The Maker Lab is very happy to announce that Jentery Sayers and William J. Turkel (Western University) have been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant to fund “Humanities Physical Computing and Fabrication for Cultural History” for a four-year term (2013-17). The grant will support a team of at least seven practitioners (including Sayers and Turkel) conducting physical computing and desktop fabrication research across the University of Victoria and Western University campuses. The support will also allow the team to present their research at conferences, acquire necessary supplies, partner with like-minded researchers (including the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the UW and the MeTA Lab at VIU), and facilitate public events dedicated to collaborative learning and experimentation with technologies and historical materials.
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.
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