Scalar/ Digital Scholarship Brownbag Information Session
More information at: http://www.iprh.illinois.edu/news/iprhevents/#scalar
Session 1:
Date: September 9th, 2013
Time: 12:00-12:50 noon
Location: 1090 Lincoln Hall (702 South Wright Street, Urbana)
Session 2:
Date: September 10th, 2013
Time: 12:30-1:20 p.m.
Location: 319 Gregory Hall (810 South Wright Street, Urbana)
This event is free and open to the public.
About this event:
Faculty and Graduate Students, bring your lunch to these short sessions for an overview of Scalar and the larger field of experimentation and critique around the future of scholarly authorship and publishing.
Scalar, an open source software platform, is alternately a presentation program akin to PowerPoint, an archiving tool useful for annotating and organizing media collections, a multi-author text composition tool with rich embedded media capabilities, or a web-based authoring environment for creating multi-linear arguments. Scalar grew out of a collaborative design process that included leading interaction designers, scholars, archivists, publishers and editors. The “look” of a Scalar book derives either from templates (as in the blogging platform WordPress) or from custom style parameters. Among the software’s most striking capacities are a rich suite of visualization tools to allow authors to see the shape of their collections and writing.
Scalar was developed by the Alliance for Visual Networking Culture (ANVC), led by Professor Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. IPRH has become a partner in the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. The ANVC seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of the humanities to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies. By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, the ANVC is investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship, including Scalar.
About the speaker:
Kevin Hamilton is Associate Professor of New Media and Painting in the School of Art and Design, a Dean’s Fellow in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and Co-Director of the Center for People and Infrastructures in the Coordinated Science Lab. Working largely in collaborative and cross-disciplinary settings, Kevin produces artworks, archives, and scholarship on such subjects as place and memory, history of technology, and state-mediated violence. Recent work has included research and production on cybernetics, race, and the role of film in America’s rise to nuclear power. His self-published graphic novel A Place in Time is currently in distribution at Champaign and Urbana area libraries, and he is currently at work on an NEH-funded digital archive for nuclear test films. IPRH welcomes Professor Hamilton in his new role as IPRH Coordinator for Digital Scholarly Communication.