Garnet in the MLab

Nicole’s “Selfie Trough” for Cows

Shaun and Nina Working with Clay

Garnet’s Cards, Shaun’s Unmanned Automated Tractor

Kat, Danielle, Bruno, Nina and I Chatting During the Workshop (images care of Garnet)

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace and HelloWorld projects, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Garnet Hertz.

Conducted as a graduate micro-seminar, with a small number of students (~10), the DHSI workshop will assume all participants have no programming experience or knowledge of Python. It will also assume a bias toward programming from arts and humanities perspectives. Participants will be asked to bring their own laptops (PC or Mac). In advance, they will also be given instructions for how to install Python 3 on their own machines. During the two-day workshop, each participant will use both the command line and a text editor of choice to write and execute programs. The first day will cover the basics of programming and Python 3 (e.g., conditionals, loops, regular expressions, IDEs, variables, values, dictionaries, and debugging) anchored in tangible examples intended for arts and humanities practitioners. The second day will build upon the participants’ research interests, but may include instruction in how to use Python 3 to create graphics/3D models, make simple games, manipulate electronic text, and/or record audio/video. All participants will be given workshop materials, including source code, for future reference. By the workshop’s end, they will develop a beginner’s familiarity with Python 3 as well as a working understanding of how it might be meaningfully integrated into arts and humanities projects.

Details about this DHSI workshop are below. Please note that seating is limited, and registration will work on a first come, first served basis, with a waiting list. To register, please email maker@uvic.ca your name, department, and degree you’re pursuing. Requests for registration should come from UVic email addresses. In early 2015, all participants will be contacted by the Maker Lab with an update on the workshop, including details about logistics, installing Python 3, and meals provided during the morning and afternoon.

INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING AND PYTHON 3 IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

A Digital Humanities Summer Institute “Hello World” Workshop for Graduate Students at UVic
Saturday March 7th (10am- 5pm) and Sunday, March 8th (10am – 5pm) 2015
Instructor: Jentery Sayers (Dept. of English, jentery@uvic.ca)
Intended Audience: UVic graduate students in the arts and humanities with an interest, but no experience, in programming
Location: Clearihue Building (exact room to be announced in early 2015)
Meals: Breakfast (bagels from Mount Royal) provided both mornings; lunch (pizza from Ali Baba) provided Saturday
Cost: No registration fee, but space is limited (first come, first served, with a waiting list)
Register: Email maker@uvic.ca your name, department, and graduate degree you’re pursuing (when registering, please use your UVic email address)

If you cannot attend the workshop in its entirety (i.e., both days, 10am-5pm), then please refrain from registering. Thank you.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Jentery Sayers and Sublime Text 3.

Edmond Y. Chang is an Assistant Professor of English at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His areas of interest include technoculture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, video games, popular culture, and contemporary American literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and his dissertation is entitled “Technoqueer: Re/con/figuring Posthuman Narratives.” He has extensive teaching experience at the university level and won the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award in 2011 and the UW Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009.

“Queer Games, Straight Design” | Monday, March 10th, 1:30pm, David Turpin Building A104

Is it possible to create a queer video game? What constitutes a queer video game? And are video games already queer? This presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games beyond queerness as window dressing, as simply LGBT-skinned plot, character, or subtext. In other words, video games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. This presentation explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness, and more importantly, imagines the queer possibilities in queergaming—the happy accidents, glitches, workarounds, even failures that open up alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames. In other words, how might we imagine ways of playing against the grain and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well?

“Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality” | Monday, March 10th, 3:30pm, Maker Lab in the Humanities

Video games are not perfect magic circles of play, they are not completely separate from the “real world,” and for many game scholars, it is the intersection of game, developers, players, and the dominant culture that demands attention. In this workshop, we will take up “close playing” to look at and unpack race, gender, and sexuality in games. Close playing, akin to close reading, requires critical attention to game narrative, game mechanics, game design, and play as both an embodied and social experience. Close playing also requires a certain distance from the game and from play, a conscious disruption of the interactive and immersive fantasy. Close play reveals that the magic circle is always, already blurred or broken.

Registration is required for this workshop, which is limited to ten participants. To register, simply send an email to maker@uvic.ca.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the HelloWorld category, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of Jon Johnson.

Participants worked in small groups to assemble the amplifier circuit and paper speaker.

Katie’s instructional booklet illustrates the circuit in schematic form, as well as how it can be laid out on a breadboard.

The perforated cardboard cover of the booklet can be punched out to form the speaker cone and base. Some gluing and taping are also required.

Alex and Karly breadboarding their circuit.

MLabbers and others participated in the event. For some, it was their first chance to build a circuit. From left: Nicole, Alex, Karly, Stefan, Zaqir, Emma, Laura, Nina.

Closeup of the finished speaker. Electricity that flows through the copper coil creates an electromagnetic current, causing the coil to vibrate around a neodymium magnet inside the cone. The vibrations emit an audio signal from the amplifier circuit. The amplifier circuit is powered by a nine-volt battery. Punk music was heard.

Thanks again to the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute for supporting the “Hello World” workshops.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the HelloWorld category, with the physical computing and news tags. Images for this post care of Shaun Macpherson.

Public Humanities Project Management

When: Tuesday, November 26th at 3:00pm
Where: Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
Register: Please email maker@uvic.ca.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the HelloWorld and BuildingPH projects, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson.

Event details and posters are below. Merritt’s talk—“What Are Games Good For? Videogame Creation as Social, Artistic, and Investigative Practice”—is open to the public. Please spread the word (poster included) to anyone who might be interested, across disciplines, professions, and affiliations. At the moment, however, the Twine workshop is already full. But we will make an announcement—likely via Twitter—if a seat becomes available. The posters below were designed and made by Jon Johnson, who recently joined the Maker Lab to conduct physical computing research during 2013-14. Thanks, Jon!

See you on the 18th at 12:30pm in ECS 108, everyone! We are absolutely thrilled about these two events and want to thank merritt for taking the time to visit us.

“What Are Games Good For? Videogame Creation as Social, Artistic, and Investigative Practice,” with merritt kopas
Wednesday, September 18th, 12:30 pm, at the University of Victoria | Engineering/Computer Science Building (ECS) 108
Introduction by Nina Belojevic | Poster in PDF | Poster in High Resolution PNG | Poster by Jon Johnson

A number of arguments have been advanced about the unique properties of digital games, but what does videogame authorship really have to offer us? We’ll think through these arguments and consider the utility of games for our personal, political, and scholarly projects.

“Twine and Beyond: First Steps in Game Authorship,” with merritt kopas
Wednesday, September 18th, 3:30-5pm, at the University of Victoria | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
Introduction by Nina Belojevic | Poster in PDF | Poster in High Resolution PNG | Poster by Jon Johnson

Twine is a hypertext authoring tool that has been taken up as an accessible game authorship platform. In this workshop we’ll take a look at the software, explore making our own games with it, and discuss ways to use it and other tools for personal game authorship.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the BuildingPH and HelloWorld projects, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of LIM, by merritt kopas. Posters by Jon Johnson.

Today, at this conference about humanities labs for research and learning, I want to start with a video about makerspaces. It was produced by Nina Belojevic, Arthur Hain, Shaun Macpherson, Katie Tanigawa, and the Maker Lab team at the University of Victoria.

One of the reasons I enjoy this video is the rather amusing way it hyperbolizes the everyday spaces where many humanities scholars hold court for populations of one. Adorned in this case with a stockpile of carbs and an attentive iPhone, the theme is familiar: isolation, individuation, fluorescent lighting, library carrels, Microsoft Word, songs with no vocals, armchairs worn by reading, and “where to start?” all comprise the life of the mind, which, as Bill Brown suggests, “has a materiality of its own.” Without a doubt, aspects of this lifestyle appeal to many scholars, at least when you peel back the hyperbole. It is a lifestyle that appears conducive to concentrated research and sole-authored essays. It is disciplined. It is focused. And yet many among us (perhaps sympathizing with Shaun Macpherson in the video) want to combine our solitary research routines and their corresponding environments with collaborative climates and collective practice—as long, of course, as our mobile phones can tag along, too. After all, Shaun’s iPhone constantly reminds us that no academic space transcends the all-embracing reach of homogeneous, empty time.

Still, the video suggests that time flies in makerspaces. After our protagonist is rescued by the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and its “Hello World” workshop series, social activities and upbeat experiments abound. Shaun constructs 3D models, builds circuits, authors exhibits, attends workshops, shares research in progress, and chats with really clever people. To boot, the canned music now has a vocal track, and the workstations are intended for group sizes two and up. Now, any of you at all familiar with labs or makerspaces will cry, “Shenanigans.” And those of us in the Maker Lab will confess. Our video gives you the everyday of an individuated humanities scholar while bypassing the everyday of makerspaces. We indeed cut out our middle state.

You will highlight how this becomes that in makerspaces, where the 3D printer often breaks, the models are rarely watertight, the circuits are always delicate, the server is under maintenance, no one wants to calibrate the machine, and the LED hasn’t blinked for an hour. Where technologies are concerned, there is certainly no shortage of glitch. And where important decisions are necessary, there’s no lack of frustration, either. Borrowing for a moment from Bill Turkel: “The things that we have to figure out don’t come in neat packages.” But the thing is, in a makerspace the glitches and frustrations are often out in the open. As environments for learning and research, they foreground the material character of technocultural relations. In them you will find dead media, bent commodities, and boxes brimming with discards and disappointments.

Today, my question is how to take such spaces on the road, or how to highlight the ways in which they are portable, tacit, temporary. For the next few minutes, then, I want to explore the phenomena of popup makerspaces, anchoring them in a recent Maker Lab experiment, where—in collaboration with the Ontario Augmented Realty Network and the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication at Western University—we grafted a makerspace onto the annual HASTAC conference, held this year, in April, at York University.

The reason the Lab is currently interested in popups is that they push humanities practitioners to transform their research and learning strategies through shifts in context. In short, popups extract research from its everyday built environment and—in so doing—necessarily highlight how laboratories and makerspaces (as socially produced, culturally coded climates) shape practice. They transplant lab life with some curious consequences, including—as I hope to show today—opportunities to meet partners in practice, to generalize beyond the university campus, to decentralize expertise, to expose and play with often overlooked assumptions, and to articulate what we might call “minimal computing.”

Importantly, I am not suggesting that the Maker Lab invented popup makerspaces or, say, prefabricated labs. For instance, you might consider the portable, modular, and versatile research shelters used in places like Antarctica. Or you might consider the recently launched DHMakerBus initiative, based at Western, that is encouraging digital humanities practitioners to get on the bus and travel with their research and materials. In this case, the MakerBus group is venturing to Lincoln, Nebraska for the annual Digital Humanities conference. And finally, here on Vancouver Island, you might consider the array of community-based activities sparked by groups like the Victoria Makerspace, the Makehouse on Fort, Limbic Media, and the G++ Gallery.

One of the first key premises of popup makerspaces is that their infrastructure is flexible and portable. In our case at HASTAC 2013, Devon Elliott brought a majority of our materials to York’s campus. Our setup time for this particular popup was less than 45 minutes, and with practice we could reduce that time to, say, 20 or 30 minutes. The popup materials—comprised largely of component parts—fit in a few relatively small crates, which we could carry from a university parking lot into the conference space. For example, this Printrbot jr (above) can be broken down, transplanted to a new context, and then reassembled to make small prints on most any desktop. Of course, many popup parts (Printrbot parts included) are small and often glitchy. When transferring these supplies from one location to the next, some of them will inevitably get lost, too. Nevertheless, they tend to be affordable or low-cost, especially where physical computing is concerned. Comparable to many desktop fabrication technologies, builds in physical computing are intended to be small and easy to transfer.

Yet perhaps more importantly, the portability of these materials helps practitioners generalize research practices beyond their campuses. By “generalize,” I specifically mean unpacking not only what changes from setting to setting but also what persists. Which questions gain traction across communities? What tends to interest a variety of people? What concerns or criticisms are common? This emphasis on difference in tandem with persistence allows us to take seriously the cultural assumptions and habits that congeal in our humanities labs and infrastructures. For instance, one pressing concern in humanities physical computing and fabrication is how to foster positive force environments that do not exclude people (especially people who are traditionally under-represented in technology-inflected fields) through their rhetorics, affordances, ideological orientations, infrastructures, and social relations. Here, work by the Fembot Collective, HASTAC, and #TransformDH (among others) is crucial.

Popup makerspaces might be one way to further such initiatives and trajectories. If they are constructed in a fashion that’s socially aware and cognizant of embodied practices, then they can allow participants to at once tinker with technologies and talk about their cultural implications and embeddedness. The popup becomes a possibility space rather than a demonstration space—a space, to borrow for a moment from Anne Balsamo’s work, “for face-to-face social interactions that are based in communal ‘tinkering’ practices.”

It helps that many popup makerspaces experiment with curiosities often fabricated on the fly. These small, printed objects encourage tacit engagement with the materials at hand, and they also help generate a critical atmosphere that builds up from the familiar, the popular, the experimental, the playful. Theory meets hobbyism halfway. Our conversations at HASTAC 2013 frequently started with current problems around 3D printing and its perceived limitations, including its potential to produce waste, WYSIWYG manufacturing, and further commodify craft making. Yet those discussions ultimately underscored the need for intervention and active engagement at the level of practice. What should media historians, gamers, and archaeologists be printing? What materials are eco-friendly or biodegradable? With technologies like Printrbots, how might we make stuff that does not yet exist in the physical world? How might humanities practitioners contribute to popular repositories of 3D models and, more generally, to the Internet of Things? And rather than assuming we can do this work alone, how might we distribute expertise across communities like HASTAC and then build accordingly? As these questions suggest, popup makerspaces resemble unconferences in the way that they can facilitate conversations, promote hacking, and encourage new partnerships across disciplines.

That said, we might also imagine popup makerspaces as vehicles for partnerships in practice, by which I mean collaborations organized around common concerns, interests, and methods. Resonating with the work of Star and Griesemer, popups give us a temporary place to think with and through “boundary objects” that simultaneously afford different, local interpretations and shared, collective uses. This combination of what’s shared and what’s different can allow practitioners to identify robust lines of inquiry relevant to contemporary culture: emerging forms of manufacturing and labor in a digital economy, social justice initiatives steeped in critical making, GLAM institutions as “intelligent environments,” questions of copyright and privacy around the Internet of Things, and the speculative design of new books, objects, and forms of scholarly communication. All of these issues require complex articulations of knowing by doing, or—echoing Fiona Barnett and HASTAC at large—practice-based orientations where difference is our operating system.

One question, then, is what kind of infrastructure enables or subtends such a system. If we start with the claim that all technologies are culturally embedded and steeped in social relations, then—as humanities practitioners—we might put a little more pressure on the assumptions motivating (or motivated by) the current climate of information saturation, rapid data transfer, social networking, and ubiquitous attention to screens. Thus far, a popular response to this climate has been big data research, which is no doubt exciting for those of us in the humanities and beyond. Many researchers, including a significant number of HASTAC members, are learning a lot from big data approaches to history, political economy, literature, and aesthetics. And, methodologically speaking, big data in the humanities is interesting and vital because it demands thinking at scale, with information that is incredibly messy and difficult (if not impossible) to classify. Yet thinking at scale can go in the other direction, too. That is, we might combine big data or large-scale computing with minimal or small-scale computing, which—in the case of popup makerspaces—asks us to consider (at least) the following: What technologies do we absolutely need in order to persuasively engage the issue or context at hand? How do technologies and data transfer from setting to setting, and through what worldviews? When do they not transfer, and why? How can “thinking small” brush against planned obsolescence, the proliferation of e-waste, and screen essentialism? When can “minimal” still imply “messy” (rather than “elegant” or “friction-free”)? How might digital humanities scholars conduct research in analog, or with “dead” and ostensibly lo-fi media? Finally, how can miniaturization become a paradigm for critical making? And to what effects on research practices, socioeconomic relations, and “big thinking”?

During the next few years, the Maker Lab team—in collaboration with our colleagues at HASTAC and GO::DH—will be addressing these very questions and whatever else unfolds in the process. For now, we want to thank you for your time.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace, BuildingPH, and HelloWorld projects, with the fabrication and physcomp tags. All featured images for this post care of Jentery Sayers, with the exception of the DHMakerBus image, which is care of “Making at the Market” at dhmakerbus.com.

Makerspaces offer graduate students a chance to consider how the physical spaces in which we interact play a role in shaping the work we do and the skills we develop. While this includes tacit engagement with tools and practices (such as 3D fabrication, microcontroller programming, and photogrammetry, for example), this model can be understood as a technological function of active, engaged learning in a shared space. A good example of how the configurations of such spaces affect our work includes the opportunities afforded to graduate students through the “Hello World!” workshops in the Maker Lab (as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute). Participants in a given workshop were encouraged to both contextualize the material in relation to their own projects and work with others to collaboratively understand how tools and skills taught could be applied across a variety of different research topics and problems.

While those of us who participated in these workshops were fortunate enough to learn from top visiting DH scholars (such as Tanya Clement and Bethany Nowviskie) who led workshops on tools that they had helped develop at their home institutions, other workshops were led by graduate students teaching tools that they themselves had recently begun using. The involved, haptic nature of work in these workshops functioned according to a kind of “first hack, then yack” model for teaching: facilitators first hacked the tool (i.e., approach a new tool with a mind towards teaching others about it), then talked to participants about what this hands-on experience yielded in their own attempts. The workshop thus became a space where this process of hacking the tool was re-performed by participants. The result of these workshops has become a space where learning happens by interaction and collaboration—a pedagogy influenced by the maker model that can inform future teaching practices. In short, in the context of constantly evolving digital economies within humanities and social sciences programs, makerspaces offer an effective new model for graduate students to engage with their work at the level of both physical and conceptual environments.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the Makerspace and HelloWorld projects, with the physcomp and fabrication tags. Featured video for this post created by Nina Belojevic, Arthur Hain, Shaun Macpherson, Katie Tanigawa, and the Maker Lab in the Humanities. Thank you, Cathy Davidson, Derek Jacoby, Kari Kraus, Tara McPherson, and Bethany Nowviskie, for your contributions to the video.

An extension of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the “Hello World” workshops are intended for graduate students at UVic, giving them opportunities to get their hands dirty in digital methods unfamiliar to them. The facilitators assume no technical competencies or previous experience with the workshop material. All workshops last approximately one hour and are open to the first eight graduate students who email maker@uvic.ca to register. Should demand exceed workshop capacity, the Maker Lab will keep a wait list of interested students. Just prior to the workshop, it will also contact all registrants by email in order to confirm attendance and provide workshop details (e.g., what materials, if any, registrants should bring to the workshop). Please contact the Maker Lab’s director, Jentery Sayers (maker@uvic.ca), with any questions or concerns.

“Stitching 2D into 3D: An Introduction to Photogrammetry”

Jentery Sayers (UVic English) | Thursday, April 11th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./sayers.pdf

This workshop guides participants through the use of 2D photography to produce 3D models of physical objects. Participants also have the opportunity to survey techniques for repairing, manipulating, and printing 3D models. To register, email the Maker Lab.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news and fabrication tags. Featured images for this post care of Jentery Sayers, who photographed 3D prints in the Maker Lab.

Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, U. of Texas at Austin) | Wednesday, March 6th | 3-4 pm | Maker Lab (TEF 243)
./clement.pdf

This workshop will introduce ProseVis, a tool that allows readers to discover aural features across literary texts. A SEASR tool, ProseVis makes prosodic features of literary texts discoverable by overlaying data produced by OpenMary, a text-to-speech application tool for extracting aural features and instance-based predictive modeling features as color codes on the original text.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news tag. Featured video for this post produced by Arthur Hain, with signed releases from all workshop participants.