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 how immersive visualizations can be built from 3d animation, live action capture, and compositing live action. One session explains how fulldome and VR production differs from standard movie or flat screen methodologies, with an emphasis on how motion and point of view influence composition and storytelling in these unique environments. Sip is also conducting a workshop meant to give animators with some knowledge of Maya hands-on experience creating fulldome animations with plugins for Maya.

Immersive sound is the medium for Charlie Morrow, whose custom platform MorrowSound literally takes sound to the next level. MorrowSound projects audio above and below the listening plane, creating the illusion of an expanded space where sound moves up, down and around. MorrowSound has been showcased at major venues worldwide, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, and 2009 Design Week Helsinki–and this year at Digital Humanities Week.

The award-winning composer of soundtracks for feature films and campaigns and chair of the IPS committee on immersive sound, Morrow has experimented with audio as a healing as well as entertaining medium. His works have ranged from massive events in public contexts such as Chicago’s Lake Michigan and New York Harbor to innovative installations for the Kennedy Space Center, Empire State Building, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Robin Sip is CEO of Mirage3D and Director of Show Production and Content for Evans & Sutherland. A resident of The Hague, he has produced and/or directed 20 fulldome shows, including Origins of Life, Dinosaurs@Dusk, and Dawn of the Space Age, the most licensed fulldome film in the industry. Mirage3D’s productions have played in over 700 fulldome theaters and science centers around the world. His current research focuses on designing new camera rigs to improve live action capture for fulldome VR, such as his next production about the planet Mars.

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 the imagination, as branded franchises with predetermined narratives like Frozen and Star Wars have crowded out open-ended playthings like generic dolls and chemistry sets.

Lego is one of the few toy companies to survive this encroachment with its reputation for exploratory play intact, yet its plastic bricks are increasingly boxed with instructions to build a single vehicle or building–a trend even more pronounced in competitors like Megablocks, whose specialized parts cannot be used to build anything else. Toys that discourage unmaking teach kids that being creative means following instructions.

Operating in contrast to the decline of hackability in today’s app and toy stores is a spectrum of creators who are decidedly not following instructions. Some hack systems without permission, like those who modify or “speedrun” Super Mario. Other artists exploit the openness of “toy” platforms like Minecraft or design microcontrollers like Arduino explicitly for hacking.

This panel invites artist and scholars to interrogate the often contradictory narratives surrounding makers and unmakers of products and platforms marketed as creative media. Depending on proposals received for the panel, its organizers may structure the discussion according to an aleatoric dynamic consistent with the theme of Lego-like creativity.

The event features Anne Collins Goodyear, a co-director of the Bowdoin Art Museum who began her interest in the digital humanities as curator at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and presided over the release of the College Art Association’s first guidelines for Fair Use. Wendy Seltzer has served as specialist in digital law for such organizations as the W3C consortium, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tor project, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. John Bell focuses on collaborative creativity as artist and Lead Application Developer for Digital Humanities and architect for the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth. Craig Dietrich harnesses database-driven interactive media for mobile apps that support renters in slums (Tenants in Action), archives that respect Aboriginal cultural protocols (Mukurtu), and Semantic Web publishing platforms (Scalar).

Upper left: Craig Dietrich, LEGO Tire Fire, 2017. Upper right: John Bell, Analog(ue), 2009.

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 to the arts, design and humanities.

Yet sometimes innovative ideas require innovative vehicles, so Malina has also spearheaded forays into experimental publishing, from the Yasmin email list to the Creative Disturbance podcasts.

A recent question Malina has explored is how the rigor of peer review can be applied to “gray literature” outside of the traditional grooves of scholarly publishing. This is one of the goals of Arteca, a new federated platform under development by MIT Press.

Malina is Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology, and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas where he runs the ArtSciLab. He founded two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Photo of Roger Malina at Ars Electronica, Linz, 2011, by rubra.

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 of scientific principles and advancements, Davis’s lateral thinking has at times put him decades ahead of mainstream scientists in discovering new uses for technology. His 1988 project embedding a visual image in DNA predated the recently publicized demonstration by Harvard researcher George Church by 24 years.

Other inventions of Davis’s have yet to find a scientific application. His Audio Microscope, a microscope that translates light information into sound, thus allowing you to hear the acoustic signature of living cells, might be someday used to identify abnormal cells such as cancer cells. Other experiments, such as learning how E. coli responds to jazz or beaming images into space via radio telescope, may never find a practical application yet are thought-provoking in their juxtaposition of human and bacterial cultures.

At Digital Humanities Week, Davis gives a talk about his latest research on the frontiers of art and science, as well as conducting a workshop on building your own DIY scientific instruments for artistic or scientific ends.

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 students.

The key components and benefits of community that COCO targets are peer support, shared experience, confidence and interest.

The COCO website approaches each of these topics on its own, mixing beginner coding tutorials with video testimonials from women in STEM and a Facebook group dedicated to helping women through some of the more technically demanding classes in New Media.

Also represented at Digital Humanities Week will be initiatives such as the Rising Tide Center, WiSTEMM, and ACM-W, which hope to nourish women in STEM fields on a campus-wide and national scales.

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 on the development of the geo-spatial web, digital publications, the ethics and visualization of cultural data, and social media events. He is the founder, director, and editor-in-chief of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of urban spaces.

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation as one of its first “digital media and learning” projects in 2008, HyperCities is an open-source, web-based platform for “going back in time” to analyze the cultural, urban, and social layers of city spaces. HyperCities brings together archival objects, maps, 3D models, and other sources for more than two dozen cities, including Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, and Rome.

Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at UCLA. He also directs the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. His lecture is co-sponsored by the McBride Fund, History Department, and Digital Humanities Week.