Call for Applicants : Affilate Positions

Learning to See Systems, a new graduate working and study group, invites applicants for participation in a two-year program of research, study, and exchange around a common question:

How can we make visible the values and epistemologies embedded in complex technological systems?

Relevant work under this question could include scholarship on contemporary or historical subjects from across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Though the “system” as an idea is sometimes more often associated with forms of modernity, we seek the broadest possible context for our conversation, and encourage applications from scholars working in all time periods and settings.

Available are six Affiliate positions. The Affiliates will work together with the program faculty and a group of new incoming Fellows to establish a new campus hub for work on the history, critique and production of the “system” as a feature of modernity.

Affiliates will agree to take two courses and give one talk on their work over two years. In exchange they will have access to research funds for work and travel, as well as a chance to collaborate with others on an exciting new venture.

Together with the larger group of Fellows and Faculty, Affiliates will contribute to a new experimental space of production and exchange focused on the idea of the “system” as both a subject of research and a mode of doing research. Our new lab space will support critical exploration of the new scholarly tools often found under the Digital Humanities through workshops, collaboration, and visiting talks.

Interested graduate students should review the group’s full mission and course listing at seeingsystems.illinois.edu, then submit a letter of interest describing their work in relation to the theme.

Send the letter, cv and a brief one-page letter of support from your advisor to Program Director Kevin Hamilton at kham@illinois.edu. All materials should be received by May 15. Successful applicants will be notified by June 1.

Call for Papers : College Art Association Conference 2014

Professors Weissman and Hamilton invite proposals for their upcoming panel, Beyond Big Data: the politics of vision in complex systems, to be held at the 2014 CAA Conference in Chicago.

Description:

“Big Data” no longer belongs exclusively to the domain of supercomputing. The proliferation of digital artifacts has made the amassing of large collections available to any curious browser or hoarder, including artists, curators, and scholars who have begun to create new online or offline spaces, data structures, maps, and software as part of their research. But how do scholars and artists make visible the values and epistemologies embedded in the technological systems we use—and often, simultaneously, seek to critique? The question of vision is central to this inquiry, not only because images play a key role in these systems, but because technological systems facilitate visibility through the application of frames, filters and algorithms. This session seeks to investigate the politics of vision in technological systems and the innovative methodologies at work in their analysis. We welcome proposals from artists and scholars who approach digital collections as networks that merit examination as technologies themselves.

Apply by May 6. See CAA guidelines here.

Also stay tuned for more information on an upcoming edited journal on the same subject, edited by Weismman and Hamilton for Media-N, the journal of CAA’s New Media Caucus.