Doug's Meme Mix

Students at the University of Michigan are both building musical instruments and composing for the iphone. (Thanks to Dennis Bishop for bringing this to my attention.)iphone as emerging musical instrument

Convergence: How Five Trends will Reshape the Social Sector is a new report issued by the James Irvine Foundation that examines “the challenges and opportunities inherent in convergence and suggests ways nonprofits can successfully navigate the changes.”

The A&AA Environmental Research Interest Group (RIG) will meet from 5:15-6:15 on Thursday, December 3. Allison Caruth, who is seeking interdisciplinary feedback on her recent conference paper on the sustainable architecture nonprofit Terreform1 will be the guest speaker. The meeting will take place in the art department conference room. Below is Allison’s bio and research interest statement.

Allison Carruth is an Assistant Professor of English and participating faculty member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research interests include twentieth-century literature and media (U.S. focus), environmental theory, food studies, and globalization. She has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, Modernism / Modernity and in a forthcoming collection entitled Postcolonial Ecologies. Her current book manuscript––which is entitled “Global Appetites”––argues that the food system profoundly shapes aesthetic responses to globalization in U.S. and Anglophone culture from World War I to the present. If pastoral poetry and food primers have historically been the chief artistic genres to take food seriously, “Global Appetites” demonstrates that the modern food system preoccupies an array of literary forms, ranging from culinary manifestos to magical realist fiction. Additional works in progress include an environmental analysis of social networking media, an essay on Seamus Heaney’s digital poetics, and a second book project that traces artistic and literary interventions in the science of genetic engineering.
Please RSVP Carla Bengtson at bengtson@uoregon.edu.

Roundtable on Immersive Environments
Friday, 11/20, 12-1:30 pm, McKenzie 175
Bring your lunch & questions

Info: Robert Long RFD 6-2293 rohilong@uoregon.edu , Sean Sharp IS 6-8099 ssharp@uoregon.edu

The Female Avatar: Understanding the Ontology of Gender and Technology
SOJC Ph.D. candidate Alina Padilla-Miller

Alina Padilla-Miller’s dissertation examines the nature of social construction within the digital world, specifically in the grid of Second Life in order to better understand the role of gender in the creation and performance of the female avatar.

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Showcases of 3D Education and Productive Collaboration in Virtual Worlds Jonathon Richter, Research Associate, Center for Electronic Studying, College of Education

Dr. Richter is currently working on two projects of interest to Digital Scholars: (1) the MERLOT Project that he directs – The Center for Learning in Virtual Environments (CLIVE) http://clive.merlot.org/index.html, which is a project to identify and vet 3D learning assets (simulations, role playing, immersive experiences, etc.) by disciplinary content experts across the metaverse. His presentation will feature an overview/peek at locations in Second Life and Project Wonderland dedicated to showcase the capabilities and educational showcases developing in each platform. The second part of this whirlwind performance will be (2) an introduction to the Collaboratory — a parallel construction (i.e. also in Second Life and Wonderland) designed to investigate and gather the various routines that virtual teams have developed to effectively collaborate in these virtual spaces.

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Tanking Like a Girl: Gender and the Study of Online Gaming
Carol Stabile, Professor, Department of English/SOJC
Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society

Dr. Stabile is currently working on a project that focuses on the role of gender in game play in the massively-multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. The virtual environments of MMOs offer repeatable experiences for girls and women that differ in significant ways from the majority of commercial media content in the US. And the nature of the immersive experiences in MM0s challenge the methodologies and analytic tools that humanist scholars have used to study media. For today’s presentation, Dr. Stabile will speak specifically about the peculiar nature of these objects of study and the difficulties they present for feminist media scholarship.