Event Title
The Wearable and Tangible Worlds of DH Workshop
Location
CB1-212
Start Date
3-11-2017 1:45 PM
End Date
3-11-2017 4:45 PM
Description
Please download the software required from the workshop before attending. The instructions are at: http://bit.ly/2gSTzNK
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where "charrette" was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies. We are now proposing for HASTAC 2017 a workshop on the same topics. Individuals and groups who attended the 2016 event will be on hand to guide participants in a beginner's introduction to the ways that hobbyist-level wearable technology can be incorporated into digital humanities praxis, with an emphasis on feminist pedagogy.
Drawing on recent developments in humanities-based "critical making" or "critical design," the workshop will situate wearable computing alongside other process-oriented and constructionist learning practices. Like other forms of physical computing, wearable computing does the work of combining the digital and the analog, or "[moving] easily, back and forth in the space between bits and atoms" (Sayers et al. "Between Bits and Atoms" 3). Wearables also open the door for feminist engagement, allowing "scholars to build alternatives" that incorporate both the body and its relationship to structures of power (Sayers et al. "Between Bits and Atoms" 15). By connecting interpretation and scholarship to the body, we highlight the relationship between situated knowledge (Haraway; Harding) and the subjective nature of interpretation (McGann and Samuels "Deformance and Interpretation"), with particular emphasis on the textual, visual, audible, and tactile.
The workshop will center on the Arduino LilyPad, a small computer designed to be sewn into circuits with conductive thread. The organizers have used the LilyPad for a range of digital humanities assignments: as a signifying platform (asking students to solve a problem or make a social statement), or as a tool for textual analysis (remediating poetry about identity or bodies). Both projects demonstrate the LilyPad's value as a tool for critical social engagement, bridging coding and electronics with techniques such as sewing and embroidery to foreground questions of labor, gender, and what counts as "digital humanities."
Our hope is to introduce participants to a technological platform, but more importantly, to engage in a consideration of how wearables, and the techniques and skills that support them, make explicit the tangible, the situated, and the embodied in our teaching. In these ways the workshop suggests possible worlds of DH as student-centered feminist engagements with texts and events of the past, as well as the future.
The workshop is intended to complement the proposed exhibition on Wearables and Tangibles. Ideally, we would have the span of two sessions (approximately two hours and thirty minutes) for the workshop. If that is not possible, an abbreviated version can be accomplished within one session.
In tandem with the onsite workshop, the organizers will further coordinate with one or more remote workshops led by other 2016 charrette participants. The multiple events will be in conversation through the use of a common hashtag and possible live streaming.
The Wearable and Tangible Worlds of DH Workshop
CB1-212
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where "charrette" was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies. We are now proposing for HASTAC 2017 a workshop on the same topics.
