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 For the second year, six outstanding UW graduate students are representing the Simpson Center in the HASTAC Scholars Program. Among HASTAC’s multiple missions is the development of digital tools and projects for teaching, archiving, and social interaction. As students and teachers leading the way in participatory learning, HASTAC Scholars receive scholarships to encourage innovative uses of technology in their work.
Led by Jentery Sayers, UW’s HASTAC Scholars will meet throughout the year at the Simpson Center.
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Amelia Abreu (iSchool) | HASTAC Profile | Email
As a scholar of classification, Amelia's current research examines ordering and describing practices in consumer use of new media. She holds an MSIS from UT-Austin and worked as an archivist and librarian before pursuing the PhD. |
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Edmond Chang (English) | HASTAC Profile | Email | Website
Edmond's main areas of interest are technoculture, digital studies, cultural studies, queer & gender studies, film, visual rhetoric, literary nonfiction, composition, myth, role-playing games, video games, and popular culture. He graduated from the University of Maryland with his BA in English, a BA in Classics, and his MA in English. He has taught at the university level for over twelve years. |
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Deen Freelon (Communications) | HASTAC Profile | Email | Website
Deen is a second-year (2009-10) Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication. His primary research interests concern the changing relationships between technology and politics, and encompass the analysis of such content as weblogs, web forums, civic engagement web sites, and other forms of political mass media. He is also developing a secondary interest in quantitative research methods, one product of which is the online intercoder reliability calculator ReCal. He spends much of his time collaborating with various research teams under his adviser, W. Lance Bennett, in the UW-based Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. |
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Peter Leonard (Scandinavian Studies) | HASTAC Profile | Email | Website
Peter is writing about individual identity and the social welfare state in contemporary Danish and Swedish literature. Prior to coming to UW, he served as Lead Technologist at Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. He has worked for a number of years as the Webmaster for the UW's Humanities Center and is presently learning to play the nyckelharpa.
Recent HASTAC blog posts from Peter:
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Jentery Sayers (English) | HASTAC Profile | Email | Website
Jentery is a PhD Candidate in English and a 2009-10 Society of Scholars fellow at the Simpson Center. His dissertation, "Invisible Technologies?", explores how contemporary rhetorics of immersive technologies and immaterial digital texts are imbricated in a cultural history of sound reproduction technologies, especially magnetic recording, since roughly 1860. At the UW, he also teaches computer-integrated courses situated in the digital humanities and media studies. In tandem with several reviews for the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, he has published "Geolocating Compositional Strategies" in issue 12.2 of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.
Recent HASTAC blog posts from Jentery:
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Meghan Trainor (DXARTS) | HASTAC Profile | Email | Website
Meghan Trainor is an artist and doctoral student at the University of Washington's Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Her work explores the use of emerging and existing technologies and materials to help examine the aesthetics of near future environments, particularly where the physical and the digital world overlap. She is interested in the methods by which new technologies become emotionally important to us, and eventually form part of our nostalgic sense of history, or conversely, components of a dystopian landscape. Her themes and interests include the anthropomorphic machines, bionic humans, stories of time travel, alternate universes and other creative devices that allow us to both invent and digest advancing technology.
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Deborah Kimmey (English) administers the online interactive “keyword collaboratories” that extend the work of Keywords for American Cultural Studies to classes and working groups.
Recent HASTAC blog posts from Deborah:
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Eric Meyers (Information School) investigates how children from ages 6-12 interact in shared virtual environments online. |
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Angela Rounsaville (English) approaches technological literacy and media access from a social justice perspective. |
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Jentery Sayers (English) examines sound reproduction technologies in the context of Anglo-American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Recent HASTAC blog posts from Jentery:
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Ramsey Tesdell (Technical Communications and International Studies) studies the role of technology in social movements in the Middle East, and runs 7iber.com, a media website from Jordan. |
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Matthew Wilson (Geography) explores how geographic information technologies enable neighborhood assessment endeavors.
Recent HASTAC blog posts from Matt:
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In Spring 2009 Jentery Sayers and Matt Wilson team-taught a class called “Mapping the Digital Humanities,” which involved undergraduates in using mobile technologies to collaboratively compose an interactive digital map of the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Students then wrote essays that reflected on the role of technology in the production of the map’s social dimensions.
The third annual HASTAC conference was held April 19-21, 2009, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the theme Traversing Digital Boundaries.
As the theme suggests, the gathering fovused on the exploration of new territory and in work that crosses, manipulates, or simply ignores traditional boundaries. The conference program included presentations of research, performances, technology demonstrations, posters, panel discussions, and "virtual" participation via telepresence technology.
Matthew Wilson and Jentry Sayers presented a talk on Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities to the Information School in November 2008.
 The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory sponsored In|Formation 2006-2007, a year dedicated to promoting the human and humane dimensions of technology and to forming new creative networks. Key institutions around the country offered intensive and innovative lectures and events for faculty, students and the general public. The Simpson Center and its UW partners worked under the rubric of Invitation with a focus on the beckoning and beguiling aspects of interactive technology and its social formations.
The centerpiece of the national effort was Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface, an unprecedented three-day mashup of ideas, demos, art, and conversation, driven by digital visionaries and practitioners from across domains and disciplines.
Selected audio and video footage will be available on the conference website soon.
May 1, 2007 • 3:30 pm • Communications 202 • Download e-Flyer
Forging a New Academic Identity:
Key Dilemmas & Challenges in Digital Scholarship
Paul Wouters (Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
April 30, 2007 • 5:30 pm • Town Hall Seattle • Download e-Flyer
Gaming, IMing, Internet: Onboard or Overbored?
Kids Speak Out about Living in the Digital Age
A Reclaiming Childhood event moderated by Katharyne Mitchell (Geography and Simpson Professor of the Public Humanities, UW).
April 28, 2007 • 10:00 am • Seattle Public Library • Download e-Flyer
Experiencing Communities: Bloggers' Perspectives
This symposium is the culminating event of Creating Community Through Blogging, a cross-disciplinary research cluster.
March 1, 2007 • 7:00 pm • Kane 120 • Download e-Flyer
The Art and Science of Social Robots
Cynthia Breazeal (Media Arts and Sciences, MIT)
Listen to the lecture (MP3)
Watch the lecture (Quicktime)
 Cynthia Breazeal directs the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is internationally known for seamlessly blending scientific theories, artistic insights, and engineering principles to create compelling robotic creatures that have a lively social presence to those who interact with them. She has participated in the development of some of the world's most famous robots including the upper torso humanoid robot, Cog, and the sociable robot, Kismet. Her current research extends these themes in the area of human-robot relations to create cooperative and capable robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. Her research program strives to revolutionize the art and science of human-robot interaction and cooperation—to develop robots that engage with us as helpful partners that will ultimately play a valuable, rewarding, and unprecedented role in the everyday lives of ordinary people.
November 1, 2006 • 4:00 pm • Communications 120
Productivity, Criticality, and Pleasure: Digital Arts and Computer-Human Interaction
Simon Penny (Art and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University)
A comparison of the so-called New Media Arts and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a fascinating case-study in the historic tensions in the west between humanistic-cultural practices and techno-scientific practices. HCI and Digital Media Arts are approximately the same age, share a common concern with interaction between people and technology, and depend on similar technologies. Yet the intellectual, philosophical, and theoretical traditions from which they arise are starkly different and belie radically different motivations, commitments, approaches, and solutions. Penny takes an historical and theoretical overview of the differences and similarities in HCI and Media Arts focusing on the convergence of a common territory from differing directions by HCI and Media Arts. Sponsored by DXARTS.
Cyborg Democracy
Taught by Tom Foster (English), this course assesses the political claims made for new media and new technologies and to define possible points of articulation and critique between Marxist traditions and new theories of radical democracy, on one hand, and new technocultural formations, on the other. More...
Applications of Digital Technologies to Humanities Research
Autumn 2006 and Winter 2007 > HUM 411/DXARTS 411
Taught by Stacy Waters (DXARTS), this course offers students the opportunity to learn about the key technologies influencing and transforming humanities research and scholarly communication.
The Public Humanities across the Digital University
Winter 2007
Taught by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (IAS, UW Bothell) and Ron Krabill (IAS, UW Bothell), this course examines the relationship between the emergence of the Public Humanities and the Digital Humanities as complementary, praxis-oriented responses to pressing questions about knowledge production that address us at the onset of the 21st century. More...
Visual Documentation Praxis for Cultural Studies
Spring 2007
Through visual production exercises, classroom discussion, and half-day on-site workshops held at collaborating institutions, this course encourages students to explore how diverse forms of visual production can expand their research interests and forge unexpected connections within and beyond the university. Taught by Daniel Hoffman (Anthropology) and Kari Lerum (IAS, UW Bothell). More...
The three Danz Courses in the Humanities for 2006-2007 include key digital components in their instruction and themes:
Creating Community through Blogging
Led by Honni van Rijswijk (English) and Matthew Vechinski (English), this yearlong research cluster considers the status of blogs as texts as well as the ways in which blogs challenge conventional paradigms of research. Download e-Flyer for April 28, 2007 capstone symposium.
 In November 2005 the UW Graduate School, in partnership with the Simpson Center and the Divisional Dean for Arts & Humanities, sponsored a special session for humanities department chairs devoted to the digital humanities with Marsha Kinder (Cinema, Comparative Literature, and Spanish, USC). This served as an invitation to In|Formation Year 2006-2007.
Kinder directs The Labyrinth Project, which is creating inspiring work in what Kinder calls "database narrative"—an alternative way of conceptualizing data, one that conjures up multiple paths through cultural history, with memory in the making.
In preparation for the In|Formation Year 2006-2007 launch, twenty-five people from across the country associated with HASTAC met at the Simpson Center in September 2005. An afternoon session was devoted to showcasing groundbreaking digital humanities projects including the work of UW's Center for Digital Arts and Experiemental Media (DXARTS).
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Undergraduate Courses