Digital Media co-director Sharon Strover will be speaking at an event today sponsored by FLOW, a digital journal produced by Radio-TV-Film graduate students. The event will be a interdisciplinary roundtable discussing how digital media may be transforming the academy. I takes place at 4pm in the Chicano Culture Room at the Texas Union. The full event details are below.
The FuturePlaces multimedia festival took place in Porto, Portugal last week. Supported by the UT Austin | Portugal Digital Media Program, the festival consisted of a series of workshops, concerts, and panels, as well as a juried art exhibition. The theme of the festival is how digital media intersects with local cultures, but of course the intersection of transnational and global cultures with the local came into play as well.
The festival offered four workshops for advanced students and professionals in the digital media field. Topics included computer vision using the Processing scripting environment, mobile interface design, mobile documentary narratives, and audio documentation of Porto. Each of these workshops engaged participants by having the contribute to a larger group project or apply skills taught in the short courses.
The exhibition brought sixteen pieces from around the world including places as far as Australia and as nearby as Porto. Pieces ranged in a variety of formats from musical performance to interactive software art, but the show was dominated by installations of various types. The jury chose four pieces for particular merit and prizes. They were:
The FuturePlaces site has more extensive detail and images of each of the prize winners. The festival was by all accounts a rousing success and thanks to Heitor Avelos, Karen Gustafson, U.Porto, and everyone else who made FuturePlaces such as success!
The second International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS Games) will take place in Braga, Portugal in March of next year. The conference currently has a call for papers on serious games and virtual worlds, open until November 1, 2009. For more information, please see the full call at the conference website.
"Stallion" is a computer cluster sporting a 706 megapixel display in the Visualization Lab.
On Friday, October 2, a second CFP meeting for potential UT collaborators was hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Visualization Lab. Several Portuguese proposals were presented, and TACC personnel were on hand to demonstrate visualization resources and answer questions about the available computing resources. Sharon Strover, Director of the Digital Media program at CoLab answered questions about funding and logistics of the call.
As I receive further proposals, I will be working to connect Portuguese researchers with potential collaborators here at UTexas.
The UT School of Journalism’s annual Online Journalism Symposium has opened its call for papers to be presented at the 2010 event in Austin. For consideration, researchers must submit a full paper or three-page abstract by December 14, 2009. Submissions will be blind reviewed by a panel of scholars.
For more information, please visit the full paper call at:
http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/callforpapers.php
Call for Proposals for UT Austin|Portugal Project in Digital Media
Informational Meeting
Friday, Sept. 18, 3:00pm in CMA A5.136
The UT Austin|Portugal Program has opened a call for the funding of
research projects in the general area of Advanced Digital Media. The
call is directed to integrated teams of researchers, which must
include a member from the University of Texas at Austin. Research
grants of up to 50,000€ (for exploratory projects) and 250,000€ (for
strategic projects) will be competitively awarded for Portugal-based
projects. Funding for UT faculty members will be provided through
CoLab, and is primarily designed to fund faculty participation and
graduate student assistance alongside some ancillary (e.g., travel)
costs.
Strategic research areas include The Future of Television, The Future
of News, and Interactive Environments / Serious Games. Exploratory
research areas include Digital imaging techniques and applications;
Data visualization; Strategic uses of digital media in social and/or
cultural contexts; Contextual and content-driven use of digital
interfaces; Behavioral analysis based on sensor networks and
location-based data; Human-computer partnerships and their outcomes
for creating new knowledge; Molecular electronics and digital media;
Multi-sensorial displays; Interfaces using new display technologies;
Real time video simulations; Regeneration/repurposing of old media for
new purposes; Balance between trust and privacy.
If your work touches on any of these areas, please stop by to learn
more about this grant opportunity and meet fellow digital media
researchers. Refreshments will be provided.
The full Call for Proposals is available here:
http://utaustinportugal.org/Events.aspx?event=252
For more information, please contact Derek Lackaff at lackaff@mail.utexas.edu.
Dr. Derek Lackaff recently joined the project as a Postdoctoral Fellow in RTF at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his doctorate in Communication at SUNY-Buffalo, where his work focused on social media, social network analysis and methodologies, and the social psychology of communication technology use. He is interested in crossdisciplinary approaches to new media research, and looks forward to helping the project develop collaborative research agendas. Derek also enjoys teaching and is a lecturer in RTF, where he is instructing the department’s Introduction to Digital Media course.
Please contact him for assistance in developing your research programs and in identifying potential collaborators, and for consulting on projects addressing social media, network analysis, and quantitative methods. He will be instrumental in working with various Portuguese research teams on responses to the next call for proposals.
You can get in touch with him to discuss you interests at Lackaff (at) mail.utexas.edu.
Professor Craig Watkins’ new book on social media explores the digital world that children and youth inhabit. Using a mix of research methods, Dr. Watkins offers a nuanced picture of “digital natives.” The Chronicle of Higher Education recently interviewed Watkins on his research.
The International School on Digital Transformation wrapped up a few weeks ago in Porto, and by all accounts it was a great success. The program featured five days of discussion among 50 students and professionals and presentations by 30 academics and practitioners. Students came from places as far as East Timor and as near by as Porto itself.
Some of the highlights from the school included:
Many of the sessions for ISDT have been documented on the school’s wiki, which you can view here. Many thanks to all of the ISDT students, faculty, and organizers!
We have had a very busy summer so far. The Summer Institute once again conducted classes in Lisbon and Porto for enrolled graduate students, individuals associated with our industrial affiliates, or interested individuals meeting the course qualifications. We offered two-week, intensive courses in the areas of Online Journalism (Rosental Alves), Screenwriting (Richard Lewis), Convergent Hollywood (Bryan Sebok), Technology and Culture (Craig Watkins), and Digital Documentary Production (Nancy Schiesari). This blend of production and theoretical course topics provided people with a broad range of instruction and research opportunities.
The Summer Institute courses in Porto are still ongoing. Subjects have included Online Journalism (Rosental Alves again), Advanced Animation (Geoff Marslett), Collaborative Documentary (Karen Kocher), Film Preservation and Historiography (Caroline Frick), Sound for Picture: Production and Post (Andy Garrison), Screenwriting for New Media (Stuart Kelban), and Creating and Designing Interactive Media (Bruce Pennycook). We anticipate that this training will lead to interesting projects and establish the foundation for some longer and more complex content creation and research investigations.