Iteration 1: Gears and motors

The first design emerged from discussions between Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, and me. At this point, we had little more than a handful of images of Trouvé’s “bijoux électriques.” In fact, our focus at the time was on creating a prototype of a Kit that recreated Trouvé’s illuminated jewels. (Nina and I had previously presented a version of the Kit with a prototype of an illuminated hairpin at the Western Humanities Alliance 2013 meeting at the University of California at San Diego, and she and Jentery presented another version of it at HASTAC 2014 in Lima, Peru.)

We originally conceived of a Kit with several jewelry pieces, including the illuminated hairpin and skull stick-pin. Katie first approached the stick-pin mechanism in the context of Trouvé’s watchmaking background. She used Cornell University’s Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) to design several gear system prototypes for the skull in sketch, digital model, and paper form. She then published her early sketches and ideas on the design. KMODDL’s library of geared systems was a useful resource for considering many different ways to think of how a geared system might work in the piece. It also provided detailed models that we adapted for prototyping purposes. (Below is an example of a paper prototype Katie constructed.)

Building on Katie’s work, Nicole Clouston adapted existing designs in the MLab for use in the skull and made several geared system models using CAD software. For the purposes of historical precision, she also hand-carved a version of the skull in basswood that we then digitized using a structured-light scanner. I adapted this scanned model to make room for the interior mechanisms and later fabricated versions of it using the MLab’s 3D printer, desktop miller, and laser cutter.

Iteration 2: Magnets

Once we printed a handful of gears and tried constructing the mechanism at scale, we realized our approach wasn’t going to work. Given the size of the skull (height: 9.2 cm, width: 1.5 cm, depth: 1.6 cm) on the original pin, the design required a tiny geared motor (comparable in size to the motors used to vibrate pagers or cell phones), which we do not believe was available during Trouvé’s time. We also did not have access to materials allowing us to make parts at that scale, and—perhaps most important—we also considered the assembly of the gear design too complex for the Kit‘s audiences to manage.

After some more research on Trouvé’s life and works, as well as conversations with William J. Turkel, Devon Elliott, and Edward Jones-Imhotep, we shifted our attention to telegraphy, which likely inspired Trouvé’s methods. For this design, I prototyped a simple telegraph sounder and—for comparative purposes—a solenoid switch as well.

The idea was that a small electromagnet could be placed inside the skull, and the jaw could act as the armature with a small hammer that, once attracted to the magnet, causes the action of the jaw to swing upwards towards the eye sockets. The added benefit of this mechanism is that the action of the magnet results in an audible “clack” sound, perfect for a teeth-gnashing motion and in many ways comparable to the sounds of a telegraph. I designed the solenoid circuit as well because it utilized the same amount of current as a telegraph sounder yet resulted in a slightly different behaviour. In the solenoid, a plunger is pulled into a magnetized shaft. With a plunger attached to the jaw, the solenoid allows for greater range of motion, meaning the jaw would be free to swing more, albeit at the cost of some of the clacking sound.

At this point, we used the MLab’s laser cutter and milling machine to rapidly prototype designs across a variety of materials. For the purposes of testing, I milled most of the parts in acrylic and installed a solenoid in the skull. Our first working prototype was complete!

Iteration 3: Interrupter Bell

While the solenoid skull worked, its mechanism was unreliable. (I credit this more to shoddy design on my part than to the feasibility of the actual mechanism.) In the interests of improving the prototype, the team felt compelled to return to the diagrams of Trouvé’s electro-mobile jewelry and consider new approaches. We also contacted the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose collection includes one of the only extant electro-mobile stick-pins. The Museum kindly supplied us with additional information that allowed us to add some nuance to our approach. Here is a sketch of a prototype we developed after our conversations with the Museum.

But later, Devon Elliott, Jentery and I pieced together a third idea: a self-oscillating electromagnet configuration resembling that found in an interrupter bell, which is similar to a telegraph sounder. (See the public domain GIF below for an example.)

Animation that demonstrates the mechanism in an electric bell (image in the public domain).

In this version, the armature is replaced by the jaw, with a lever attached to the hinge that also controls the movement of the eyes. As long as the lever attached to the jaw is touching the pin (which is connected to a lead on the battery), the circuit is live, causing the magnet to attract the lever, which in turn forces the jaw closed and the eyes down. This force also breaks the circuit, thereby causing the magnet to stop attracting the lever. Thus there is an oscillation between an on and off or a “jaw-up” and “jaw-down” state. My most recent work on the skull involved making a large model of this electromagnetic mechanism and designing the lever system using CAD software. Images of both are below.

Conclusion

While this aspect of the Kits project is not quite complete, I feel proud of how it has progressed, not only due to the various insights afforded by the designs, but also because of the methodological approaches we developed in order to speculate about the particulars of media history. The work has amounted to a close reading of technology: in the absence of first-hand knowledge, we have taken an historically informed approach to deciphering a mechanism and experimenting with versions of it. Perhaps even more important, the Kits’ collaborative research model has proven both invaluable and absolutely necessary to creating prototypes that balance technical particulars with historical, cultural, creative, and conjectural methods.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images, sketches, and videos for this post care of Shaun Macpherson, Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, Danielle Morgan, and the Maker Lab, except where otherwise noted.

The skull model for the Trouvé pin, carved by Nicole Clouston, resting on the servo-driven turntable. The HDI 120 3D scanner uses structured-light, blue-LED technology to take high resolution images of the object as the turntable spins.

The wireframe model of the scanned skull, as seen in Rhinoceros. The yellow rectangle represents the inset for the closeup view of the polygon detail (see next image).

The inset view of the skull’s wireframe model, as seen in Rhinoceros. The final 3D model contains over 7.74 million polygons.

While we still have a lot to learn to fully utilize the features and capabilities of this scanner, we’ve begun digitizing models for our early wearables kit, starting with the wooden skull carved by Nicole last semester. Below are a few shots of the process of scanning the skull, mandible, and crossbone that will be used to remake Gustave Trouvé’s stickpin.

The setup for scanning objects on the turntable. The scanner is in the foreground, connected to a PC workstation.

The HDI 120 scanner taking high-resolution images of the object.

Danielle and I working together to scan the crossbone.

Once the scans were completed, the 3D models were exported as STL and OBJ files. These files will be modified for reproduction on another one of the lab’s new pieces of equipment (a Roland SRM-20 milling machine) in the weeks to come.

The rendered 3D model of the scanned skull, as seen in Rhinoceros. The scanning software used with the HDI 120 is FlexScan3D.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture and Makerspace projects, with the physcomp and fabrication tags. Featured images for this post care of Shaun Macpherson.

Basically, a telegraph consists of an electromagnetic coil connected in a circuit with a low-voltage power source. An armature is positioned in proximity to the coil, and when the circuit is closed, the electromagnet is activated and the armature is attracted to it, causing an audible “click” noise. A metal key or button is used to close the circuit. The benefits of this device are that the mechanism can be made small (appropriate if we hope to approach the roughly two-centimetre diameter of the original piece) and that it makes the click sound when activated by a button, which could be concealed in the wearer’s pocket alongside a battery pack (as we believe was done during the late Victorian period).

One of the constraints of the telegraph mechanism, however, is that the armature of the telegraph needs to be positioned close enough to the magnet to be attracted by the magnetic force—generally within a couple of millimetres. This means that, while the gnashing jaw motion will produce audible feedback, its visual feedback would likely be less perceptible. To get around this problem, I also built a prototype for a solenoid circuit. Similar to a telegraph, a solenoid electromagnetically attracts an armature, only in this case the magnetic coil is wrapped around a tube and the armature is drawn through it. This affords a far greater range of motion for the armature and also maintains the audible clicking sound.

I made a video demonstrating the two pieces:

As for which mechanism more accurately reflects the one Trouvé (allegedly) used in the original pin, in the absence of access to the physical artifact this decision is a matter mostly left to historical and technical conjecture. As Jentery noted in his recent post, this research is in the context of using our limited knowledge of the original artifact as a point of study of the scientific, technological, and cultural conditions in which Trouvé conducted his work. In this case, both the telegraph and solenoid will be developed further as possible additions to the final circulated device and the Early Wearables Kit.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the physcomp and fabrication tags. Featured image and video for this post care of Shaun Macpherson.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the Makerspace category, with the news tag. Image for this post courtesy of Jillian Westby and Nexus.

September 2012

View of the Maker Lab from outside its front door

The MLab Opens Its Doors: When the MLab first opened in September 2012, there was already a burgeoning team, including lab director, Jentery Sayers; MVP Director, Stephen Ross; and HASTAC scholars, Alex Christie, Mikka Jacobsen, Shaun Macpherson, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa. These members brought their diverse skills and research backgrounds to the MLab, and all were committed to expanding not only the work of the MLab itself, but also the idea of a space for collaborative humanities work.

October 2012

Shaun and Mikka working on the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit in the MLab

Projects Begin: October marked the beginning of many of the MLab’s major projects for the 2012–13 academic year, including the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit, the Year of Ulysses project (with the Modernist Versions Project), and The Crocodile Cafe Exhibit. In the best possible way, these projects differed significantly, sparking some exciting interdisciplinary research in the MLab.

November 2012

Shaun at the “Hello World” workshop on visual programming

“Hello World” Series Launches: As an extension of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and with support from the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the MLab launched a series of educational workshops, starting with Shaun’s “Max/MSP: An Introduction to Visual Programming,” followed closely by “Collating Your Texts: Using Juxta to Identify Textual Variants,” which was facilitated by Stephen Ross and Matt Huculak. From the start, these workshops brought people from across campus into the MLab to see what we were doing and how. Given its success, this series has continued into the 2014-15 academic year.

December 2012

In the MLab, a poster for the “Long-Term Thinking” panel

MLab Co-Organizes Panel with George Dyson: With the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the MLab co-organized a panel on “Long-Term Thinking with Technologies,” which speculated about how technologies, new media, and culture might change in the future. The panel featured notable science historian, George Dyson, together with Barbara Bordalejo (English, U. of Saskatchewan), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Anthropology), Jeffrey Foss (Philosophy), David Leach (Writing), Victoria Wyatt (History in Art), and Jentery. During his visit to Victoria, Dyson also received an Honorary Doctor of Laws and gave the President’s Distinguished Lecture.

January 2013

Tweet from Aaron Mauro, announcing the ETCL’s HASTAC panel

HASTAC Scholars Panel Brown Bag Speakers Series: Alex and Jana participated in the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory‘s Brown Bag Speaker Series, discussing their research as graduate students working in humanities lab environments.

MLab at MLA: Jentery travelled to Boston for the 2013 Modern Language Association‘s annual convention. There, building upon some MLab projects for example material, he facilitated “Digital Scholarly Composition with Scalar” for the “Get Started in Digital Humanities” workshop. He also presented “Linked Open Data for New Modernist Studies” during the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) panel titled, “Open Sesame.” This talk was based on research he was conducting with Stephen Ross and the Modernist Versions Project. Travis Brown (Maryland), Johanna Drucker (UCLA), Eric Rochester (UVa), Geoffrey Rockwell (Alberta), and Susan Schreibman (Trinity College, Dublin) also presented on the ACH panel, with Susan Brown (Guelph) presiding.

February 2013

Katie Tanigawa facilitates a “Hello World” workshop in the MLab

“Hello World” Workshops Continue: The “Hello World” workshops continued in the new year with “How to Data Model an Object,” facilitated by Jana in January, and “Visualizing Data Using XML and the Mandala Browser,” by Katie T. in February.

MLab Mentioned in Watters’s ELI Keynote: With a focus on campus makerspaces, educational technology researcher, Audrey Watters, mentioned the MLab in her keynote at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting.

March 2013

In the MLab, posters for March 2013 talks by Tanya Clement and Bethany Nowviskie at UVic

Tanya Clement’s “Hello World” Workshop: The fifth of seven workshops in the 2012-13 “Hello World” series, titled “Distant Listening: Discovering Sound Patterns with ProseVis,” was facilitated by visiting scholar, Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin). Clement also gave an outstanding talk on campus that day.

Bethany Nowviskie Visits UVic: As a part of UVic’s Lansdowne Lecture series, and hosted in conjunction with the University’s Digital Humanities Committee, Bethany Nowviskie (Director of Digital Research and Scholarship, University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab) gave a compelling talk, “Praxis Makes Perfect: New Models for Learning in the Humanities.” She also facilitated the sixth 2012-13 “Hello World” workshop in McPherson Library, where she guided a packed room through Neatline, an exhibit-building tool developed at the Scholars’ Lab.

April 2013

Nina and Alex presenting at HASTAC 2013 in Toronto

HASTAC Presentations: A number of MLab members, including Nina, Alex, Jentery, and Katie, presented at the HASTAC conference at York University (the first HASTAC conference in Canada), giving papers as well as co-organizing a pop-up makerspace with the Ontario Augmented Reality Network (OARN) and Western University’s Lab for Humanistic Fabrication.

MLab CFUV Interviews: Jentery was invited to speak on “Post Everything,” a program on UVic’s campus radio station, CFUV. During the interview, he talked about 3D printing, physical computing, and other forms of fabrication and how they open up new avenues of inquiry in humanities research. Meanwhile, Shaun was invited to speak about his graduate research on the intersections of maker culture, critical theory, and the cultural construction of interfaces on CFUV’s “Beyond the Jargon.”

MLab participates in Day of DH 2013: Several MLab members participated in Day of DH 2013, an annual event in which DH practitioners from around the world offer a snapshot of the DH-related projects they are working on. Shaun blogged about desktop fabrication and planning a popup makerspace at HASTAC 2013; Katie T. wrote about working with Alex to create geo-temporal maps of James Joyce’s Dublin; Nina wrote about her Hyperlit prototype and creating a project portfolio; Arthur wrote about 3D modelling a stereoscope; Jana wrote about tagging the poems of Audrey Alexandra Brown; and Jentery wrote about planning the HASTAC trip, organizing a Public Humanities lecture series with Nina, and prepping for his upcoming photogrammetry workshop.

Final “Hello World” Workshop: The “Hello World” workshop series ended on a high note with “Stitching 2D into 3D: An Introduction to Photogrammetry,” which Jentery facilitated. This session explored the possibilities of 3D modeling and printing for historical research.

May 2013

SSHRC Storytellers from left to right: Shaun, Adèle, Katie T., and Arthur (top row), Mikka and Jana (bottom row)

MLab Team Wins SSHRC Video Contest: MLab team members Adèle, Nina, Alex, Arthur, Mikka, Shaun, Jana, and Katie T. won the SSHRC “Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers” contest with their video, “Recovering the Local: A Digital Literary Exhibit on Audrey Alexandra Brown.” The SSHRC video contest included a prize of $3,000 per winning team.

The Long Now of Ulysses Launch: After months of development, the Long Now of Ulysses exhibit began. With support from the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, the University of Victoria Library, and the University of Victoria Art Collections, graduate students from Stephen’s English 560 seminar on the modernist novel and Jentery’s English 507 seminar on digital literary studies developed and launched the exhibit online and at the Maltwood Gallery in McPherson Library. For Editing Modernism in Canada, Amanda Hansen published a short piece on the exhibit, and several local news outlets covered the event.

The MLab’s Website Goes Live: After months of writing, organizing, editing, backing-up, re-editing, re-backing up, and arguing about web design, the Maker Lab site went live at last! Since its launch, the site has been visited by people in over 100 different countries, with thousands of pageviews per month.

IJLM Publication: Jentery, the MLab, and seven students from the 2012 English 507 graduate seminar on digital literary studies saw their co-authored Scalar article, “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications,” published by MIT Press in the peer-reviewed venue, International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM). The piece demonstrated how Scalar can be used as both a multimodal pedagogical tool and a research platform, and it included commentary and analysis written by all the authors.

June 2013

Edward Jones-Imhotep (center) and Jacqueline Wernimont (right) building a 3D printer at DHSI

MLab Participates in DHSI 2013: Many MLab members participated in workshops at the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), hosted by UVic every year. Jentery co-taught the “Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication” course with William J. Turkel and Devon Elliott.

MLab Presents at Congress 2013: Adèle, Nina, Alex, Jana, Stephen, Jentery, and Katie T. presented during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, “Canada’s largest academic gathering,” held at UVic during the first week of June.

MLab Gets Mentions: The MLab was mentioned on several notable websites: Maker Bridges mentioned it in a post on “Makerspaces in Academia;” Steven E. Jones mentioned the MLab and embedded an MLab video on the website for his book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities; and ProfHacker mentioned Jentery’s presentation, “Portable, Tacit, Temporary: Popup Makerspaces in the Humanities,” which he gave at the “DH Innovations: Lab Based Environments in the Humanities” symposium at Vancouver Island University.

July 2013

Photograph of Brian Croxall taken during the “From 2D to 3D” workshop at DH 2013 in Nebraska

MLab at DH 2013: At the annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, Jentery presented a paper (“Made to Make: Expanding Digital Humanities through Desktop Fabrication”) and facilitated a workshop (“From 2D to 3D: An Introduction to Desktop Fabrication”). Both featured the MLab’s desktop fabrication research and were conducted in collaboration with Devon Elliott (Western University) and Jeremy Boggs (University of Virginia).

Rhetoric Society of America Interviews Jentery: Focusing on the topic of makerspaces, John W. Pell with the Rhetoric Society of Amercia interviewed Jentery about the MLab and its “collaborative, embodied work” for The Blogora.

August 2013

Slide from Jentery’s TEMiC 2013 talk at UBCO

MLab at TEMiC 2013: Jentery gave a talk titled, “Editing, Annotating, and Discovering Historical Audio,” at the Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) 2013 meeting hosted by the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. This talk was based in part on some of the MLab’s scholarly exhibit research, including its work with historical audio.

September 2013

Image from Belojevic and Johnson’s HyperLit project, which was awarded the 2012-13 Praxis Award

MLab Team Members Win Praxis Awards: Nina, Alex, Jon, and Katie T. each received the Digital Humanities Praxis Innovation Award for demonstrating “scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication” with their collaborative projects, “HyperLit: A Gameful Design Model for a Social Edition” (Nina and Jon) and “Dislocating Ulysses“ (Alex and Katie).

MLab Welcomes New Team Members: The MLab’s second year welcomed the addition of several new team members, while many previous members remained. The new members were Patrick Close, Laura Dosky, Jon Johnson, Stefan Krescy, Nancy McWhirter, Katie McQueston, Keddy Pavlik, Zaqir Virani, and Karly Wilson.

MLab at the University of Kansas: Jentery was one of the keynote speakers at the Digital Humanities Forum 2013 hosted by the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. He gave a talk titled, “Fabrications, or How to Lie with Computer Vision.” During the talk, he walked audiences through the MLab’s Z-Axis research with Implementing New Knowledge Environments and the Modernist Versions Project.

Alex and Katie Present at MSA: Alex and Katie T. presented at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Brighton during a roundtable session on modernism and interdisciplinarity.

MLab Hosts merritt kopas: As a part of the “Building Public Humanities” project, and with support from the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, merritt kopas came to UVic to give a talk and workshop. Both the workshop and the talk were full of interested students and profs from across the disciplines.

MLab Awarded SSHRC Insight Grant: In perhaps the biggest news of the year for the MLab, Jentery Sayers, in collaboration with William J. Turkel (Western University), received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant. The Grant was awarded to fund “Humanities Physical Computing and Fabrication for Cultural History” for four years (2013-17). Work began almost immediately on the Kits for Cultural History, the primary project supported by the grant.

Nina and Jentery Present at INKE NYU: Nina and Jentery traveled to New York University to present their paper, “Prototyping Personas for Open, Networked Peer Review,” at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments conference. A revised and developed version of this talk was later published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. 

MLab Video Included in North Carolina State Syllabus: A video project led by Shaun and produced with other members of the MLab was included in the course syllabus (under the section “Making”) for Paul Fyfe’s Fall 2013 ENG582-003 course (“Studies in Digital Humanities”) at North Carolina State University.

MLab Mentioned in Prince George Citizen: In an article about the Two Rivers Gallery, the Prince George Citizen cited the MLab as an example of a growing “global movement” of labs and spaces devoted to research projects and explorations that utilize a maker approach.

October 2013

“Tinkering with Scholarship” piece in the Times Colonist

MLab in the Times Colonist: The MLab was featured in a Times Colonist article titled, “Tinkering With Scholarship.” The article was part of a series of pieces written on UVic research; it describes how the MLab blends humanities research with the collaborative makerspace model.

MLab Team Members Start Working on NANO Special Issue: MLab team members Adèle, Alex, Jana, Stephen, Jentery, and Katie T. were invited by New American Notes Online (or NANO) to be the guest editors of a special issue on digital humanities and public humanities.

Jentery Presents in Seattle: Jentery traveled to Seattle as the keynote speaker for the TYCA-PNW & Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association Joint Annual Conference. His talk, “Why Do Makerspaces Matter for the Humanities? For Writing Centers?,” discussed the practicalities and appeal of maker culture beyond its trendy status.

MLab Inspires UWGB Course: Taking the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History project as the “inspiration” for a project called “Cultural History Kit,” Chuck Rybak developed an assignment for a class he taught through the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay’s Commons for the Digital and Public Humanities.

Laura Publishes “Digital Publishing in Analog” with MediaCommons: In this piece, Laura describes the importance of maintaining an awareness of the “analog” materials that underscore much digital scholarship and research, including the MLab’s work on scholarly exhibits.

November 2013

Nina and Shaun presenting during the WHA conference at UC San Diego

Nina and Shaun Present at WHA Conference: Nina and Shaun travelled to the University of California, San Diego for the Western Humanities Alliance (WHA) Annual Meeting, where they gave a lightning presentation that featured an electronic poster and early prototype of the Kits for Cultural History Early Wearables project.

UVic Torch Mentions Maker Lab: UVic’s alumni magazine, Torch, mentioned the MLab in their Autumn 2013 issue. The article features the Victoria Makerspace and the MLab showing how the maker ethos can be applied to academia.

Sayers and Dietrich Published in Digital Studies: The online journal, Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, published “After the Document Model for Scholarly Communication: Some Considerations for Authoring with Rich Media,” an article by Jentery and Craig Dietrich (Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California). The article discusses the platforms, ThoughtMesh and Scalar, and how each can be utilized for digital communications that expand our understanding of scholarship.

MLab Hosts Lynne Siemens: For the second part of the “Building Public Humanities” series, presented by the MLab in conjunction with the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, Lynne Siemens gave a workshop on “Public Humanities Project Management.” It was well-attended by graduate students interested in gaining insight into what it takes to develop, define, plan, and manage public projects.

More Nods for MLab Projects: The Z-Axis research was mentioned in Whitney Trettien’s blog post “Towards a Prototype of Digital Harmony” on the relation of digital editions to maps, and Ryan Hunt mentioned the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History in “An Introduction to Maker Culture for Historians,” as an example of the effective applications of maker culture in academic settings.

December 2013

A warped map, by Katie and Alex, from the Z-Axis project

Katie T.’s “Mudbox” Post Selected by DHNow: Katie T.’s piece, “Warping the City: Joyce in a Mudbox,” which describes the Z-Axis project, received an Editors’ Choice at Digital Humanities Now.

MLab in “Faces of UVic” Video: Jentery was invited to speak about his research and the MLab’s projects in UVic’s YouTube series, “Faces of UVic Research.” In the video, Jentery discusses the ways that the explorations of technology undertaken in the MLab help to further historical research.

January 2014

Nicole, Alex, Karly, Stefan, Zaqir, Emma, Laura, and Nina at the Paper Speaker workshop

Katie M. Conducts a Paper Speaker Workshop: During the MLab’s “Hello World” series, Katie M.’s “DIY Paper Speaker” workshop guided participants through how to build a speaker out of paper and copper coil, as well as a simple amplifier circuit. Using her well-designed instruction manual, workshop participants were soon filling the room with the tinny sounds of paper-amplified tunes.

Jentery Publishes “Making the Perfect Record” in American Literature: With support from Duke University Press, Jentery published “Making the Perfect Record” (open access) in the journal, American Literature. The article draws from his research on early magnetic recording, and it was part of a special issue on new media and literature. It was authored and published in Scalar, and it ultimately influenced how the MLab approached its various Scalar projects.

February 2014

Photograph taken by Alex during the MLab’s trip to INKE Whistler

MLab Researchers Present at INKE Whistler Conference: Nina, Alex, Stephen, Jentery, and our colleagues at the ETCL all traveled to beautiful Whistler, BC, for the annual INKE gathering, where everyone also gave a talk. The title of this year’s gathering was “Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing.”

MLab Co-Hosts Doran Larson: As a part of the “Building Public Humanities” project, and with help from the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, Hamilton College’s Doran Larson came to UVic to deliver his presentation, “Bearing Digital Witness: The Humanities and the American Prison Complex.” The talk centred on social justice issues in the U.S. prison system and described his book project, an edited collection of 71 essays written by inmates in the American prison system.

“Hello World” Series Welcomes Ed Chang: Drew University’s Edmond Y. Chang was sponsored by both the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory and the MLab to give a talk titled, “Queer Games, Straight Design,” as well as a workshop on “Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality,” which explored strategies for using video games in the classroom to talk about race, sexuality, gender, and power. Both the talk and workshop featured fascinating and engaging discussions.

Davidson and Jagoda Mention the MLab: With Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago), Cathy N. Davidson (Graduate Center, CUNY)—who is a co-founder of HASTAC and member of President Obama’s National Humanities Council—mentioned the MLab while discussing digital humanities innovations. In particular, Jagoda and Davidson cited the MLab as an example of how the “lab” model has led to “renewed public interest—and confidence—in the academic humanities.”

March 2014

Katie M., Keddy, and Heather at IdeaFest 2014

“Book Nerds in a Lab”: MLab Does Ideafest: Taking the opportunity to connect with people across campus and the larger Victoria community, MLab participated in Ideafest 2014, UVic’s annual “festival of research.” Team members from the MLab’s different research projects—Z-Axis, Kits for Cultural History, and the Year of Ulysses (YoU)—displayed their work and discussed it with some of the 4,000+ attendees of the week-long event.

MLab Receives CFI/FCI Support: March 2014 was brimming with good news. From the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) / Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation (FCI)’s  John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the MLab received support for its research proposal, “The Makerspace for Desktop Fabrication and Physical Computing in the Humanities.” This proposal was created in partnership with the Department of English at UVic and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

Kits for Cultural History at SCMS: Jentery traveled to Seattle for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ (SCMS) annual conference, where he gave a paper titled, “Kits for Cultural History: Applied Approaches to Old Media and Mechanisms,” and participated in a panel (with Anne Balsamo, Shannon Mattern, Paulina Mickiewicz, and Patrik Svensson) titled, “From Libraries to Labs: Spaces of Media Access, Making, and Learning.”

 April 2014

Nina, Shaun, and Katie in the Barranco District of Lima

MLab team at HASTAC 2014 in Lima: Nina, Katie M., Shaun, and Jentery traveled to Lima, Peru, for the sixth annual HASTAC conference in Lima, Peru. Fun was had, ceviche was consumed, and the team hosted a popup makerspace, “Whose Hand am I Holding, Anyway?” Nina and Jentery also presented a paper, “Making a Kit for Cultural History,” in which they discussed the conceptual framework for the Early Wearables Kit.

MLab Featured in University Affairs: University Affairs (UA), Canada’s leading journal providing information “about and for Canada’s universities,” published a feature article about the MLab in both its print and online editions. The piece, “Exploring the Humanities Through Unique Makerspaces,” describes the lab as a pioneer in the “blending [of] ‘makerspace ethos’ with the humanities.”

Nina and Shaun’s CFUV Interview: Nina and Shaun were invited for an interview with CFUV’s show, “Doers, Makers, Thinkers.” In the interview, they discussed how their graduate research was shaped by their work at the MLab.

MLab Referenced by SUNYIT: SUNYIT at Utica/Rome’s MakeIT initiative listed the MLab in a list of resources of “Making Across Disciplines.” The MLab is listed alongside the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the California College of the Arts, among others.

May 2014

In 2014, the MLab received support from the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund

MLab Receives BCKDF Support: More good news! The MLab was awarded a British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund grant for “The Makerspace for Desktop Fabrication and Physical Computing in the Humanities.” As with the CFI/FCI award, the proposal was created in partnership with the Department of English at UVic and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

June 2014

Visual summary of Jentery’s ETUG keynote by Jason Toal and Tracy Kelly

MLab at ETUG: Traveling to Langara College in Vancouver for the Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) spring workshop, Jentery gave the keynote, “Make, Not Brand: DIY Making after Big Data.” The well-attended talk discussed the concept of “make” beyond the brand, including its origins in DIY culture.

Devon, Jentery, and Bill Teach at DHSI: For the second year, Devon, Jentery, and Bill taught the week-long course, “Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication for Humanists,” at the 2014 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria. Participants in the course gained knowledge and hands-on experience with 3D printing, Max/MSP, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other physical computing tools and technologies. The class even built a MAME cabinet! At the end of the course, Nina and Shaun were invited to join Devon and Jentery to teach physical computing at DHSI 2015.

July 2014

Screen grab of the “Around DH in 80 Days” project, which features the MLab

MLab Gets Mentioned in “Around DH”: The MLab team was absolutely honoured to be featured as Day 27 of “Around DH in 80 Days.” Edited by Alex Gil, the post describes how the MLab “affords its team of graduate students and faculty opportunities to build projects through various modes of knowing by doing.”

Alex Presents at DH 2014 in Switzerland: Alex traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland for DH 2014, where he presented a paper co-written with the INKE-MVP research team. The paper was titled, “Modeling How Modernists Wrote the City.”

MLab Team Publishes Special Issue of NANO: New American Notes Online (NANO) invited members of the MLab to act as guest editors of a special issue: “Digital Humanities, Public Humanities.” Adèle, Alex, Jana, Jentery, and Katie T. all participated in circulating the CFP, selecting from the submissions, providing feedback, editing, and writing the special issue’s introduction. Additionally, Nina’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies,” was selected for publication in the issue.

Year of Ulysses E-Book Published on UVicSpace: Stefan—MLab team member and lead researcher on the Year of Ulysses (YoU) project with the Modernist Versions Project—edited the Twitter conversations around the online, serialized release of Joyce’s Ulysses into an elegant e-book. In total, the book (licensed with Creative Commons) represents over thirteen thousand tweets organized into conversations around each chapter of Joyce’s novel.

August 2014

Materials from the MLab’s prototyping space, including anodized aluminum laser cut with the MLab logo

MLab Makes Room for More Machines: As the MLab entered its third year, it began the process of expanding operations on the Kits for Cultural History project, which included new CNC equipment for prototyping and production. (More details on this front soon!)

September 2014

From the MLab’s Trouvé repo, an image of an illuminated fish experiment

Gustave Trouvé Gets Github: As part of the Kits for Cultural History, Danielle Morgan and the MLab team created a public Github repository of images cropped from Georges Barral’s 1891 biography of Trouvé, Histoire D’Un Inventeur. Danielle also translated the image captions from the original French into English.

Nina and Shaun Named Assistant Directors of the MLab: Congratulations to MLab team members, Nina and Shaun, who were named Assistant Directors of the MLab! Also, a special welcome to new team members, Nicole Clouston, Katherine Goertz, and Danielle Morgan, all of whom are working on the Kits for Cultural History.

Stephen and Jentery Published in Literature Compass: Stephen and Jentery’s article, “Modernism Meets Digital Humanities,” was published in Literature Compass. The article surveys digital humanities approaches to modernism and includes references to the Z-Axis project.

CUNY Mentions Nina’s Publication: In its announcement of the publication of the special issue of New American Notes Online (NANO), City Tech’s website draws specific attention to Nina’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies.” Calling Nina’s essay a “highlight” of the issue, the post writes that she “hacks into Nintendo Entertainment Systems to try to reconfigure play potential.”

MLab Included in Growing List of Syllabi and Resource Lists: As the new school year rolled around, many instructors around the world included the MLab’s website and the work of MLab researchers in their course syllabi and resource lists. These included mentions by Steven E. Jones, for his Media and Culture course at Loyola; Ashley Blacquiere, for his History of Videogame Design course at UVic; Melissa Bailar, for her Introduction to Digital Humanities graduate seminar at Rice; and Steph Ceraso, for her Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Additionally, UCSB’s Alan Liu listed work done by Alex, Katie T., Jana, Stephen, and Jentery in his DH Toybox for students.

Nina and Jentery Published in JEP: Nina and Jentery’s article, “Peer Review Personas,” was published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP). The article presents a prototype that is currently under development by Implementing New Knowledge Environments.

The “Hello World” Series Continues: At the month’s end, the MLab announced it will be conducting a weekend workshop, “Introduction to Programming and Python 3 in the Arts and Humanities,” with support from the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. The workshop will take place during the first weekend of March 2015.

Today

This piece is the 120th piece published at maker.uvic.ca since its launch during our first year. Here’s to 100+ more! Thanks, everyone.

Post by Shaun Macpherson and Karly Wilson, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, physcomp, fabrication, versioning, and exhibits tags. Featured image of Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, and Shaun Macpherson care of the Maker Lab.

At UVic on October 10th, participants will gather together at the Maker Lab (TEF 243), watch a live panel of speakers at CUNY, send questions to the panelists, and contribute (if they wish) to open access documents about writing and defending non-traditional or digital dissertations. Chaired by Cathy N. Davidson, the panel will consist of Jade E. Davis (Communications, University of North Carolina), Dwayne Dixon (Cultural Anthropology, Duke University), Gregory T. Donovan (Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University), Amanda Licastro (English, Graduate Center, CUNY), and Nick Sousanis (Teachers College, Columbia University).

According to Cathy Davidson, the goal of the workshop is “to showcase, celebrate, and model what it takes to not only produce an innovative dissertation but how to enact the institutional change required to have one approved by your university. That means knowing institutional rules, having the right mentors, being willing to explain yourself in terms of existing structures, goals, and aspirations and how your work moves those along, etc. This session is about success strategies.”

The event’s hashtag is #remixthediss, and details about the UVic gathering are below. If you are at UVic, and you would like to participate in the workshop, then please email maker@uvic.ca by Wednesday, October 8th to register. There is no registration fee, and we especially encourage graduate students to register. Space is limited; participants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. All involved are encouraged to bring their laptops, if they have them.

What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media

Friday, October 10th, 1pm – 2:30pm Pacific
Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
Event hasthag: #remixthediss
Register for free (by 8 October) via email to maker@uvic.ca
Send any questions to maker@uvic.ca

We’re looking forward to participating in this event with our partners at UVic, CUNY, Duke, and elsewhere. Hope to see you in the MLab on October 10th!

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the HASTAC project, with the news tag. Images for this post care of HASTAC.

As hoped, proposals were submitted from across the world and from a wide array of disciplines. After peer review, seven articles were accepted for publication. Each of these articles was then edited by an MLab researcher, with Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Jentery, and Katie Tanigawa ultimately co-authoring the issue’s introduction. Among the published articles was Nina Belojevic’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies.” In September 2014, Nina became one of the MLab’s assistant directors.

A screengrab from Nina’s NANO publication (image courtesy of NANO)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

The guest editors for the issue were MLab members, Adèle Barclay, Alex Christie, Jentery Sayers, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa, with feedback from Stephen Ross. NANO founding editor, Sean Scanlan, along with Assistant Editors, Rebecca Devers and Ruth Garcia, also contributed to the issue. Alex, Jana, Jentery, and Katie wrote the introduction to the issue. Other contributors to the issue were Rachel Arteaga, Karl Baumann, Benjamin Stokes, François Bar, Ben Caldwell, Nina Belojevic, Sam Byrd, Jimmy Ghaphery, Elise Chenier, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Sonnet Retman, Angelica Macklin, and Elizabeth Alice Honig. NANO is supported by the New York City College of Technology.

Project Status

This project was officially completed in August 2014. The NANO issue was published in July 2014, complete with an introduction co-written by the guest editorial team. In an announcement of the issue’s publication, writers for CUNY (which supports NANO) called Nina’s essay a “highlight” of the issue, noting that she “hacks into Nintendo Entertainment Systems to try to reconfigure play potential.”

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the Makerspace project, with the projects tag. Feature image for this post care of NANO. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

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.

Instruction manuals typically function as directions for a reader to execute a procedure or set of procedures. As both historical artifacts and mechanisms for historiography, instruction manuals make arguments, usually without presenting themselves as such. When we use them, we subscribe to a set of assumptions regarding cultural, technical, and intellectual authority. In this sense, they are selective distillations of the technical, cultural, or philosophical knowledge of a purported expert or group of experts. That said, manuals are—especially in the context of technology—rarely understood as ideological; rather, they are treated as instrumental to our engagement with materials. Yet a quick survey of the history of manuals (broadly understood) reveals how they can support, obscure, or reveal the ideologies that congeal around specific procedures.

For instance, the Enchiridion (dated 135 CE) was a guidebook written for the daily practice of Epictetus’s Stoic philosophy. Notably, the word “enchiridion” roughly translates to “that which is held in the hand” and is the basis for the word, “handbook.” When instructing readers to guard against material attachments, the Enchiridion says the following: “with regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things.” Epictetus provides this instruction because there is an ideological consequence for thinking otherwise, namely that “some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are . . . in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are . . . whatever are not our own actions.” Hence, when an object of fondness (such as a prized ceramic cup) is destroyed, the Stoic ideology comes to bear in determining the consequence: people who adhere to such instructions will not be “disturbed” when material objects out of their control are lost. In other words, as instructional material close to hand, the Enchiridion provided a context for readers to readily access and actually understand the motivations for proceeding in a certain way. Still, from early modern “how-to” manuals (such as a guide to tree-grafting written by Leonard Mascall in 1575) to Haynes Manuals for automobile repair to developer’s guides for programming languages, instruction manuals describe procedures without almost ever explaining their significance beyond how to practically address what’s at hand.

My intent here is not to unfold the vexed legacies of manuals, judge their authors and audiences, or assign value judgments to the procedures, conditions, and discourse of practical approaches. Rather, I am suggesting that—regardless of their proclivities for practicality, for immediately dealing with problems at hand—instruction manuals do in fact have the capacity for contextualizing the procedures in which they are so deeply invested. By considering ideology foundational to procedure, even the most clinical manuals can underscore the warrants or assumptions that allow this to become that.

To return, then, to the question of how to approach the pedagogical components of our Kits for Cultural History: when they reconstruct the historical experiments and mechanisms at hand, we do not want our audiences to simply follow instructions. We want them to become equipped with an understanding of how mechanisms and procedures (help us) make arguments, and why the contexts for those mechanisms and procedures matter. At this time, we are unpacking how, exactly, to achieve this aim. In the form of a physical kit, what would it look like? How would it happen?

From our perspective, the pedagogical materials for a given kit should create something like an ambivalent understanding of a historical mechanism—a knowledge invested in the ambiguities and problems it affords, including the multiple and often contradictory ways it can be understood, perceived, and used. Rather than “plug A into B, and voilà,” the kits could say: “This is a diode. This is a circuit. This is how current functions. This is how this part interacts with the whole system. Here is a cultural history of those parts and that system, and here is one approach (among many) to its assembly. The procedures involved in this approach assume the following perspectives, conditions, and effects.” In the case of our “Early Wearables” kit about Trouvé’s electric jewelry, some of the foundational descriptions—intended for humanities practitioners interested in old media and histories of electronics—might read as follows:

Keywords and Key Materials for this Kit
These are some of the components and concepts that will help you make Trouvé’s electric jewelry light up.

Current and Circuits
Electrical current is often described using the metaphor of water’s current. It “flows” from a source to a destination. In the case of this mechanism, the current is created by the battery. The electrons in the current flow from the negative lead to the positive lead. The flow is only possible when there is a complete connection through the “load” (the other things in a circuit) when the ends of the circuit are attached to the positive and negative leads of the electrical source. This is because the current cannot flow without both a source and a destination. In our case, we use stranded wire to create the circuit.

Ohm’s Law and Resistors
Ohm’s law is a simple equation that allows one to calculate missing values in a circuit. It states that voltage (V) equals current (I) multiplied by resistance (R). Returning to the water metaphor, current is the amount of electricity that flows; it is the “volume.” Voltage is the rate at which the voltage flows; it is the “pressure” on the volume. Resistance is just that: the restriction placed on the volume that effects the pressure. In short form, Ohm’s law is V = I x R. In this kit, we will use Ohm’s law to determine which resistor to use in the circuit, and where. The resistor restricts the current, causing a change in voltage on the other side.

Diode
Continuing with the water metaphor, the diode acts as a one-way valve. It requires some “pressure” (i.e., electrical current) to open, and does not allow current to flow in the opposite direction. It is used to “bias” (push in one direction) alternating current circuits, and to protect DC circuits from power surges or other failures in current flow. A light-emitting diode (LED) is a diode that generates a concentrated level of light when current flows through it.

Switch
A switch works to connect or disconnect the circuit. It acts as a sluice gate, stopping or starting the flow of electricity.

While these descriptions are still rough, and they are not historicized or fully contextualized, they are but one aspect of the kits we are building. For now, in this early stage of our research, the important point is that the kits will enable audiences to blend hands-on practice and technical literacy with some self-reflexivity and sense of history. We are also experimenting with ways to write and peer-review scholarly essays through the kits. For instance, an essay about Trouvé and the gender politics of early wearables could at once walk readers through its argument and the assembly of a kit. In this case, media archaeology scholarship could actually perform—and help readers perform—the very procedures it is analyzing, even if we cannot experience the procedures like people did in the 19th century.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture category, with the desktop fabrication and physical computing tags. Image for this post, of the Early Wearables Kit for Cultural History, care of the Maker Lab. 

Updates for this four-year project will be published here, at maker.uvic.ca. Generally speaking, the research is dedicated to mobilizing physical computing and fabrication knowledge through open-source “kits,” or bundles of source code, component parts, prototypes, and process documentation intended to introduce humanities scholars and other interested audiences to the creation and distribution of 3D content according to scholarly recommendations. The central claims of the research are that: 1) matter is a new medium for knowledge production in the humanities, and 2) desktop fabrication and physical computing are central to the future of the past in 3D. Again, updates are forthcoming, and the research team—including (for 2013-14) Sayers, Turkel, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Devon Elliott, Jon Johnson, Shaun Macpherson, Katie McQueston, and Zaqir Virani—will be regularly publishing their research logs. Thank you for checking in!

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Featured image for this post care of Garnet Hertz. The hands belong to Jentery Sayers.