Past Events
Obsolete Computing Drop-In Sessions
Obsolete Computing and Media @ University of Victoria Libraries (OCaM) is pleased to announce we will be open for drop-in visits on Friday afternoons in November. Come by for a tour of the collection and an opportunity to get hands on with some classic computing hardware, including Commodore, Apple, Tandy and more!
Drop in sessions will be held between 12 noon and 4:00pm on the following days:
Friday, November 8
Friday, November 15
Friday, November 22
Friday, November 29
OCaM is located in room 080 on the Lower Level of the Mearns Centre/McPherson Library, just off the compact shelving area.
No RSVP required – we look forward to seeing you there!
Podcast Curious?
Interested in podcasting your research but don’t know where to start? Learn about Podcasting @ UVic with three, one-hour events
Dr. Hannah McGregor, Podcaster
Wed, November 20, 2019
12:00 PM – 3:00 PM PST
Mearns Centre for Learning – McPherson Library, Room A308
Session 1: 12-1pm Podcaster’s Panel & Audience Discussion
Come listen to a panel of scholars, staff, students and alumni talk about the challenges and rewards of podcasting to share knowledge and create communities of listeners.
Speakers include: Dr. Hannah McGregor, SFU publishing prof and podcaster of Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda; Adam Huggins, host of Future Ecologies and UVic environmental studies/biology alum (2019); Julie Rémy, producer of Learning Transforms, the podcast from the UVic Faculty of Education; Jenni Schine, sound artist, acoustic ethnographer and UVic instructor of Anthropology of Sound; Martin Bauman, MFA student & producer of Story Untold; And more!
Session 2: 1-2pm Guest Lecture: Podcasting & Peer Review in the Academy
Dr. Hannah McGregor talks about a grant-funded initiative exploring peer review and evaluation for podcasters in the academy.
Session 3: 2pm-3pm: Learn how to make your own podcast: A workshop with Dr. Hannah McGregor
Want to learn how to make your own podcast? Join us for a free 45-minute workshop guided by Dr. Hannah McGregor. Learn about free podcasting equipement you can borrow from UVic Libraries–including a podcasting room.
Monday, Oct. 21 | 11:00 am -12:00 pm
Dr. Erin Glass
Open access in the age of surveillance technology: Fighting for ground in the public imagination Dr. Erin Glass, University of California San Diego
Does the influence of surveillance technology in our academic and everyday information practices have any bearing on the open access movement? How might the open access movement fruitfully respond to these issues in ways that deepen its purpose while further serving the academic community and the broader public? In this talk, I show how the growing dominance of surveillance technology, or technology whose business models are based on monitoring and controlling of user behavior, threatens to exploit and undermine the goals and existing achievements of the open access movement. At the same time, however, I argue that an expanded vision of the open access mission could provide a powerful intellectual and political framework for resisting and transforming surveillant information systems in academia and more broadly. I suggest that some of the challenges in advancing more just and equitable information practices stem from the lack of representation of alternatives in popular culture, and consider how other movements use cultural and symbolic production to bring their values to the mainstream. Using examples from poetry, art, fiction, and television, I show how creative practices might help scholarly and public communities work together to imagine, motivate, and build more equitable and democratic global information systems.
Dr. Erin Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she facilitates the Digital Humanities Research Group. Her work focuses on using digital tools and social practices to make education and knowledge production more democratic, collaborative, and publicly engaged.
Sponsored by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the University of Victoria Libraries.
Dr. Dene Grigar
The Digital Scholarship Commons at the University of Victoria Libraries is pleased to host author Tim McLaughlin and Dr. Dene Grigar for a Traversal of McLaughin’s hypertext novel, Notes Toward Absolute Zero. Written in 1992/93, McLaughlin’s work dates from the pre-web era of hypertext, when the creative potential of the medium was still largely unexplored. Dr. Grigar, director and professor of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at WSU Vancouver, will conduct a Traversal of McLaughlin’s work; a narrated, recorded performance capturing the experience of the work on period 1990s computing technology.
Stored on decaying media and dependent upon obsolete hardware, digital works from earlier eras present escalating degrees of difficulty to those seeking to experience them in their original, authentic form. Traversal is a process for documenting and preserving digital media so that they may outlast the transient dependencies of their original making.
Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic Literature. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she developed the methodology for documenting born digital media, a project that culminated in an open-source, multimedia book, entitled Pathfinders (2015), and book of media art criticism, entitled Traversals (2017), for The MIT Press. She is President of the Electronic Literature Organization and Director of the Electronic Literature Lab at WSUV.
Tim McLaughlin
Tim McLaughlin is a writer and photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Over the years Tim has been active in experimental radio, hypertext fiction (he is included in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada), graphic design, book production, and documentary film. In partnership with Charllotte Kwon and Maiwa Handprints, Tim documents artisan communities and advocates for the importance and continuation of traditional craft and culture. Recently, Charllotte and Tim worked together to produce Textiles of the Banjara: Cloth and Culture of a Wandering Tribe (Thames and Hudson, 2016).
Monday, OCT. 29 | 12:00-1:30pm
Reanimating Monsters with Arduino
This event will feature a very brief presentation about Victorian experiments in science, electricity, and resurrection that lend context to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as its relevance to present-day artificial intelligence (AI) . Participants will have the chance to create their own little monsters or modest AIs using Arduino—a credit card-sized computer for sensing and interacting with the physical world.
This event is suitable for beginners. No experience with Arduino or programming is assumed or required.Participants should bring a laptop or borrow one from the Library’s Music and Media desk on the first floor.
Leader: Tiffany Chan
Tuesday, OCT. 30 | 10:30am-12:00pm
Frankenreads Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon
This special workshop will teach you how to edit the most powerful, free information resource on the web: Wikipedia. Users will be walked through the process of creating Wikipedia accounts and will be trained in the ins-and-outs of editing articles. Wikipedia Edit-a-thons are a powerful tool in helping recover the forgotten/ignored/repressed histories in the past. In celebration of Mary Shelley’s great novel, we’ll learn how to identify and verify information on the pages of famous female authors. Or, we can check to see if your favourite author has an appropriate entry.
This workshop is suitable for beginners and experts. No experience of Wikipedia is necessary. Participants should bring a laptop or borrow one from the Library’s Music and Media desk on the first floor.
Leader: Matt Huculak