IAH Forges Partnerships and Plans for Digital Arts and Humanities Festival

The Institute for the Arts and Humanities has been very busy working behind the scenes to develop our new digital arts and humanities initiative. We plan to inaugurate this initiative with a campus-wide festival in 2010—Collaborations in Humanities, Arts & Technology (CHAT), which will take place Feb. 12-21 on UNC’s Chapel Hill campus.

To keep up-to-date with the latest CHAT happenings, visit the newly launched site: iah.unc.edu/chat. 

With one year to go, here’s an update on what we’ve been up to since last spring:

Developing Partnerships Across the UNC Campus

Throughout the past year, we have developed partnerships with arts and humanities departments within the College of Arts and Sciences and with other programs, schools and resources across campus in digital technology. Our partnerships show that UNC has the framework in place to remain competitive as technology ushers in the next wave of arts and humanities work.

Partners such as the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Information Technology Services (ITS) and the Office of Arts & Sciences Information Services (OASIS) are playing an integral role teaming up with faculty on campus to create innovative digital arts and humanities projects.

Other groups such as the School of Library and Information Science (SILS) and the UNC Libraries already have exciting digital projects in the works that they will share during the festival.

Finally, we are thrilled to work with Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) and the UNC music department to offer exciting performances throughout the festival. CPA plans to bring in world-renowned digital performers. In 2010, the music department will hold Music on the Hill in conjunction with CHAT and feature digital music composition and performance.

To explore the breadth of topics that touch on digital arts and humanities, we are joining forces with other groups on campus, too. In November, we hosted two professors from the UNC School of Law, who led an informative discussion on copyright and intellectual property law. Professors Lolly Gassaway and Deborah Gerhardt fielded myriad questions from artists, librarians, humanities faculty and students.

Developing Partnerships Across the Triangle

Through CHAT, the IAH has reached out to faculty at North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University and Duke University. We’ve also reached out to technology companies in the Research Triangle Park in an effort to connect people with mutual interests in technology, the arts and humanities. 

In July, Megan Granda and Mary Flanagan, IAH executive director and director of development, respectively, had a productive meeting with Bob Winston, IAH Advisory Board member and longtime friend. Bob is the current president of the Research Triangle Foundation, and he put us in touch with some folks at CISCO, which led to a very promising meeting about possible corporate sponsorship for some of our CHAT projects.

Also this fall, Kate Hayles, electronic literature expert and newly appointed professor of English at Duke, came to speak about “Virtual Architecture, Actual Media” to a room full of our arts and humanities faculty and graduate students.

Joining National and International Communities

The IAH has explored potential collaborations in national and international communities of scholars and technologists interested in the digital arts and humanities. 

We’ve been busy: IAH Director John McGowan, Megan and a small team of technologists, artists and humanities faculty took turns traveling to St. Louis, San Francisco (twice!), Tucson and London to attend select conferences on arts, humanities and technology. In September, John traveled to Cambridge, England, to attend the annual Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts conference.

In addition, John, IAH Associate Director Joyce Rudinsky and select Carolina technologists and faculty have been contributing to regular meetings of the Bamboo Planning Process, a Mellon Foundation project spearheaded by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The Bamboo Process is a multi-institutional and inter-organizational effort to bring together researchers in arts and humanities, computer and information scientists, librarians and campus information technologists to tackle collectively the question: How can we enhance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? Most recently, John and Joyce headed to Tucson in mid-January to attend the third meeting of the Bamboo Group.

Incubating Faculty Projects

A priority for us this past fall and this spring is bringing together faculty and technologists from across the Triangle to develop projects using digital media to exhibit during the CHAT festival. We’ve hosted several working groups and are now working to match six collaborative project proposals with various funding sources and campus technology resources.

The projects are an exciting glimpse into the possibilities that digital technology enables in arts and humanities work. In one project, a group of faculty from communication studies and dramatic art will collaborate with RENCI technologists on a “virtual performance factory,” a live and virtual simulation of a video game. Audience members will perform the game in real time in a performance space on campus while an art video game projects the game in the immersive dome at RENCI’s UNC engagement site.

We also have an interdisciplinary group of faculty and technologists working to create a collection of digital information on North Carolina that they hope to build into an interactive interface, such as a Web site. By clicking on an area on the map for which there is content, a user could learn about the history of music in that area or view old zoning maps.

These are just two examples of the exciting projects now underway. In addition, the IAH is supporting arts and humanities faculty seeking to use technology in teaching. In October, we held a forum in which interested faculty could connect with campus technologists and technology resources and identify possible funding support for new course development. We plan to include some student projects resulting from these courses in our February festival. 

Funding Opportunities

John has been working hard this fall to connect the IAH’s digital arts and humanities initiative with several funding opportunities. 

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has invited UNC to submit a proposal to participate in its “Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research” project (SEASR). SEASR is an analytical platform for the analysis of rich media content led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

A software engineering project, SEASR is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for the humanities. SEASR’s software research and development environment will enable existing applications to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (e.g., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media and even custom data).  A group from SEASR will visit Chapel Hill March 6 and 7 to lead a workshop that introduces the SEASR platform to faculty and technologists in the Triangle. 

It has been an exciting few months, and we look forward to watching the next year of festival plans and preparations unfold.