During the week, we also archived all of our Physical Computing and Fabrication course materials with GitHub, including an index file containing the course outline, schedule, and notes. (You can download all of the course materials as a ZIP file.) See you at next year’s Institute, where the team is teaching the course again, with a twist.

Image 1: Yvonne, Jay, Brandon, Kuba, Kathleen, Aaron, and Andrew exhibiting their projects on Friday
Image 2: Kuba and Jay working on their prototypes, with Andrew in the background
Image 3: Physical computing and fabrication projects on display during Friday’s exhibit
Image 4: Padmini working with Brandon on #box, a light-emitting heart corresponding with Twitter hashtags
Image 5: Ethan’s gloom box
Image 6: Aaron’s 3D poetry display, in conversation with Margaret and Andrew’s work on Gertrude Stein
Image 7: Kyle and Tracey talking about their “Tilt Me House” project, with Jay in the background
Image 8: Looking inside Danielle’s remaking of Edison’s Black Maria movie production studio
Image 9: Jay’s weather monitor in progress
Image 10: Nina working with—from foreground to background—Ethan, Danielle, and Kathleen
Image 11: Shaun walking the class through how to trigger behaviours in Arduino

Shaun photographing the class on Friday

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Featured images for this post care of Jentery Sayers.

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.

For the 2013-14 award, students from across the UVic were invited to submit projects (of all types, in a variety of formats) that demonstrate scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication. This year’s two successful projects met or exceeded the following criteria: 1) they were completed within the course of study for an 2013-14 undergraduate or graduate class in any department at UVic; 2) they met the course’s stated learning outcomes or expectations; 3) they demonstrated an innovative use of digital technologies for research, teaching, learning, or communication; and, 4) they blended computational methods with a critical approach to a humanities question or problem.

Baer’s doctoral dissertation, “An Old Norse Image Hoard: From the Analog Past to the Digital Present,” unites the long established field of Old Norse Studies with the emerging field of Digital Humanities. Baer’s work is based on extensive original research of illustrations in manuscript and early print sources that preserve the history of illustrations of Old Norse literature. In addition to exploring the transmission, reception, and remediation of illustrations, Baer’s dissertation documents her creation of an XML digital image repository named MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository). MyNDIR was launched at the UVic’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (June 2013): myndir.uvic.ca. MyNDIR’s model represents a second-generation digital image repository that models academic standards and expands the tools and resources of Digital Humanities. Baer’s dissertation promotes visual literacy, advances knowledge dissemination, and benefits scholars in the fields of Old Norse studies, Book History, Art History, Visual Studies, and Cultural Studies, as well as members of the general public with an interest in Viking gods and heroes.

Lawrence Evalyn’s web-native essay for English 507 (Spring 2014), “Male and Female Gothics: A Computational Approach,” transforms the index of a bibliography into a gallery of graphs in order to investigate the gendered trends behind 70 motifs in 208 eighteenth-century Gothic novels. Resisting simple binaries in both graphic design and literary analysis, it argues that, in the wider perspective of the genre, gendered outliers are generally male, rendering the Female Gothic indistinguishable from the Gothic itself.

For the Award, both of these students will receive a certificate of recognition, together with a 2015 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) scholarship.

Please join us in congratulating this year’s two award winners for their innovative and inspiring research!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag, and cross-posted at etcl.uvic.ca. Featured images for this post care of Trish Baer and Lawrence Evalyn.

The admittedly experimental theme of the popup makerspace was, “Whose Hand Am I Holding Anyway?” We used the space’s temporary infrastructure to draw public attention to the intricate relationships between bodies, data, immediacy, and distance in a “global” digital economy. We first cast hands in plaster and then—with anyone who stumbled upon the space—created silicon proxies of those hands. The proxies were embedded with sensors, and later in the conference we wrote an Arduino sketch to not only log when the sensors were triggered but also display messages via a serial readout. Conference participants could shake hands with these rather defamiliarizing proxies, an often amusing encounter that was immediately confirmed on a screen in the space. The handshake data was then logged so that we’d know, by the conference’s conclusion, how many people the proxies had “met.”

We also used the proxies to teach Arduino-based programming and “hands-on” prototyping, having a bit of fun with the hand as a fetish in maker communities. These creative activities also became opportunities to have some fascinating and lively conversations with people from around the world, including various regions of Peru, about the Internet of Things, data surveillance, the politics of making, material culture, and—more generally—the abstraction of data from bodies and social relations.

In short, our makerspace demonstration sought to provide a simplified example of how—as our behaviours are tracked, logged, and rendered value-productive across “intelligent” networks of communication—our very understanding of bodies and their edges is muddled. This scenario is cause for both fascination and concern.

A proxy together with a printed description of “Whose Hand Am I Holding Anyway?” at HASTAC 2014

Post by Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, Katie McQueston, and Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace and HASTAC projects, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Images for this post care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, Katie McQueston, and Jentery Sayers.

Instructions

Inspired by Shaun’s post on instruction manuals, our motive has been to not only define each component of the circuit, but to also simplify and give context for every step (graphically, wherever possible) in the most persuasive way. Our intent is that, through the kits, people will gain a foundational understanding of not just how a speaker works; they will also develop a sense of how circuits are designed and, more importantly, how and why each part of the structure is deemed optimal for the desired output (in this case, sound). Our hope is that people will be prompted to create their own circuit designs and question, complicate, or improve upon the principles outlined in the kits. Resonating in part with the aesthetic of Forrest Mims, this platform allows a given researcher to acquire an in-depth understanding of the principles of electronics and accompanying mechanisms. It also demands embodied activities that are difficult (if not impossible) to enact through screen-based interactions or symbolic logic alone.

Why a Speaker?

A speaker is an interesting subject for this kit for a few reasons, predominantly its simple analog composition. This territory was a good starting point for humanities scholars interested in circuit building. Some analog components of technology outlast digitization, whereas most have been gutted from contemporary electronic objects. Given that analog components are necessary to bridge the gap between humans and computers, they tend to remain on the outermost casing of technological objects. A speaker is one of those lasting analog components, as the functions of analog components have been reduced to human-computer translators. These are components that simulate and synthesize the human senses for the purposes of computation. For example, aside from speakers, consider the ubiquity of buttons and LED indicators in present day technologies. The simplified DIY nature of our speaker, which includes no pre-fabricated elements, allows people to not only participate in the build, but also—through a kit, its materials, and its inevitable limitations—fail, struggle, or get frustrated with the stuff at hand. This failure (or threat of failure), as well as the understanding that parts (not wholes) ultimately comprise the technological sphere, allows us to dismantle the assumptions at work in “black boxing” technologies.

The Amplifier

The amplifier was not included in our initial kit design, but its incorporation does two important things. First, it serves as a visible transition between the digital input of the audio signal (e.g., from an MP3 player) to the handmade speaker, and thus encourages a better understanding of the transfer of energy within a circuit. Second, it allows the participant to partake in physically building a multi-component circuit. It inevitably incorporates the principles of electricity, such as flow, resistance, electrostatic storage, magnetic fields, integrated circuits, voltage input, etc. The amplifier also introduces a less abstract approach to circuitry than the speaker in that it closely resembles the guts of electronic objects familiar to most people, solidifying (or so we hope) the link between themselves and the manufacturers of technological objects. Moreover, the kit allows people to play music from practically any audio player they have at hand, thereby acknowledging that circuit-building occupies a significant place in our day-to-day lives. This element of the kit urges participants to retroactively consider circuit-building when, say, plugging a pair of headphones into an iPod or iPhone. In this way, we build upon—and even intervene in—people’s already congealed understanding of electronics, including their perceptions of how technologies influence their everyday life.

Further Questions

We understand that in order to be useful to academics, the kits must help people envision the ways that circuit-building could augment research. As such, through kits like our “Introduction to Circuits,” we are blending tacit knowledge with theoretical work drawn from comparative media studies and STS (among others). We are also emphasizing the adaptability and simplicity of seemingly complex applications like sound, with the aim of prompting applied approaches to humanities methods. The following questions are considered while designing the kit for such purposes:

How does the language of human-computer interaction (or network interactions) influence what tasks we delegate, or want to delegate, to electronics?
How have our needs and desires shaped the development of this language and culture?
How do the limits of materials demand adaptation?
How has this adaptation affected the history of computing, the interoperability of electronic parts, and the ostensible obsolescence of technologies?

Post by Katie McQueston, attached to the KitsForCulture category, with the physcomp tag. Images for this post care of Katie McQueston.

Trouvé apparently sought out a watchmaker to create the small operating mechanism that operates the jaw. This historical detail is interesting because watchmaking is a trade that has adapted to and been threatened by the battery (Trouvé’s own invention), not to mention digitization and, more recently, the demand for smart watches. Put differently, the makeup of Trouvé’s stick-pin is embedded in a long history of techniques used to express and understand time. Although neither the pin nor the project is really about watches or temporality during the Victorian period, the component parts we’re using correspond with keeping time during the late nineteenth century as well as skilled trades and analog manufacturing processes routinely subjected to obsolescence.

By redesigning Trouvé’s stick-pin, we are thus adhering to traditional gear systems while also maintaining a cultural perspective premised on the contingencies of interpretation. This approach is conducive to triangulating nineteenth-century objects and labour practices with their theoretical or socio-political coordinates.

To be sure, there’s a bit of irony here: the same technology that affords us a better understanding of objects and labour also risks mystifying manufacturing processes and their histories. 3D printing not only allows us to make more and sometimes better things; it also changes why and how we make them. That is, it changes the relationships we have with the very objects we create. If the production of an object is—in a WYSIWYG fashion—independent from many skills used to build it, then making things arguably becomes more about processing and production than, say, attaining manual skills or tactically solving problems.

In this way, a gain for academics, hobbyists, and makerspaces could be a loss for skilled trades and working classes. As such, throughout this project I have been considering this question: How can 3D printing be transformed by people who are antagonized by it? Alternatively, how can skilled trades and maker cultures encourage such transformations? In the spirit of art movements that have perverted their own mediums in response to emerging worldviews and technologies (e.g., the introduction of abstract painting alongside the development of photography), how can we foster cultures that resist the logic of obsolescence and instead favour hybrid practices?

Post by Katie McQueston, in the KitsForCulture category, with the fabrication tag. Images for this post care of Katie McQueston.

From “Electric Jewels,” by G. Trouvé (1884)

Specifically, I have noticed tensions between arguments—on the one hand—for reproduction, feasibility, and ease and—on the other—for replication, fidelity, and authenticity. These tensions boil down to what I feel are two key claims nested in the debate:

The claim for frozen moments: The practice of replication suggests a kind of frozen moment in cultural history. By replicating a historical mechanism exactly as it was, the cultural context is presumably preserved. Of course, such replication is at once difficult and expensive (e.g., outdated materials live up to their reputation of being both hard to find and out of use), and—perhaps more importantly—it is difficult (if not impossible) for many scholars to accept the very premise of the frozen moment. After all, no matter how much attention we pay to material particulars, we cannot live, see, or hear like they did back then. Still, affording audiences an immersive experience that would manifest through the use of legitimate parts seems central to the aims of our kits, if not the aims of historical materialism.

The claim against warping history: By reconstructing a historical mechanism through modern electronics, we are making the assumption that feasible reproductions override authentic replications, opening ourselves to accusations of radical subjectivism. For instance, consider Gustave Trouvé’s light-up sword (an image of which is doctored below). “Modernizing” or “resituating” this mechanism could involve anything from a few coin-cell batteries and some LEDs in a pyrex tube, to the configuration of a bona fide light sabre. One advantage of using convenient means to reconstruct the sword is the low-cost creation of multiple iterations (or versions) of the sword that rely on the materials we have at hand. However, the actual mechanism in question can be irrevocably warped and torn from its historical context.

In other fields and practices, we see similar tensions. No matter how hard they try, chefs will never be able to cook a shepherd’s pie exactly like someone else. And yet they continue to make new pies inspired by, say, local or family tradition. Elsewhere, no matter how hard they try, a Zeppelin cover band will never play “Stairway to Heaven” just like Zeppelin did. So they adapt, revise, or resituate it, in homage to the original. In other words, when things are made, they are integrated into a current cultural fabric, such as it is. Covers, if you will, employ the tones, progressions, and arrangements that ring both current and well, as people see fit for a given context.

That said, I feel that usability and translation are major components in the direction of the kits for cultural history, including our early wearables kit. In order to follow this line of inquiry, I will make a few assumptions about the kits’ content. First, the kits’ audiences likely consist of a smörgåsbord of students, curators, professors, and general enthusiasts. This variety presents two important touchstones necessary to the kits’ success: 1) the content must communicate material history by prompting hands-on engagement and assembly, and 2) in effect, addressing a broad audience means we must attend to the wider cultural narrative at play. Were the kit purely for media studies scholars or curators at memory institutions, the case would be different. Addressing the wider cultural narrative, then, means we must build with change in mind. What materials came before our kits? What materials grew from or came after them? What materials have been ignored? What materials are ambiguous about their very relation to truth or authenticity?

Even if we avoid including critical essays about the materials and practices at hand, we are still constructing and conveying a critical argument simply by creating a kit. Since the founding notion of these kits is to use them as a vehicle for scholarly inquiry and argumentation, then their composition and components carry a weight that shapes claims and thesis statements.

Shepherd’s pie, “Stairway to Heaven,” and light sabres aside, the very assumption that the kits for cultural history are premised solely on recreation is thus flawed. Instead, with unavoidable bias, we are prompting a hands-on understanding, which should augment (or even complicate) the historical documents we have at our disposal. In so doing, we are changing history as we interpret it. For example, in the following schematic, our rendition of Trouve’s light-up hairpin is shown next to Trouvé’s own design. Both renditions can be explained and exhibited, but the building occurs in our current cultural moment.

Post by Zaqir Virani, attached to the KitsForCulture category, with the physcomp tag. Images courtesy of Zaqir Virani and Classic Boat (pre-doctored image of Trouvé’s swords in Faust).

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.

Early Wearables

Trouvé’s nineteenth-century wearables are influential because of their scientific achievements as well as how they welded technological innovation to social life, everyday practice, and people’s bodies through the use of jewelry and other accessories. Inspired by Nina’s research, in the lab Zaqir, Shaun, and I found it extremely important to express the intimacy of early wearables with and through our kit. So I decided to build a handmade period jewelry box (see sketch above), which is similar to what wearers of Trouvé’s pieces might have had in their bedrooms. Through the work of contextualizing these pieces as jewelry, I also asked myself if there were other early instances of wearable electronics that were not marketed as fashion accessories (e.g., mining hats and other electronics worn on bodies for industrial use). This comparative approach no doubt enriched the design process, not to mention our understanding of material history.

Tennis for Two

The materials for this kit design were also motivated by packaging’s historical contexts. Tennis for Two was an early DIY game that relied in part on equipment and materials used for military applications. Alex, Shaun, Jon, and I found the narratives between gaming and military technologies to be provocative subjects—topics we want to unfold through the kit. For instance, placing the Tennis for Two components in a mid-twentieth-century ammo box (see example image above) is a way to reference these narratives without making the kit too muddled or ornate.

But will using evocative objects as cases for kits help us or our audiences better situate a kit within a specific historical context or critical paradigm? At this point, we’re not exactly sure. However, in this early stage of kits design, we are experimenting with evocative objects in order to invite the overlap of otherwise parallel histories (i.e., domestic, military, industrial, social, and cultural) through intimate engagements with materials. Is it possible that, by removing ourselves from more consumer-oriented design (e.g., the traditional cardboard box), we forfeit the ability to clearly speak to a participant’s desire to pick up and play with a kit? Or will these material juxtapositions—which communicate intuitively rather than didactically (much the same way that Dada and Surrealism used absurdity and dreamscapes as forms of protest against logical and insensitive scientific thought)—enable us to successfully engage audiences through tacit approaches to historical technocultures? On this front, more from us soon.

Post by Kaitlynn McQueston, attached to KitsForCulture, with the fabrication tag. Featured images on this post care of Kaitlynn McQueston and INCH Survival.

For the 2012-13 Award, students from across the UVic were invited to submit projects (of all types, in a variety of formats) that demonstrate scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication. This year’s two successful projects met or exceeded the following criteria: 1) they were completed within the course of study for an 2012-13 undergraduate or graduate class in any department at the UVic; 2) they met the course’s stated learning outcomes or expectations; 3) they demonstrated an innovative use of digital technologies for research, teaching, learning, or communication; and, 4) they blended computational methods with a critical approach to a humanities question or problem.

Belojevic and Johnson’s collaborative project, “HyperLit: A Gameful Design Model for a Social Edition,” models a social reading environment that encourages deep attention to literature while also satirically prompting awareness of the digital economy’s tendency toward gamification. For English 507 (Spring 2013), Belojevic and Johnson (both MA students in English) developed a wireframe prototype and a speculative design video that use James Joyce’s Ulysses as a tutor text for their reading environment.

Christie and Tanigawa’s collaborative English 507 (Spring 2013) project, “Dislocating Ulysses,” combines traditional literary analysis, archival research, geospatial mapping, and 3D modelling techniques in order to ask how data is (or can be) embodied and felt. Following the course objectives, Christie and Tanigawa (both PhD students in English) used materials from UVic’s Special Collections to develop a prototype for mapping readers’ geotemporal experiences of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Of note, aspects of both projects were publicly displayed during the “The Long Now of Ulysses“ summer exhibit in UVic’s Maltwood Gallery. Belojevic, Christie, Johnson, and Tanigawa have also presented research from these projects at York University (April 2013), Congress 2013 at UVic (June 2013), the Gaming without Frontiers event at UVic (March 2013), and the annual Modernist Studies Association conference (August 2013).

For the Award, each of these four students will receive a certificate of recognition, together with a 2014 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) scholarship (valued at up to $3750). Please join us in congratulating this year’s four award winners for their innovative and inspiring research!

Post by Karly Wilson, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured images for this post care of Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Jon Johnson, and Katie Tanigawa.