We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

The event includes an introduction to FIELDCLUB’s practice and premieres the work FieldMachine 1.0 (Interactive Meaty Master: Self-Sufficiency Calculator Table). This project is an interactive webtool that enables visitors to design their desired diet in a self-sufficient UK and discover the effects this scheme could have on the land across St Ives. They also showcase 24hr FIELDCLUB Wildlife Museum, an ongoing collection of archaeological artefacts found during farming activities at FIELDCLUB.

The event also features themed contributions by other artists.

This event is realised within the framework of Late at Tate, an experimental programme taking place the last Friday of each month. Fieldclub & Friends features a series of projects that occupy different spaces across the gallery

Teleshared actions are procedures for collaborative creation in real time. The works are produced online between two or more users by means of interactive systems or telepresence. These expanded performative practices generate new spaces, languages and narrative forms. The possibility of the “body-less” message. And all of this founded on a basic concept: transform space into time. The workshop consists of teleshared actions which give an incentive to experimentation and critical reflection in relation to remote communication processes.

The workshop has as its main participants: María Domínguez Alba, Manuel Terán, ErnestoGarcía and Sara Malinarich, who collaborate in the areas of lighting, use of camera, video, sound, plastic, action, contents, interfaces and documentation. At distance, experiments are carried out, co-authoring with Alexandre Berthier from Canada and Vicente Pastor from Portugal, who will interact in real time with the participants by means of video conference systems and other software.

Supervised by: Sara Malinarich

Free registration (limited places): talleres [at] laboralcentrodearte.org

From the Sunlight Foundation: Tired of switching between two different databases to get state *and* federal campaign contribution data? We were. So we made TransparencyData - allowing you, for the first time, to get a clear picture of campaign contributions at both the state and federal level. Before now, there were two datasets: the OpenSecrets data focusing on federal data, and the FollowTheMoney data, focusing on state data. Now, finally, you can use to query, filter, and download this data.

These two datasets are only the beginning of what you’ll be able to query via TransparencyData. We’ve already added lobbying information from the Senate Office of Public Records, and over the next few weeks we’ll build a query interface for that dataset too. We’ll also be adding new data on a regular basis. Look for government contracting, earmarks, and congressional biographical data coming shortly.

Jeremy Carbaugh, lead developer for Sunlight Labs, gives you a quick walkthrough of the current offerings.

A resource for teachers and students of new media writing, who are exploring what authoring tools to use, for new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their colleagues approach their work, and for readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work, Authoring Software is an ongoing collection of statements about authoring tools and software. It also looks at the relationship between interface and content in new media writing and at how the innovative use of authoring tools and the creation of new authoring tools have expanded digital writing/hypertext writing/net narrative practice in this vibrant contemporary creative writing field.

Begun in conjunction with the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference, this resource continues to solicit documentation from new media poets and writers and in February 2009 is a part of Computers and Writing 2009 Online Sessions.

Includes Mark Amerika, Stefan Muller Arisona, M. D. Coverley, Chris Joseph, Rob Kendall, Antoinette LaFarge, Deena Larson, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Pullinger, Jim Rosenberg, Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Sue Thomas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Joel Weishaus, and Nanette Wylde among many others.

The DVA is beginning a renewed phase of further development with existing and new members. Based on the concept of expanded documentation it epitomizes a collective, project dedicated to media art. 500 artists selected from over 5,000 applicants offer the best selection of thousands of high quality artworks. Besides the artists, more than 300 theorists and media art historians are contributors. The DVA is a scholarly project and from the beginning a university-based endeavor.

NEW FEATURES of the DVA:

::: Optimized upload system allowing contributors to add, revise, & cross-link information in a clear online procedure.
::: Artists can easily upload videos, as well as work descriptions, digital documents, technical data, institutions and bios.
::: This rich online resource has a systematic thesaurus built from various international keyword systems.
::: Any contributor from the field can submit to the news-ticker.

Inviting a new wave of contributions to use the enhanced and improved interface.

ADVISORY BOARD: Roy ASCOTT, Beryl GRAHAM, Erkki HUHTAMO, Jorge LA FERLA, Gunalan NADARAJAN, Christiane PAUL, Martin ROTH, Steve WILSON.

The DVA is partner of: Re:Live - World Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and
Technology.

Mechanical Turk is a site where requesters can put up tasks with a set price — usually pennies to a dollar — and find workers who will do those tasks. Some do AMT for fun and many enjoy it as work. However, many use it to make ends meet when they have few other choices.

The Open Source Embroidery exhibition presents artworks that use embroidery and code as a tool for participatory production and distribution. The Open Source Embroidery project includes workshops and exhibitions which investigate how the open source software development model has been incorporated into the language of cultural participation.

Using open source software Hamilton, Southern & St Amand are facilitating a new production of Running Stitch creating a map of Umeå. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to take a GPS walk around the city and sew their paths onto a giant canvas in the gallery. The activity will take place June 6 and 7 and every Sunday until September 6.

This major exhibition at BildMuseet brings together individual and collectively made artworks by artists, makers, computer programmers and html users that explore the relationship between craft and code through social and digital networks. The works experiment with interdisciplinary approaches to modifying patterns, the DIY culture of hacking and sampling in sound, GPS and mobile technologies.

The history of computing as craft began with the Jacquard loom (1801), the first programmed machine which used binary punch cards to design woven patterns. The loom inspired Charles Babbage in his design of the Analytical Engine, often described as the precursor to the modern computer. Flare Productions’ documentary film about Ada Byron Lovelace To Dream Tomorrow (2003) highlights the significance of her extensive notes about the Analytical Engine, and her insight into the potential of the machine to operate not just as a calculator of numbers but also as a computer of symbols and information. Richard Hamilton also featured Ada Lovelace in a poster campaign to save free public entry for the South Kensington Museums in London (1998). Issues of access to code and culture are still pertinent questions of our time.

Open Source Embroidery is curated by Ele Carpenter, HUMlab Research Fellow in partnership with BildMuseet. The exhibition has been developed by BildMuseet and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, and supported by Arts Council England and Canada Council.

OPENING | Saturday June 6th, 1.30 pm, with a Sampler Culture-Clash performance.

INFORMATION | Ele Carpenter, Curator, 090-786 7407, elecarpenter [at] humlab.umu.se
Katarina Pierre, Curator; 090-786 96 32, 090-786 52 27, katarina.pierre [at] bildmuseet.umu.se

OTT09 will be followed by an Open Translation “Book Sprint” which will produce a first-of-its-kind volume on tools and best practices in the field of Open Translation. Both events are being co-organized in partnership with FLOSSManuals.net and Translate.org.za, and generously supported by the Open Society Institute.

Agenda partners for the event include Creative Commons, Global Voices Online, WorldWide Lexicon, Meedan, and DotSUB.

OTT09 will build upon the work and collaboration from Open Translation Tools 2007. The event will convene stakeholders in the field of open content translation to assess the state of software tools that support translation of content that is licensed under free or open content licenses such as Creative Commons or Free Document License. The event will serve to map out what’s available, what’s missing, who’s doing what, and to recommend strategic next steps to address those needs, with a particular focus on delivering value to open education, open knowledge, and human rights blogging communities.

Primary focus will be placed on supporting and enabling distributed human translation of content, but the role of machine translation will also be considered. “Open content” will encompass a range of resource types, from educational materials to books to manuals to documents to blog content to video and multimedia.

We invite all prospective participants to answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants.

The agenda goals of the 2009 event will be several:

* Addressing the Translation Challenges Faced by the Open Education, Open Content, and human rights blogging communities, and mapping requirements to available open solutions.
* Building on the vision and exploring new use cases for the Global Voices Lingua Translation Exchange
* Documenting the state of the art in distributed human translation, and discussing how to further tap the tremendous translation potential of the net
* Making tools talk better: realizing a standards-driven approach to open translation
* Exploring and sketching out Open Translation API Designs, building on existing work and models
* Documenting workflow requirements for missing open translation tools
* Match-making between open source tools and open content projects
* Mapping of available tools to open translation use cases

See the Agenda Overview for elaboration and more details about what is being planned.

Most importantly, the agenda will center on the needs and knowledge of the participating projects, structuring sessions and collaborations to focus on designing appropriate processes and selecting appropriate tools to support open content projects and inform further development of open source translation tools.

In addition, OTT09 will continue the knowledge sharing for the open translation community, and continue discussion on other identified needs from OTT07. The agenda for this event will be greatly informed by open education, open content and human rights blogging projects with specific translation needs, and a number of sessions will be structured to both characterize requirements and propose solutions to respective projects’ translation requirements.

OTT07 mapped out a hefty list Open Translation Tools. Participants at OTT09 will survey what has changed over the past 18 months, and assess the most pressing remaining gaps.

If OTT09 sounds like your kind of event, we invite you to answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants!

This workshop is an introduction to the openFrameworks library. OpenFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding. It is designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things via code, and here via compiled and fast C++ code giving access to the full power of the machine and its operating system.

Contrarily to many other libraries targeted for game developers, audio programmers and application developers, openFrameworks is a library that would be the bare minimum necessary to get started doing audio-visual work with C++. It integrates openGL for graphics, rtAudio for audio input and output, freeType for fonts, freeImage for image input and output, quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing.
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OpenFrameworks is actively developed by artists Zach Lieberman and Theodore Watson along with help from the OF community. OpenFrameworks is used by many artists and creative collectives such as Golan Levin, Cory Arcangel, Graffiti Research Lab, Chris Surgue, Ars Electronica Future Lab.

made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.

OF Logos - Hikaru Furuhashi, 2008
Ed v. Zach - Ed Burton and Zach Lieberman, 2006-2007
Phone software interaction tests - Todd Vanderlin, 2008
Audio Space - Theo Watson, 2006
Animo - Zach Lieberman and Utani, 2008
Liners - Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson, 2007
Opensourcery - Mago Julian and Zach Lieberman, 2007
Face costume interaction tests - Todd Vanderlin, 2008
I want you to Want Me - Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, 2008
Multitouch interface tests - Todd Vanderlin, 2008
Contact - UVA, 2008
Delicate Boundaries - Chris Sugrue, 2008
Opto-Isolator - Golan Levin, 2007
Reface - Tmema (Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman), 2007
AR Magic System - Lalalab, 2007
Funky Forest - Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille, 2007
Out of Bounds - Chris O’shea, 2007
L.A.S.E.R tag - GRL, 2007