Up Close and Personal: Art Museums and Digital Models
Beth Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Williams College Amber Orosco, MA candidate, Art History Graduate Intern, Williams College Liz Gallerani, Curator of Mellon Academic Programs, Williams College
Moderated by Austin Mason, Assistant Director for Digital Humanities & Director of Digital Arts & Humanities, Carleton College
How do you bring digital imaging, including RTI (reflectance transformation imaging) and photogrammetry, to students in a liberal arts environment? How do digital models enhance and not replace in-person learning with art?
This panel presents strategies for digital imaging that focus on digital accessibility, equity, agency, and liberal arts learning.
In fall 2020, the Williams College Museum of Art launched a minimal-budget imaging project that initially responded to concerns about equity for hybrid and remote learning. This panel presents strategies for digital imaging that focus on digital accessibility, equity, agency, and liberal arts learning. The pilot program at the Williams College Museum of Art aims to make objects more engaging in a time of distance, while remaining attentive to data bias and trying to highlight under-used objects. Goals of the project include increasing comfort level with objects and digital models, and also encouraging agency, exploration, and play.
By sharing our own iterations throughout this ongoing project, we offer a range of possibilities to participants who may wish to explore similar methods and applications. Working with limited staff and resources, we focused on individual strengths and perspectives–Liz with the collection, teaching, and relationships with faculty across campus; Beth with digital humanities, teaching, and entry-level digital technologies; Amber with prior experience using RTI and perspective as a graduate student who is both learning from and teaching with models. Amber is the Academic Programs Intern at the museum, and is also the Teaching Assistant in a studio course that is a key collaborator in this project.
Aus der Finsternis: Cross-Institutional Intermediate German with Dark (Netflix 2017-20)
Sunka Simon, Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College Matthew Miller, Associate Professor of German, Colgate University Pia Eger, DAAD Fellow, Colgate University
Three colleagues explore both synchronous and asynchronous activities and projects built on cross-institutional team-screenings of weekly episodes of Dark’s first season on Netflix.
This presentation showcases the pedagogical and technological tools utilized to achieve the learning outcomes for the LACOL sponsored cross-institutional digitally connected Intermediate German course in the fall semester of 2020 between Swarthmore College and Colgate University.
Hamilton College hosted the summer 2021 consortium-wide LACOL, June 21-23, 2021. With “Play and Innovation” as the official 2021 theme, this summer gathering brought together faculty, technologists, research librarians, academic support specialists, and other educators and students for collaborative exchange and playful discussion. Read More
Gaming and Liberal Education
June 21 @ 1:30pm Eastern via Zoom
Dr. Bryan Alexander
Futurist and Author, Academia Next
@BryanAlexander
Bryan Alexander is an award–winning, internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future.
He completed his English language and literature PhD at the University of Michigan in 1997, with a dissertation on doppelgangers in Romantic-era fiction and poetry.
Then Bryan taught literature, writing, multimedia, and information technology studies at Centenary College of Louisiana. There he also pioneered multi-campus interdisciplinary classes, while organizing an information literacy initiative. Read More
Reimagining the Future(s) of Learning: Play in Speculative Spaces
June 22 @ 1:30pm Eastern via Zoom
Dr. Heather Pleasants
Educational Consultant, Experiential Learning & Assessment
University of Texas at Austin, @heatherplez
Dr. Heather Pleasants is a faculty development and senior assessment specialist at the University of Texas at Austin, where she works with faculty interested in making experiential learning a part of their courses. She is also an educational researcher and consultant who specializes in providing needs assessment, program evaluation, and external evaluation of funded initiatives—particularly those that address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Dr. Pleasants received her PhD in Educational Psychology (2000) with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Learning from Michigan State University. She is a regular contributor to the work of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, and her most recent publication is Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives (2017).
Dr. Catherine D’Ignazio
Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Author, Data Feminism (with L. Klein), @kanarinka
As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists–and others who rely on data in their work–to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” How can we operationalize intersectional feminist thinking in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices? This talk will focus in particular on examples of play, innovation and emancipatory pedagogy in data science. Read More