Opening Plenary Session
Monday — 1:15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
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Presentation of the Daniel E. Atkins |
Following the award presentation, Dr. Atkins will deliver the
Paul Evan Peters Lecture:
Leadership in the Age of
Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Discovery and Learning
About Daniel Atkins:
As chair of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, Daniel E. Atkins, inaugural Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation and a distinguished professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, led the team that issued the highly influential report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure. The document, now referred to as “The Atkins Report,” catalyzed new priorities and led to the establishment of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) at NSF.
The OCI coordinates and supports the acquisition, development, and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and services essential to the conduct of 21st-century science and engineering research and education. Cyberinfrastructure includes supercomputers, information management systems, high-capacity networks, digitally enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools for computation, visualization, and collaboration. In June 2006, Atkins joined NSF, on leave from the University of Michigan, to lead the cyberinfrastructure effort.
Atkins stated that his charge at NSF would offer him “another important platform for contributing to my overarching professional aspiration—leadership in the creation and use of information and computer technology in service of human learning, creativity, and well-being.”
From 1992 to 1998, Dr. Atkins served as the founding dean of Michigan’s School of Information, the first school of its kind in the nation. This professional graduate school, which “embraces a vision that harmonizes people, information systems, and organizations to improve the quality of life,” was instrumental in shaping the concept of iSchools nationally.
More recently, Atkins has focused on research and teaching in the area of distributed knowledge communities and open learning resources. He has directed several large experimental digital library projects as well as projects to explore the socio-technical design and application of “collaboratories” for scientific research.
Dr. Atkins has also served as Associate Dean for Research at the University of Michigan College of Engineering where he presided over the formation of one of the first and most effective university distributed computing environments. Earlier in his career, as a professor in electrical engineering and computer science, Dr. Atkins made major contributions to high-performance computer architecture, and led or participated in the design and construction of several experimental machines, including some of the earliest parallel computers. He developed high-speed arithmetic algorithms now widely used in the computer industry, and he conducted groundbreaking work on special-purpose architecture, including collaboration with the Mayo Clinic on the development of computer-assisted tomography (CAT).
http://www.educause.edu/PaulEvanPetersAward/852
http://www.nsf.gov/oci/
Presentation (PDF, with builds)
Presentation (PDF)
Closing Plenary Session
Tuesday — 2:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
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Tara McPherson Associate Professor of Gender Studies |
Expanding the Scholarly Imagination:
Vectors and Multimodal Publishing
After offering a typology of the digital humanities, this presentation will explore several aspects of the international electronic journal, Vectors: its conception, its mandates, its infrastructure, and its innovative collaborative design process. Some questions to be considered include: What happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring different modes of engagement from the reader/user? How does “argument” shift when scholarship goes fully networked and multimedia? How do you “experience” argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space? Can scholarship show as well as tell? What do humanities scholars gain from working with database structures? What kind of new partnerships will be required among libraries, publishers, and scholars to foster future growth in this area?
About Tara McPherson:
Tara McPherson teaches courses in new media, television, and popular culture in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture and was a finalist for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008). She is currently co-editing an anthology on digital narrative and politics and working on a book manuscript on the racial epistemologies of new media. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, race, and representation, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.
She is the founding editor of Vectors, the multimedia peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. Vectors pushes far beyond the “text with pictures” format of much online scholarly publishing, encouraging work that takes full advantage of the multimodal and networked capacities of computing technologies. She was recently selected as one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2009), a hybrid online/print journal that will also explore new forms of online publishing.
Presentation (PPT)