HASTAC@NUDHL Scholars and other interested folks, HASTAC just announced three new upcoming forums.
Dis/Ability: Moving Beyond Access in the Academy:
http://hastac.org/forums/disability-moving-beyond-access-academy
- What strategies do you use in your classrooms to increase accessibility or even to cater to or accommodate particular disabilities? What challenges have you faced making your classroom more accessible? Have some strategies backfired? Are there particular issues that have prevented you from making accessibility-related changes?
- What technologies are people using (whether assistive technologies or broader tech like YouTube & Twitter) to meet the needs of students? What technologies are used to create and/or support online disability identities?
- How can our own scholarly research be more accessible? I mean this both in terms of wider availability (open access publishing, perhaps) and in terms of ensuring that a range of people with various physical differences can access our new media projects. How might accessibility enhance a digital or multimodal project?
- How does disability theory intersect with technology, particularly in relation to race & resistance studies; “assistive” technologies; innovation, hacking & appropriation; and gender & queer studies?
Alan Turing: The First Digital Humanist?
- What does it mean to include Turing as a digital humanist?
- Is the “uncanny valley” still a useful concept?
- What does it mean to consider technology queer? Is information queer? How might both be queered and to what end?
- In considering the idea of the posthuman as queer, can we understand disability and /or illness to always already be posthuman? To never be posthuman? something else? What is the role of the state in creating the posthuman through technologies such as Turing’s chemical castration?
- Why has Turing been a particularly important icon when thinking about the history of computing? In which histories is he highlighted or ignored?
- The history of cybernetics is full of other interesting thinkers and makers, and many have gone unsung. We’d love to hear about the people, inventions or movements that you can add to this history.
- What are your most interesting questions about cybernetics, posthumanism or Turing?
Visualizing Geography: Maps, Place and Pedagogy
- How can web tools represent the literary spaces that a reader encounters (or imagines) in literature? What types of tools would fill the existing technological gaps in geospatial information studies?
- How do narratives travel and replicate over geographical space? What would mapping these processes yield? How can we do it?
- Is it problematic to represent literary and historical geography with modern interfaces like Google Maps? Should we be concerned that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of how our subjects would imagine space, or can we be content in uncovering new (and previously impossible) readings of old texts?
- How does using maps as a pedagogical tool affect our understanding of both real and literary environments? Does mapping change the way we make connections even when we aren’t thinking about geographical space?