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.

A poster for the event is below, and the talk—“Bearing Digital Witness: The Humanities and the American Prison Complex”—is open to the public. Please spread the word (poster included) to anyone who might be interested.

See you on Tuesday the 25th at 11:30am in ECS 108, everyone! We are thrilled about this event and want to thank Doran Larson for taking the time to visit us.

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

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.

Creative and Critical Approaches to E-Waste

How and to what effects does digital research produce e-waste? And how can faculty, students, and staff at UVic not only become more aware of such waste but also re-purpose it for their creative and critical projects? This conversation will unpack these two questions, with an emphasis on “convivial computing” and the materiality of technologies.

We hope to see you there!

Post by Keddy Pavlik, based on an ETCL post by Matthew Hiebert, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Nina Belojevic.

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.

Topics for the workshops include problem-based modelling, speaking for/with community partners, building and sharing process narratives, producing interoperable data and documentation, social justice action planning, and project management. Importantly, the construction and delivery of the workshops relies on a broad range of expertise and a wide array of investments that allow the inter-professional series to draw from generative differences across perspectives and practices.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

“Building Public Humanities” was organized by Nina Belojevic and Jentery Sayers, both of whom are also the project’s research leads, with contributions from Miriam Bartha (UW Simpson Center), Jon Johnson (UVic English), Lynne Siemens (UVic School of Public Administration), and Katie Tanigawa (UVic English). It was made possible by support from the ETCL, with events and outreach facilitated by the MLab.

Project Status

This project began in 2013-14 and continued through 2014-15. During 2013-14, several “Building Public Humanities” workshops took place on the UVic campus, and information about each was published here at maker.uvic.ca. In 2014, the MLab published “Digital Humanities, Public Humanities,” a special issue of NANO. Additional workshops occurred during the 2014-15 academic year. See details below, and please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the BuildingPH project, with the projects tag. Featured image for this post, of Shaun Macpherson (left) at HASTAC 2013, care of Jentery Sayers. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

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.

Which digital humanities projects are currently engaging contemporary politics and social exclusion, under what assumptions, and through what mechanisms?
How are these projects articulating relationships with their publics and community partners, and through what platforms and forms of collaboration?
How are public humanities projects being preserved, circulated, and exhibited through digital methods? By whom? Using what protocols and technologies?
Does public humanities have “data”? If so, then how is that data defined or structured? If not, then what are some concerns about data-driven research?
What might the histories of digital humanities (however defined) learn from social justice activism, participatory research, context provision, and witnessing?
How are building, making, or coding activities embedded in social justice initiatives?

Across text, image, audio, and video, authors are invited to individually or collaboratively submit notes or brief “reports” detailing projects that work across digital and public humanities, including projects that do not identify with either term. For this issue, a note or “report” implies a submission that, at a minimum:

Focuses on an existing project, which is in development or already live;
Provides screengrabs, screencasts, or snapshots of that project and (where possible) treats them as evidence for an argument about the project;
Intersects questions of computation and technology with questions of culture and social justice; and
Articulates a narrative for the project, including (where applicable) its workflows, motivations, interventions, management, and partners.

Invited by NANO, the editor of this special issue is the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria, including Adèle Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Stephen Ross, Jentery Sayers, and Katie Tanigawa.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: For this special issue, we are accepting submissions across text, image, video, and audio. All submissions should be submitted to both maker@uvic.ca and editor.nanocrit@gmail.com by 11:59pm on 1 October 2013 in your time zone. The body of the email should include your name(s), your affiliation(s), the title of the submission, five keywords describing the submission, and media type(s) and format(s) for the submission. Where possible, the submissions should be attached to the email. Should a submission exceed the email attachment limit, then the body of the email should also include a URL for the submission. The URL should not be discoverable on the web (e.g., it should be behind a passcode-protected wall, in a private cyberlocker, or not visible by search engines). Do not include your name(s) in any file name. Your name(s) should only be included in the body of your email.

If your submission is in text, then it should not exceed 3500 words (DOC(X)s and RTFs are preferred). Up to 15 high-resolution (at least 600 dpi) images are permitted (JPEGs are preferred) per submission. Video submissions should be 3 to 10 minutes in duration (MOVs and MP4s are preferred; minimum resolution: 426 x 400; maximum resolution: 1920 x 1080). Audio essays should also be 3 to 10 minutes in duration (MP3s and WAVs are preferred, encoded at 256 kbit/s or higher). Both audio and video can also be embedded in any text submission (no more than 5 instances of embedded media per submission).

All submissions should follow MLA guidelines for format, in-text citations, and works cited. Please email any questions about the submission guidelines to maker@uvic.ca and editor.nanocrit@gmail.com.

SCHEDULE: Below is a tentative timeline for this special issue:

April 2013: Call for papers
October 1, 2013: Deadline for submissions to maker@uvic.ca and editor.nanocrit@gmail.com
October 2, 2013: Peer review commences
November 1, 2013: Comments by the editors sent to all authors
November 25, 2013: Authors return final, revised submissions to the editors
December 1, 2013: End of peer review process
December 1, 2013: Final versions of selected submissions sent by editors to NANO
December 6, 2013: Publication in NANO

COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS: NANO expects that all submissions contain original work, not extracts or abridgements. Authors may use their NANO material in other publications provided that NANO is acknowledged as the original publisher. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for reproducing copyright text, art, video, or other media. As an academic, peer-reviewed journal, whose mission is education, Fair Use rules of copyright apply to NANO. Please send any questions related to copyright and permissions to editor.nanocrit@gmail.com.

QUESTIONS: Please do not hesitate to contact the Maker Lab in the Humanities (special issue editor) at maker@uvic.ca with any questions or concerns about this special issue. We are looking forward to receiving your contributions to this issue of NANO.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the BuildingPH project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of NANO.