Virtual Workshop. Preregister by December 7 to participate. 

Led by Anastasia Pantazopoulou, the “Imagineering Stories” workshop is centered around digital technologies which have transformed the way we conceptualize and tell stories creating a space where anyone can express themselves. More specifically, engaging with the goal of the Intersections group, the workshop aims at familiarizing the audience with digital storytelling, a digital technology that lends itself to be used as an educational, research, and social-interaction tool. The participants will be actively introduced to the possibilities that WeVideo, a video editing platform, affords to researchers and especially instructors, and will reflect on ways in which they can incorporate and utilize digital storytelling in their classes to facilitate critical discussions and creative thinking, especially at a time when online classes are our daily reality.

Anastasia Pantazopoulou is a PhD candidate in Classics at the University of Florida. She holds a BA in Philology majoring in Classics (2013), and an MA in Ancient Greek Philology (2015) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is an alumna of the American Academy in Rome CSS, an Intersections-Mellon Grant doctoral student for the 2018-2021 academic years, and a UF Graduate Student Teaching Award recipient for the 2017-2018 academic year. Her research interests include ancient Greek and Roman drama, and metatheater, classical reception, digital humanities, performance studies, and public scholarship.

This workshop is free. However, attendance is limited to 29 participants. Please click here to register by December 7. Registration will be on a first come, first serve basis. For additional information, contact Anastasia Pantazopoulou at apantazopoulou@ufl.edu.

This event is organized by the UF Mellon Intersections Imagineering the Technosphere group, with additional support from the UF Center for Humanities in the Public Sphere; the UF George A. Smathers Libraries; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Virtual Zoom Workshop with Preregistration 

What is your “why”? What motivates you in your personal and professional life? What future do you wish to create? How do you wish to tell the story of the work that you engage in? This workshop will help you leverage the power of storytelling to tap into your passions and purpose and unleash your best self. Your story is important and meaningful. By reflecting on your experiences and envisioning your professional and personal growth in the form of a story, you will be able to align your goals, your trajectory, and your legacy with the story you want to live!

Dr. Jaron Jones brings a wealth of expertise in personal leadership development for higher education. He is passionate about working with faculty, student organizations, administrators, and athletics to enhance student experiences and outcomes during their time in high school, college and beyond.

Brandon Telg is a social entrepreneur who strives to help people grow through understanding and developing their personal stories. He combines his experience in communication with a hands-on mentoring approach to work with people and organizations to achieve their goals.

This event is organized by the UF Mellon Intersections Imagineering the Technosphere group, with additional support from the UF Center for Humanities in the Public Sphere; the UF George A. Smathers Libraries; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This event is free and open to UF students, faculty, and staff. However, registration is limited to 40 participants and is on a first come, first serve basis. Click here to preregister for this event. Registration is limited, so please sign up in advance. For more information, contact Dr.  Sara Gonzalez (saragonz@ufl.edu).

At Google, we believe that artificial intelligence can provide new ways of approaching problems and meaningfully improve people’s lives. That’s why we’re excited to support organizations that are using the power of AI to address social and environmental challenges. Google.org issued an open call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges. We looked for projects across a range of social impact domains and levels of technical expertise, from organizations that are experienced in AI to those with an idea for how they could put their data to better use.  In this lecture I will talk about this program and speak about my personal experience working on it.

Oscar Wahltinez is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google working on Android, cameras and machine learning.

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

For information or questions, please contact Angelos Barmpoutis at angelos@digitalworlds.ufl.edu

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.

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.

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).

The Palatine Anthology is a collection of Greek poems (epigrams) that were discovered in the early 17^th 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).

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.

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.

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”.

Based on examples from Genesis, the Gospel according to John, and the Bible-translation of Martin Luther and his own comments about it – on which my main attention is focused, I explore in this workshop the validity of the proposition that culture generally and within it the technosphere – at least the part of it pertaining to crucial occidental employments of languages and literatures – might be described or circumscribed in terms of an always-ongoing madeness/making of things. With the help of the above sources (mainly Luther), I will explore whether such descriptive/circumscriptive terms might be made somewhat more precise binarily or “digitally” as relations of eternal and immediate, infinite and infinitesimal.

The slides of this presentation can be downloaded from this link: https://abarmpou.github.io/technosphere/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/presentation-1.pptx

Will Hasty is Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of German Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He has published widely on medieval and early modern literature culture, particularly on medieval romance narratives. He is author of numerous books and has edited collections of essays and literary encyclopedias.