Keynote Speakers
Virginia Kuhn joined the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy as Associate Director and Research Assistant Professor in USC's School of Cinematic Arts in 2005 after successfully defending one of the first all-digital dissertations in the country, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Her dissertation was created in TK3, an electronic book platform that is the precursor to the USC-based, open source program, Sophie http://www.sophieproject.org/ , an open source application, centered at USC, funded by Mellon. Her group just completed this explanatory video: http://iml.usc.edu/flashVideoPlayer/sophie/sophie_video.mp4
She teaches in the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program at the IML and is also working on the creation of a persistent, media-rich digital portfolio, along with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The project was recently awarded a large (3 terabyte) allowance of storage space on SDSC’s TeraGrid—this will make the portfolio accessible to numerous grid users across the country. In its beta stage, the digital portfolio provides numerous functions from assessment to pedagogical aid, from a showcase for student work to an eventual space for faculty work in digital media. Virginia is also the project lead on an NEH Challenge grant awarded to the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences working with the Supercomputing Centers in Pittsburgh, San Diego and Urbana-Champaign. The goal is to bring access to the big iron computers--large scale grids that link supercomputers via huge pipes--to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences across higher education. Virginia recently ran several sessions of the Computers and Writing Online Conference in Second Life, which you can find more about here: http://sl.nmc.org/2009/03/08/interview-with-vee-kuhn/Todd Presner is an Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at UCLA and director of the HyperCities project.
HyperCities http://www.hypercities.com/ is a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with the stories and histories of the people who live there and those who have lived there in the past. A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with its geo-temporal information, ranging from its architectural and urban history to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live and lived there.
Through collaboration between universities and community partners in Los Angeles, Lima, Berlin, Rome, Tel Aviv, New York, and other places, HyperCities will develop and offer a participatory, open-ended learning environment grounded in space and time, place and history, memory and social interaction, oral history and digital media. The development of the project is supported by a "Digital Media and Learning" grant from the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC for 2008-09. Prior support for the project was provided by a "Digital Innovation" grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, in collaboration with UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA's Academic Technology Services, the UCLA Academic Senate, and the UCLA Office of Instructional Development. The initial idea for the project Hypermedia Berlin was incubated at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory in 2001-03.
Todd also uses the HyperCity Berlin as part of his teaching http://www.oid.ucla.edu/edtech/interviews/presner/index.html in the course HyperMedia Berlin http://www.berlin.ucla.edu/
Todd has a Ph.D. From Stanford in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in History of Art.
Rebecca Rossignoli
Executive Assistant to the VP of Information Resources/CIO
Occidental College
rebeccar@oxy.edu
(323) 259-1451