2012 Spring Seminar Program

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Log On to the Humanities: How New Technologies Expand the Humanities and How They Don’t

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May 4–5, 201

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ach spring the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities gathers together friends and alumni to Expand the Humanities and How They Don’ t ” takes its lead from the institute’s just-completed Year of vast distances, changes in the global flow of knowledge, and relations between the humanities and the horizons of the humanities for a young generation and are here to stay. But they also bring the danger of

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explore a topic through a humanities-and-arts lens. This year, “Log On to the Humanities: How New Technologies Digital Humanities. We explored profound shifts in scholarly practice, book publication, partnership across arts that have been emerging courtesy of the technological revolution. These changes expand the possible flash over focus, tweet over narration, attention deficit over close scrutiny, and the aesthetics of absorption.

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Seminar Schedule

Friday, May 4

Saturday, May 5

Note: On Friday evening, May 4, Spring Seminar registrants and other guests will attend a private gala reception and dinner as we bid farewell to outgoing director Daniel Herwitz and thank him for his dedicated service and leadership at the Institute for the Humanities.

Rackham Building 915 E. Washington fourth floor

Institute for the Humanities 202 S. Thayer

Sessions include time for questions and discussion. Faculty and presenters are available both days for formal as well as informal exchange. Excellent meals provide time for more conversation with fellow participants and presenters.

8:30–9:00 5:30–6:00 Reception

9:00–10:30

6:15–7:45 Paul Kaiser, “A Digital Artist’s Forays

into the Humanities”

7:45–9:45 Dinner, remarks by

Jim Foster, board chair

Breakfast Finn Brunton, “The Nonhumanities: Writing with Crowds and Algorithms”

10:30–10:45 Break 10:45–12:15 Phil Pochoda, “The Media is the Ménage:

The Digital Futures of Publishing” 12:15–2:00

Lunch

2:00–2:20 Bus transportation to North Campus Digital Media

Commons, 2281 Bonisteel, North Campus 2:30–4:00

Tour of Digital Media Commons

4:00–5:00

Light refreshments

5:00

Transportation to 202 S. Thayer

Seminar Lectures “A Digital Artist’s Forays into the Humanities,” Paul Kaiser Interdisciplinary artist Paul Kaiser will show how new visual and algorithmic methods open up ways to investigate and present areas of the humanities that elude traditional textual scholarship. His presentation will explore specific projects that he, in collaboration with his colleagues at OpenEndedGroup, has developed since the early 1990s. These will include Visionary Theater, the Loops preservation project, and Spatializing Photographic Archives. Kaiser will conclude by showing how two current OpenEndedGroup projects seek to create hybrid forms of art, humanities,

drawing as performance—which became the points of departure for his digital artworks. With his two OpenEndedGroup colleagues Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie, he has created works that span a wide range of forms and disciplines, including dance, music, installation, film, and public art.

Outside collaborators have included Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown. In 2008, Kaiser received the John Cage Award; in 1999, a Bessie; in 1995, a Guggenheim Fellowship; and in 1992 a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian Award. He has taught at Wesleyan, Harvard, Columbia, and San Francisco State, and has had residencies at the University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, the Exploratorium, and others.

“The Nonhumanities: Writing with Crowds and Algorithms,”

and science.

Paul Kaiser is a digital artist and writer and the institute’s 2011 Kidder Resident in the Arts. In the 1980s Kaiser spent ten years teaching students with severe learning disabilities, with whom he collaborated on making multimedia depictions of their own minds. From this work, he derived two key ideas—mental space and

Finn Brunton What does it mean to engage in humanistic practice today? Finn Brunton will focus on the act of writing, now embedded in networks of algorithms, networked crowds and publics, bots and other programs, and look towards the future of authorship. Discussing matters from chess-playing automata and combinatorial literature to early online communities, “spam books,”

nineteenth-century popular fiction, and philosophy, participants will tour the

trying desperately, and likely in vain, to stay afloat and in control while

current vanguard of “human-machine” writing and place it in the context of

everything about their product and their business processes is being upended.

the previous centuries of humanistic inquiry.

Publishers are attempting, with uncertain success, to harness the visible

Finn Brunton is an assistant professor of information at the U-M School of Information. He was trained principally in the history of science, receiving a PhD from the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen and an MA from the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He has worked extensively on issues of online privacy and security as a postdoctoral researcher with Helen Nissenbaum at NYU. He now focuses on technological adaptation and misuse, writing on topics including

changes in the content containers—from paper to screens, from cardboard bindings to electronic tablets—for their own survival. But they cannot control the much more profound cyber-challenges to many prevailing cultural and social values embedded, generally invisibly, in the static, physical book. Many perceive this as a dire threat, others as an unprecedented opportunity. But the game is certainly on, and publishers are not the only ones who will never be the same.

digital anonymity, encrypted currency, and the history of experi-

Phil Pochoda recently retired as director of the University of Michigan Press.

mental and obsolete media. His book, Spam: A Flood, A Theory,

Previously, he was associate director and editorial director of the

A History, will be out this fall from MIT. “The Media is the Ménage: The Digital Futures of Publishing” Phil Pochoda The Internet and the digital revolution are already responsible for the single greatest transformation in human communication since at least Gutenberg, 450 years ago. Book publishers—having witnessed the precipitous, disastrous fate of their music industry counterparts—are at the epicenter of this turmoil,

University Press of New England; editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press at Doubleday; and vice president at Simon & Schuster while publisher and editor-in-chief of Prentice-Hall Press. He has a PhD from Princeton in history and sociology.

Register To reserve your place in the 2012 Spring Seminar, register online at www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities/LogOnToTheHumanities or call 734.763.4463 to register by phone. The cost to attend the seminar is $200 before April 20, $225 after, and includes materials, presentations, and meals.

We try to give complete and accurate information but changes beyond our control may arise. In such cases we will make every effort to notify registrants ahead of time.

Participants will receive a short selection of readings in advance in digital format. Print copies may be available upon request.

For further information, contact Doretha Coval at 734.936.3518 or humin@umich.edu.

Institute for the Humanities University of Michigan 202 South Thayer Ann Arbor MI 48109