannon Lee Dawdy: “Re-purposing the Past for the Future with Digital Technologies”

Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 10:00 am

The past has a tenuous, often contentious, relationship with the future. We fragment and sequester the past, drawing memory from only those things we have at hand and rupturing continuities with the present by forgetting. Futures discounting exacerbates this myopic condition by playing on uncertainties to diminish the wisdom of looking too far ahead. How can digital technologies help bridge the past with the future? Examples from digital storytelling, augmented and virtual reality, and spatialized archives enable us to explore the potential for hetereotemporality, nonlinear histories, and the power of ruins and artifacts to experience other times and places. Workshop participants are invited to share their own efforts with digital technologies for repurposing the past for the future.

Shannon Lee Dawdy is a Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, University of Chicago. Her fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods with a regional focus on the coastal communities of the U.S., Caribbean, and Mexico. The central thread running through her work concerns how landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships, whether this means an examination of the historical ecologies of capitalism, or the emotional trajectories of those who lost their intimate object worlds to Hurricane Katrina. She also has a strong interest in questions of temporality (past, present, future). She has written a couple of quite different books on New Orleans. Her current research (which will take the form of both a film and a book) focuses on rapidly changing death practices in the U.S., particularly around disposition and transformation of the body. She is interested in what these emerging practice say about popular ontologies.

This workshop is sponsored by the Mellon Intersections Group “Imagineering and the Technosphere” and is free and open to the public.

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Speculative Archaeology: The Politics of Disaster Debris

Shannon Lee Dawdy, University of Chicago

Tuesday, November 12, 2019, 4:00 pm, Smathers Library 100

The debris pile from 134,000 New Orleans buildings damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is visible from space. Although there was some effort to recycle materials through a little-known global market in demolition debris, most of the rubble amassed in place. In the future, archaeologists might reasonably consider the hurricane landfill a monumental structure. In the 1970s, Bill Rathje boldly suggested that an archaeological approach to contemporary life can reveal things about ourselves that we didn’t know. Modern landfills were his field sites. This talk thinks through Rathje’s garbology and the exceptionalism of disaster sites. Contestations reveal how important the management of debris and its ideological effects are to local and national governments. Trash is political. And politics is an assemblage of the human and the non-human, the intentional and the accidental.​

This lecture is sponsored by the Mellon Intersections Group “Imagineering and the Technosphere” and is free and open to the public.

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The Infrastructure of Tolerance with Simon Goldhill

Friday, October 18, 4pm, Smathers Library 100

This lecture examines how we might understand the relationship between urban infrastructures, and the logics of exclusion and inclusion around which the category of citizenship is understood and cultural identities are formed. It looks in particular at the role of city planners and some past urban planning projects that had the effect of brutalizing social life in urban areas. In studying these examples, we can see how the politics of fear play a major role in the shaping of urban atmosphere.

Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King’s College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. In 2009 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek. In 2016 he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS). Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster, who has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, USA and Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.

This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Imagineering and the Technosphere, the Center for Greek Studies and the Department of Classics.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact: humanities-center@ufl.edu and Prof. Eleni Bozia (bozia@ufl.edu).

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Workshop: Misreading The Literature of Late Antiquity: Palatine Anthology and the politics of criticism with Simon Goldhill

Friday, October 18, 10:40-11:40AM –Dauer 219  (Ruth McQuown Room)

The Palatine Anthology is a collection of Greek poems (epigrams) that were discovered in the early 17th century. The material included in the manuscripts are narratives originating from between 7th BCE to late antiquity.  The manuscripts are currently housed at the Library of the University of Heidelberg (click here to review the digital archive). This workshop is about why and how the Palatine Anthology is not read as an anthology but is instead cut up and redistributed — to the extent that the Teubner  (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana) does not even print book 8, and the standard work on it (Cameron) does not mention four of the fifteen books.

Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King’s College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. In 2009 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek. In 2016 he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS). Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster, who has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, USA and Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.

This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Imagineering and the Technosphere, the Center for Greek Studies and the Department of Classics.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact: humanities-center@ufl.edu and Prof. Eleni Bozia (bozia@ufl.edu).

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Aishat Aloba

Motion-based applications, such as Exertion games (games that combine physical activity and play), are becoming increasingly popular among children. Exertion games have been widely utilized by researchers to improve children’s motivation to participate in physical activity, since children are likely to spend more time engaged in sedentary activities [1]. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise activity [2]. A major challenge faced by researchers in the field of exergames is that children are not motivated to use these games after the initial novelty of the game wears off. The aim of my project is to improve children’s motivation to exercise using exertion games by improving their interactive experiences within the games. Prior work has found that that the precision of motion recognition systems used in exertion games is associated with increased immersion in the game [3]. Therefore, I plan to improve the effectiveness of motion recognition systems in recognizing children’s motions. Currently, my approach focuses on distinguishing children’s motions from adults’ motions in order to understand the motion qualities that are unique to children. The ultimate goal of my project is to improve children’s willingness to participate in exercise activities in order to satisfy the recommended number of hours that children should engage in physical activity.

References

  1. Jane Gould. 2013. Consumer Insights: Nickelodeon’s “Story of Me.” Retrieved August 30, 2017 from http://blog.viacom.com/2013/12/consumer-insightsnickelodeons-story-of-me/
  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “How Much Physical Activity do Children Need?,” 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/children/index.htm. [Accessed: 09-Sep-2017].
  3. Jasmir Nijhar, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, and Gemma Boguslawski. 2011. Does movement recognition precision affect the player experience in exertion games? In International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for interactive entertainment (INTETAIN ’11). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30214-5_9
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Workshop with Professor David Frye: “Archaeology, Walls, and Charting Premodern Technospheres.”

October 10, 12:00-1:00 pm, Pugh Hall 302

David Frye is Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University and author of Walls. A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick (Simon and Schuster, 2018). This recent book on walls has been reviewed by journals such as the National Geographic, the Washington Post, and the Rolling Stone and is scheduled soon to appear in Italian, Mandarin, Polish, and Lithuanian translations. Professor Frye has published in numerous journals (including Classical World, Classica et Mediaevalia, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Byzantion, Historia, Nottingham Medieval Studies, etc.) and has worked as archaeological excavator at Roman Vindolanda (Hadrian’s Wall) and Sibot-3 (Roman settlement in Dacia, now in Transylvania Romania).

In this workshop, Professor Frye discusses his ongoing archeological concerns with walls and their functions and how these help us map premodern technospheres.

This workshop is sponsored by the Mellon Intersections Group “Imagineering and the Technosphere” and is free and open to the public.

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UF Quest Game Preview in Pop-Up Culture

Plaza of the Americas, Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Come by our table during the Pop-Up Culture event for a preview of the UF Quest Game, which will be played for the first time during our Spring 2020 Imagineering the Technosphere course. Registration and sign-up sheets will be available on-site!

Pop-Up Culture is hosted by organizations from across the University of Florida to celebrate National Arts & Humanities Month. During this event, student organizations, clubs and individuals will give performances ranging from choreographed dances to acro-yoga and lead activities like painting and screenprinting. The goal of Pop-Up Culture is to increase awareness, appreciation and excitement for the arts and humanities at UF.

Darius Brown (left), Angelos Barmpoutis (center), Dominick Milocco (right)

Come and play our game! Every move counts!

Update

The event was a huge success and the UF Quest Game attracted several students who expressed interest in registering to our Spring 2020 course on “Imagineering the Technosphere”.

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Andrew Jenkins

The Technosphere working group’s “How have technologies shaped our lives, and how do we draw on them to meet 21st century challenges?” grand challenge question invites inquiries into the ways that technology channels human perception and forms practices.  My research interests run along parallel rails by seeking to read the texts of Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson through the lens of nineteenth-century science and visual culture.  My project focuses on astronomy and the profusion of telescopically-mediated stellar figures these authors borrow, alter, and invent.  As science challenged established discourses like religion for authority, the public was left to amalgamate new and disturbing information—magnitudes greater voids in the cosmos unveiled by stellar parallax, an invisible planet (Neptune) lurking at the edge of our own solar system discovered via the new method of statistical prediction, and monstrous shapes emerging from the nebulae like the one in Orion.  The cultural work of basic metaphors like orientation, centrality, spheres of influence, and concepts like ‘heaven’ came under pressure.  This group of authors, as a result, sought to work through and use these new ways of seeing and thinking about the cosmos in what can now be recognized as a type of prehistory to our own Hubble-inflected relationship to the unseen totality of the known universe.

Conference paper accepted at the 2019 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference in Irvine, CA, November 2019.  Conference website: https://litsciarts.org/slsa19/

Conference paper abstract:

“Starry Ether and Nebulous Transcendence: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Scientific Vision in Poems”

In responding to the ways in which speculative practices tangle with utopic, communitarian, and transcendental ideals, my proposed conference paper will address Ralph Waldo Emerson’s engagement with optics and astronomy in his first volume of poetry in 1847. The paper draws upon a dissertation chapter in which I contend Emerson goes beyond just casual allusion to and incorporation of concepts drawn from astronomy and optics and instead offers a causal theory that points to a material process of transcendental inspiration akin to spiritualism’s use of the ether as a basis for ‘contact’ with departed souls later in the century (cf. Moffet’s “Swept Over an Etheric Niagara” JLS 2015). I balance this abstracted theory against its practice, particularly a passage from his journals in which Emerson laments his inability to make direct contact with his “holy fraternity” of friends leading him to state “But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve: And the dearest friends are separated by irreconcilable intervals,” a sentiment that stipulates the necessity for a connecting medium. In proposing a mechanism for his utopic form of individual, momentary transcendence—by no means permanent with the fleeting instances of revolutionary inspiration zapped from mind to mind and spirit to spirit (cf. Mastroianni’s “Moods and the Secret Cause of Revolution in Emerson” chapter of Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature)—Emerson is attempting to co-opt popular excitement surrounding astronomy’s nineteenth-century discoveries by offering a genre- and natural history-inflected version of the inductive method and in the process reclaims literature’s constitutive function in public meaning-making.

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Anastasia Pantazopoulou

The Intersections Doctoral Student Mini-Grant has afforded me so far the opportunity to participate in the DH@Guelph Workshop, The Work that Stories Do in the World:  Digital Storytelling for Research, Education, and Change which was held in May 7th-10th, 2019 at the University of Guelph, in Ontario Canada.

The Workshop gave me a hands-on experience with the possibilities that digital storytelling offers in research, education, and especially in shaping individual and communal identities as a form of community engagement, a key point of my own research. During the workshop I was also trained in using the Final Cut Program to edit digital stories and work on my own digital story having spent a day writing my script, recording it, and taking footage.

You can find my digital story, which “narrates” the story of Helen of Troy (mostly as presented in Euripides’ tragedy, Helen) through a series of questions and statements that reflect on the impact of space and rumors/opinions/labels on one’s identity, in the following video: