[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 03 : Bettivia and Flanders

[Hamilton, Kevin]

March on empyre : Engineering the University

WEEK THREE :
The #Alt-Academy: Technology and new Research Labor

GUESTS:

Rhiannon Bettivia 
Doctoral candidate (ABD)
Graduate School for Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Julia Flanders
Professor of the Practice, Department of English
Director, Digital Scholarship Group
Director, Women Writers Project
Northeastern University

Today we're starting our third of four weeks of conversations about the
changing shape of academic labor in research settings. Each week, one of
the grad students in our Seeing Systems
(http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/) cohort here at Illinois will lead a
conversation with a scholar whose work and path lends some possible
examples, models or theories to reflective engagement or critique of
existing academic structures.

This week we'll be led by Rhiannon Bettivia, a scholar whose work also
relates closely to many on empyre, in that she has spent a great deal of
time on the question of archiving and preserving digital art. Through her
past work while in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at
at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Rhiannon worked on
digital preservation and archive projects for the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), the Federal Reserve Bank, NYU Libraries and the Internet Archive,
the Hemispheric Institute, and artist Alan Berliner. Her current research
focuses on preservation with a focus on film, games, and time based media
art. Among our cohort here at Illinois Rhiannon is the most qualified to
talk in specific detail about the intersection of social and the
technical, especially as they interact in the development and enactment of
artifacts such as reference models for information storage. She studies
the use, creation, and critique of such artifacts, with a special emphasis
on gender, race and ethnicity.

Rhiannon invited to the discussion Julia Flanders, who shares with
Rhiannon an intellectual and professional path that moves in and out of
traditional academic settings, through archives, libraries, scholarship
and practice-based work. Julia has maintained a crucial role in Digital
Humanities discussions, debates and research, through contributing
simultaneously to the vanguards of practice, in her leadership in the Text
Encoding Initiative, and in critical application and examination of that
practice. Through her work on the Women Writers Project Julia helped
demonstrate early on the potentials of new digital scholarly techniques to
address previously marginalized bodies and bodies of work. Her
publications, speaking and workshops continue to bring a needed focus to
questions of labor that emerge from these new techniques, and fold very
nicely into matters introduced by Mimi and Chad in the past weeks. Julia
is currently editor in chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and her work
is included among many other places in the very useful Debates in the
Digital Humanities anthology published last year by University of
Minnesota Press.

I want to welcome Julia and Rhiannon to empyre, and again to encourage
others to jump in over the week. THANK YOU ALL!

THE HANDOFF TO RHIANNON:

Rhiannon, you've known Julia's work for some time, though some of our
cohort just learned of her work and the whole notion of the alt-ac. What
aspects of Julia's research and practice are most present for you right
now in the context of this discussion, and what would you like to ask
Julia in the context of our month's topic?

-- Kevin Hamilton