Category: Uncategorized

Growing beyond boundaries in 21st century collaborations

Artists and scientists inherit from their separate academic training and social milieus very different standards for evidence, success, and tenure criteria. This discussion asks how intrepid collaborators who want to cross those disciplinary chasms can navigate such cultural differences to invigorate their research and their field. A number of panelists focus on the oceans as …

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Free bus to Bangor ARTwalk during Digital Humanities Week

  Join the free UMaine student bus trip from campus to the Downtown Bangor ARTwalk on Friday, Oct. 6. We will attend a free reception and performances at the Bangor Arts Exchange (193 Exchange St.), a free reception and tour at the UMaine Museum of Art, and have time to explore on our own. The …

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BYOT–Bring Your Own Topic!

Sprinkled throughout the 2017 Digital Humanities Week are THATCamps and hackathons that break the academic conference mold by allowing participants to start ad hoc conversations on their own topics, whether how to run a lasercutter or what to do about fake news. Nevertheless some workshops include a “featured” theme for participants who would prefer to …

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The Science and Art of Immersive Media

Whether the subject is symphonies, galaxies, or dinosaurs, immersive audio and video offer a captivating platform for educating and engrossing audiences. The 2017 Digital Humanities Week features two pioneers of such platforms, who will demo their unique systems in UMaine’s new Emera Astronomy Center and M.F. Jordan Planetarium. Dutch planetarium producer Robin Sip will demonstrate …

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Discovering the “Long” 18th Century

DISCOVERING THE “LONG” 18th-CENTURY Making Connections within Gale Primary Sources Tuesday, Oct. 3 4:00-5:15 p.m. Library Classroom 1st floor Fogler Library (near the “Union” entrance) This workshop will provide an overview of critical primary sources available to scholars at the University of Maine seeking to enhance their digital humanities research experience. Representatives from Gale will …

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Lego-like creativity and the “right to unmake”

As technological platforms have become more powerful, our ability to deconstruct them has weakened. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes farmers who disassemble tractors, hip-hop artists who sample vintage songs, and museum conservators who decompile obsolete software. Store shelves over the last fifty years have likewise undergone a decline in toys that leave play to …

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Art + science? Full STEAM ahead

A keynote speaker at this year’s Digital Humanities Week is Roger Malina, widely regarded as a leading champion of the STEM to STEAM movement. As Executive Editor of MIT’s Leonardo publications, Malina has overseen a scholarly magazine and book series that for 50 years has explored emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering …

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Fishing for paramecia and beaming runes to the stars

No one better exemplifies the promise and excitement of STEM to STEAM than MIT’s unofficial artist in residence, Joe Davis. Davis’ contagious brilliance has inspired some of the world’s leading scientists to help build his outlandish ideas, from fishing rigs designed to catch microorganisms to ornithopters powered by frog legs. Combined with his rigorous understanding …

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Encouraging women coders with COCO

Despite a nationwide push to teach programming to a more diverse body of students in K-12 education, recent studies suggest women are most likely to drop out of computer science in college. Ruth Leopold’s Coders Collaborative (COCO) aims to increase the retention of women in computing fields by fostering a sense of community among female …

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Peeling back history one layer at a time

If historians in previous eras used hardware to excavate the past, today it is software that increasingly generates historical knowledge. Todd Presner’s talk “Experimental Knowledge in the Age of Digital Humanities.” examines what these new tools mean for today’s scholars of the cultures past and present. In the field of Digital Humanities, Presner’s research focuses …

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