Monday, July 30, 2012

Men, Music and Consumption - High Fidelity



Online Resource- Plastics Collection

Syracuse University Library has a "Plastics Collection" online. The collection includes approximately 3,000 objects with high-quality photographs, information about plastic materials and processes, and twice the previous number of biographies and company histories.  
It's very easy to search by:
  •  "subject"
  • "material"
  • "material trade name" 
  • or "manufacturer".
  • Manuscripts are catalogued by "subject".
  • There is a collection of short "essays".
  • A time line.
  • A catalogue of people, companies, materials and processes.
The links page includes "films", "industry resources", and other "sites" and "museums".
The films include "Le Chant du Styrene part 1 and part 2, a 1958, 19 minute French documentary film depicting plastics manufacture as industrial sublime. The film was directed by Alain Resnais who went on to direct Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961) and Muriel (1963). The film was ordered by the French industrial group Pechiney. The commentary script, was written by French novelist Raymond Queneau. The script was all in Alexandrines, a very old kind of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables pre-dating Marlowe and Shakespeare. The script was narrated by French actor Pierre Dux.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Experimenta


Experimenta is thrilled to announce the 5th International Biennial of Media Art set to launch in Melbourne at RMIT Gallery September 14 to November 17, 2012. 
Experimenta Speak to Me is an invitation to consider what it means, at this time, to be together. Speak to Me: 3 Days, 3 Programs from 2 - 4 August. The program includes three individually curated events which will form a prelude to the launch of Experimenta Speak to Me in September. 
Three 'Soundwwwalks' will be hosted at West Space, Level one, 225 Bourke Street, Melbourne, on Thursday 2 August, a video art program including works by Ann Hirsch (US), Eugenia Lim (AUS), and Yu Cheng-Ta (TW) will be installed at street level on the ground floor of City Village, 225 Bourke Street, Melbourne on Friday 3 August, and Nobuhiro Shimura's Dress will be installed the following day, Saturday 5 August. http://www.experimenta.org/  

E-Research

E-Research, or "technologically enabled research" is an emergent area. It has received significant support from the Gillard Government.  Important in this regard is NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources), an Australian Government project to build new infrastructure specifically for the needs of Australian researchers. 
E-Research is important in the context of Climate Change Researchchoice modeling and Legal Research - including the Australian Legal Information Institute, AUSLII, which has compiled over 525 databases, all from from all Australasian jurisdictions. 
E-Research also plays an important role in humanities research and has seen the rise of the "Digital Humanities". Federal investment in the Digital Humanities in Australia has funded the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI). HuNI is NeCTAR funded and is one of the first large scale eResearch Infrastructure projects for the humanities in Australia. The project will integrate a number of important cultural data-sets in Australia and will also build what is termed a Virtual Research Environment’ (VRE). A VRE or ‘Virtual Lab’ is online environment of tools and services to allow specialist researchers to come together to perform certain computational research tasks with the possibility of uncovering new insights into Australia’s cultural landscape.
The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (AADH) was formed in March 2011. The inaugural Secretary is Craig Bellamy. Their "Resources" page is useful.
Journals include The Fibreculture Journal, which recently published FCJ20, a special edition on "Network Utopias" edited by Su Ballard (Otago / University of Wollongong), Zita Joyce (Canterbury) and Lizzie Muller (UTS).
Other resources and events in Australia include:
International:
  • Lev Manovich's work on Data Visualization. 
  • Textvre (UK) aims to "support the complete lifecycle of research in e-Humanities textual studies.
  • Project Bamboo (international- including ANU) is facilitating the collaborative curation of digital texts by building services and connecting tools.
  • The Townsend Humanities Lab (berkeley) offers a community driven suite of digital tools to support interdisciplinary collaboration.
  • MIT Media Lab: Applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities.
  • ALiVE, the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment, is an interdisciplinary research initiative of the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media. It is an incubator and innovations showcase for new forms of creativity, whose challenge led programs are at the cutting edge of digital media in society.
  • The Virginia Library's Scholars Lab.
  • Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for eResearch at Kings College London. The DDH is interested in the application of technology in the arts and humanities, and in the social sciences.

Visualizing Research

The UTS Library has been running some fantastic workshops on Visualizing Research.
The link for the workshop can be found here:
The workshop started out with this 5 minute video.

Some visualisations included: The "Billion Euro-Gram", a visualization of various global financial phenomenon, such as the cost of the global war on terror (€1047 billion) and the size of the global pharmaceutical market (€651 billion). 
Billion Euro-o-gram
And: An analysis of Gender differences on social networking sites, showing that women use facebook and twitter more than men, while men use soundcloud and youtube more than women. Overall women use social media more than men.
Chicks Rule
For more visualization projects see: