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.

Katie Tanigawa (UVic English) | Thursday, February 7th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./tanigawa.pdf

This hands-on workshop will help participants use XML and the Mandala Browser to produce meaningful data visualizations. Participants should bring their own TEI-encoded texts if they have them. Sample TEI will also be provided.

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

Like The Whole Earth, we want the Maker zine to be tools-driven, empowering readers by providing something like a how-to for DH and/or physical computing-related tools and methods. Like The Whole Earth, our zine would be about doing and making—only instead of offering information on, say, beekeeping or building windmills (basically a guide to living off-the-grid), we would teach readers how to interact with technologies in creative, empowering ways: a user’s guide to making. (In this, I guess the project more closely resembles Garnet Hertz’s work with circuit bending and critical making.)

To start with, we’re co-authoring a pilot issue on contact microphones: how to build them, where to find the things you need to make them, what you can do with them, etc. For a number of reasons, the contact mic makes for a good first-issue tool: the components are cheap, the processes are relatively simple, and they can be put to a variety of uses. Conveniently as well, we have a few people in the lab with research interests in sound history and production (for example, see Shaun’s work with DIY and the Croc Cafe or Jentery’s dissertation and book project on the cultural history of magnetic tape).

Most importantly, we want to use the zine to facilitate conversation; we want to find out what readers do with these tools; we want to build a community of makers and innovative users. And for now, it starts with making mics.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication and physical computing tags. Featured images for this post care of Google Images, at images.google.ca; and JrF, at hydrophones.blogspot.com.

Jana Millar Usiskin (UVic English) | Thursday, January 24th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./millarusiskin.pdf

How are objects expressed as data? We’ll use the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to explore how we might describe objects for discovery online. Participants are encouraged to bring a familiar, physical object they want to model.

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.

During our last fortnightly meeting of the Fall term, members of the Maker Lab sat down to collaboratively write a charter of shared values, ethos, nuts and bolts, and research questions. It was a productive (and fun) exercise, but digressions were difficult to avoid; goals like “publicly communicate across media,” “make the digital material (matter),” “work together to create,” and “build research and outreach initiatives that enable our projects to address both scholarly [and non-academic] communities” were occasionally interspersed with (bad) puns like “put the ‘Borat’ in collaboration.” Half-jokingly, under “nuts and bolts” I contributed: “French press, proper lighting as integral to productive lab environment.” Actually, lighting and lamps came up quite a few times during this writing exercise, and it became increasingly unclear which category (real goals/values or jokes?) my comment belonged to. Oddly enough, following the initial writing exercise, lighting was one of the topics we followed up on most in our wrap-up talk. Apparently this was more than an ongoing joke, or misuse of Lab time: [pullquote]the quality of light and configuration of space in the Lab were central concerns for a lot of us here.

Room 243 in the Technology Enterprise Facility is, well, functional . . . We have a workbench for making, where we keep our Maker Bot for 3D printing, soldering iron, tools etc.; a bookshelf that Jentery has generously stocked with various DH and cultural studies materials; whiteboards for brainstorming; computers; workshop posters and schedules on the walls; and as of recently, a coffee grinder and French press. It’s actually a pretty welcoming environment . . . aside from the lack of windows and overhead fluorescent lights. We’ve tackled this issue to a certain degree and have started to accumulate desk lamps, but one of the things I want to do here over the holidays–in addition to video editing, sketching Maker zine ideas, and helping to get the website ready for launch–is to work on improving the ambiance of our collective work environment. Because it matters.

Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life talks about areas of overlap between Bloomsbury writers and Omega Workshops: domestic design and spatial configuration were huge concerns for these artists. Having a room of one’s own (to borrow Woolf’s title) was imperative, but just how does one make it one’s own? Sometime over the next couple of weeks I want to build a series of lamps out of old manual SLR cameras with tripods as stands (a camera tripod seems to me the ideal lamp stand since it can be adjusted to any height and pointed in any direction at any angle). Hopefully some warm lamplight will make up for the lack of natural light, and help contribute to a positive, welcoming, enjoyable, and productive atmosphere. And maybe I exaggerated a bit when I wrote that proper lighting is “integral” to a productive work environment . . . but it helps.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication tag. Featured images for this post by Arthur Hain and Jentery Sayers.

Stephen Ross and J. Matthew Huculak (UVic English) | Friday, Nov. 23 | 12:30 – 1:30pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./ross_huculak.pdf

This workshop introduces participants to the Juxta collation tool. We will spend the first few minutes discussing genetic criticism. In the remaining time, we will walk through the process of using Juxta to ingest texts, identify variants, and visualize differences.

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

Shaun Macpherson (UVic English) | Wednesday, November 7 | 3:30 – 4:30pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./macpherson.pdf

Max/MSP is a visual programming language used for creating music, video, and other media. In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of Max/MSP and MIDI communication and construct a small patch related to some form of media. Participants will need to bring a laptop and have installed the Max/MSP demo ahead of time. (Installation details will be emailed to registrants prior to the workshop.)

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

My job at the lab is in Media and Communications (things like content-editing the Maker site, filming and editing workshops, producing lab-related images and audio, planning and working on the upcoming Maker zine, etc.). The Maker Lab for me presents a tremendous opportunity and challenge to try and reconcile my tastes, ideas, prejudices and preferences in media aesthetics (so much of which are tied to what might be thought of as technological limitations, like film graininess) with new technologies, platforms, and media. Is there room for a touch of Maysles in a 30-second promotional video shot on mini-DV (rather than 16mm) and digitally edited (instead of by hand)? How does one bring old influences into play in new genres and media? Actually, I think the Maker Lab—in its emphasis on materiality, collaboration, and integration of old and new technologies—is particularly well-suited to facilitate this kind of reconciliation, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the DH world, while continuing to pursue my interests in media studies . . . only now in different, newer, digital media.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication tag. Featured image for this post by Arthur Hain, who used an analog camera.