HASTAC

Humanities, Arts, Sciences and Technology Advanced Collaboratory

Mission

HASTAC (pronounced “Haystack”) is a consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers dedicated to working together to develop innovative computing and information systems that support interdisciplinary research and teaching in the humanities and arts and that stretch the possibilities and applications of existing computational technologies.

HASTAC Members

Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center in collaboration with ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies), Jenkins Chair in New Technologies and Society, Arts Warehouse, Fitzpatrick Photonics Center, Visualization Lab, Program in Cultural Studies in Science and Technology at UNC and RENCI, UNC

University of California Humanities Research Institute, based in Irvine and supporting the entire UC system, with the San Diego Supercomputing Center, CalIT2 (based at both UC-San Diego and UC-Irvine)

University of Southern California’s Program in Critical Media Studies, School of Cinema-TV, with the Institute for Media Literacy, the Annenberg Center, and Vectors electronic multi-media journal

Stanford Humanities Lab with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at UC-Berkeley

Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington with computer scientists and engineers at both U Washington and in industry in Seattle

University of Illinois, Urbana, with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan and partners across the computational and engineering sciences

Questions

The questions researchers are asking are increasingly complex.

Intertwined issues of biology, geography, the environment, technology, the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Legal, ethical, social, historical, and aesthetic issues must also be carefully considered as we expand our capacities for accumulating and analyzing data.

We are pushing the boundaries of science and what it means to be human: this is the age-old territory of the humanities.

Interdisciplinary

No single academic discipline or point of view is sufficient to comprehend all the implications of this evolution. Yet in order to bring together the relevant perspectives, these critical needs must be addressed:

more and better collaboration with colleagues across distance, time, and discipline;

better technological tools in order to facilitate this collaboration; and

a new generation of scholars: humanities scholars who value and are expert in dialogue with the most advanced work in technology development, and scientists and technologists who value and are expert in dialogue with the content-rich and data-intensive environment provided by advanced humanities research.

Computational Challenges in the Sciences

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is one of the most ambitious astronomical survey projects ever undertaken. It includes millions of x-ray, infrared, and visible light images of over a hundred million celestial objects and maps one-quarter of the entire sky. It measures the distances to more than a million galaxies and quasars. It entails over 40 terabytes of information.

By Comparison…In the Arts and Humanities The Survivors of the Shoah project is a

compilation of 52,000 video interviews of Holocaust survivors, representing 32 languages and 56 countries. This project uses over 180 terabytes of memory.*

In addition, the Shoah project requires us to think about intellectual property, privacy, access, violence, ethics, use, and other delicate, controversial, and significant “real-world” issues.*Example cited by ACLS commission on “Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities”

Solution

Collaboratories of humanists, artists, designers, IP legal theorists, eticists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, media analysts, engineers, and computational scientists working together on problem- or issue-based projects, often with real-world applications and implications.

HASTAC Projects

The Sikh 3-D Virtual Museum: “THE FUTURES OF OUR PASTS: Three-Dimensional Representations of Culturally Significant Objects and Their Humanistic Implications—the Case of Sikh Cultural Artifacts”

Social software that allows diasporic community of users to come together virtually.

Co-PI’s: UCHRI, CITRIS at Berkeley, Smithsonian Institution, Sikh Foundation, and Getty Institute.

Projects (cont.)

“Cultural California” is an ambitious online project bringing together mappings of the history of cultural developments and contributions throughout the state of California, including visual and environmental arts, literature, music, performance, theater, film, architecture, digital art (including video games), cuisine, and sports.

Projects (cont)

New 3-D imaging tools that use gaming environments, humanities data sets, and a sensor space to recreate virtually the experience of walking through the Cathedral at St. Pierre de Beauvais, France. Data provided by Professor Peter Allen from Columbia University (see http://www1.cs.columbu.edu/~allen/ITR/__)

Projects (cont)

The Labyrinth Project at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication is developing on-line college courseware on Modernism in general and Russian Modernism in particular. The courseware serves as a model to demonstrate the unique pedagogical potential of interactive digital media.

Projects (cont)

Vectors is a multimedia journal edited by one of HASTAC’s leaders and published at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. The journal is committed to engaging cross-disciplinary debates surrounding the changing role of the visual and the aural in scholarship, media and daily life.

Projects (cont)

CITRIS, in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, has produced the first ever interactive curatorial program based on a gaming environment. The Fuller Game couples the vast quantities of multimedia materials that make up the Buckminster Fuller Archive with user-friendly search tools and a real-time, multi-user 3-D world.

Projects (cont)

The alban eved dance troupe of Greensboro, North Carolina and the Fitzpatrick Photonics Center teamed up with Information Sciences + Information Studies at Duke University for a performance and symposium called Free Space. The performance exemplified the melding of disciplines and the potential for new academic collaborations and partnerships of the kind that necessarily occur outside the academy (in the world of business, entertainment, medicine, and other areas). Panel discussions and a documentary film addressed the difficulties, challenges, and rewards of this project.

Projects (cont)

In 2005, UCHRI will roll out its new virtual residency program, using gaming environments such as Croquet and/or Torque to allow distance collaborators to interact using avatars and other collaborative systems to foster interaction.

Projects (cont)

HASTAC is currently consulting for the government of Costa Rica on a project designed to provide academic, nonprofit and industrial institutions throughout Costa Rica with a world-class, wide-area distributed computing Grid technology infrastructure. In February 2005, a VIP Summit will be hosted in Costa Rica to bring together heads of state and more than three dozen senior executives from some of the largest industrial organizations worldwide, representing academe, industry, and government.

2006-2007 “In Formation Year”

A year of synchronized, linked, collaborative events distributed across the HASTAC consortium and designed for faculty professional development, tool and technology innovation, pedagogical impact and national public awareness.

Intensive Summer Workshop on Technological Humanities

Summer 2006: The University of California Humanities Research Institute and the San Diego Supercomputing Center will co-host an intensive two-week summer workshop on technological humanism.

AY 2006-2007 In Formation Year The participating institutions will be hosting semester-and

year-long seminars bringing together humanists, social scientists, artists, engineers, designers, and computational scientists to train faculty and exchange ideas that will influence the next generation of technology and humanistic scholarship.

Approximately 70 faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across the country will be participating in this networked year.

HASTAC is working with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to raise additional funds for a national fellowship to extend beyond 2006-2007 and bring dissertation students and junior faculty (postdocs) to residential seminar sites.

Duke’s Topic (AY 2006-2007) “Interface,” human-computer/human-

machine interactions, from a historical and contemporary perspective

Co-convened by Jenkins Chair Tim Lenoir and English Professor Priscilla Wald.

Will include faculty from the humanities, arts, social sciences, computational sciences and engineering, and medicine.

Distributed Public Lecture Series on “In Formation” Each participating institution will host a lecture/panel

discussion featuring a giant in technology innovation and a distinguished humanist as part of an “In Formation” series.

Each talk will address a topic of national interest with a catchy and graphically appropriate title: Interface, Insecurity, Inauthenticity, In Vision, Intellectual Property, Interaction, etc.

A number of local tv and radio stations have pledged to broadcast these events.

Social software—blogs, wikis, real-time video annotation systems—will help create a virtual audience and also be used in courses coordinated with the lectures.

National Conferences

2 national conferences showcasing state-of-the-art tools developed for the arts, humanities, and the general college classroom.

NeedleHumanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology @ Cutting-Edgewww.hastac.org

HASTAC’s on-line newsletter will provide updates on HASTAC projects and programs.

Launch: March 2005

We Welcome Your Participation

We invite feedback on our Croquet-based 3-D curatorial game. http://www.citris-uc.org/hosted/projects/ith/gallery. The actual download is: http://www.citris-uc.org/hosted/projects/ith/gallery/dlpage.html

How can the AY 2006-2007 public educational year be incorporated into other Duke planning?

How can we collaborate on events, projects, and grants of mutual interest (esp. grants with an outreach or a societal impact component)?

Thank you for your ideas and feedback!

HASTAC VISION STATEMENT

www.woodrowwilson.org/draft/HASTAC

WHY WE NEED THE HUMANITIES NOW: A MANIFESTO FOR THE HUMANITIES IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGECATHY N. DAVIDSON and DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

http://www.uchri.org/humanities_manifesto.htm

End of Presentation