Viz Cult Meeting -- Agenda

Viz Cult Meeting: September 20, 2010 4:15 Arts West

1. Welcome: Who are we?
2. Introductions:  Who are you and what have you done with Viz Cult?
3. Discuss goals and dreams for 2010-2011:
• Chose texts for our working group meetings.
• Propose a Common Reading.
• Discuss how Viz Cult might work with the GST review.
• Choose a future for Viz Cult.  
• "In 2012 will we be:"
• a CATL working group? 
• A PERCS-esque program? or a PERCS-esque program with clusters of classes? 
• A minor?  
• An institute with an awesome "billion dollar" building? 
• Should we propose a classroom design template for visual pedagogy? 
4. Set next meeting time/place.
• Thursday October 28th at 4:15 may be a GST review forum.

Viz Cult Meeting, Thursday, Sept. 30th 4:15, Arts West

Hi Everyone,   

If you are receiving this email you are either a devotee of Viz Cult, or you requested to be added to our list-serv, or someone told me to add you to our list-serv, or you seem like you might like visual culture so I added you myself.  

This is a reminder of our “meeting” this Thursday afternoon at 4:15 in Arts West.  Let’s meet in the lobby, but we’ll probably end up Room 126.  I used scare quotes around meeting because, really, what does anything actually “mean”, and because it’s more of a gathering than a meeting.  We will have wine, cheese, fruit and chocolate (or something of the that ilk) and we will introduce ourselves as consumers, producers, historians and “analysists” of visual culture (see now I can’t be stopped with the scare quotes). 

I will also take suggestions at this meeting for our next “text”.  This can be an actual essay, a work of art, film, website, anything that you think deserves our attention as we spend this year figuring out what viz cult @ elon should be.  I have LOTS of ideas, so you will want to bring ideas simply to stop me from getting my way!   In addition to introducing ourselves, I’d like us to start considering the following questions:   

Do we want to consider a Viz Cult curriculum?  

Do we want to consider promoting clusters of classes?  Even if that’s not something that Elon will adopt as part of the GST review, it’s something we could promote among interested students. 

Should we propose a classroom design template for visual pedagogy? 

Do we want to sit in the corner, wear a beret, drink wine and scoff at what’s not happening?  Well, yeah.  

Anyway, please join us Thursday.  

Bring your brains and eyeballs and let’s get started.  Questions or concerns?  Drop me an “electronic mail”  (egatti@elon.edu)

Call for Particpation: Museums and the Web 2011

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Museums and the Web 2011:
The International Conference for Culture and Heritage Online
April 6-9, 2011
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2011/
Deadline September 30, 2010
**Sorry for the tight turn-around, I just received the call for papers**

Museums and the Web explores the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage online. Taking an international perspective, MW reviews and analyzes the impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Our community has been meeting since 1997, imagining, tracking, analyzing, and influencing the role museums play on the Web - wherever the network
may take us.

* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION *
The MW program is built from the ground up. Proposals are invited from professionals and researchers in all areas actively exploring the creation, online presentation and use of cultural, scientific and heritage content, and its re-use and evaluation. There are no pre- defined themes -- just a strong interest in the best work out there!

The bibliography of past MW papers (all online since 1997) can be searched at http://conference.archimuse.com/biblio/
All full texts are freely available online.

* PROPOSAL FORM *
Online proposal submission is required. Use the form linked from http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/call.html

Please co-ordinate your proposals with your collaborators. Multiple proposals about the same project will not be successful.

Proposals are peer-reviewed individually by an International Program Committee. Note that proposals for full sessions are rarely accepted. Proposals for sessions should be submitted as individual papers with a covering note. The committee may choose to accept some papers and not others.


*SESSION FORMATS *
MW sessions vary in format - from formal Papers to informal Birds of a Feather lunches, and from structured Professional Forums to timely Unconference Sessions. Find the best format for your idea, by reviewing the session formats at http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.sessionFormats.html


* DEADLINES *
Proposals due September 30, 2010
- for papers, mini-workshops + professional forums (written paper
required by Jan. 31, 2011)

Proposals due December 31, 2010
- for demonstrations (written paper optional)

* PROGRAM SUGGESTIONS *
The Museums and the Web program is built from the ground up, from your
proposals. Add your ideas to the on-line discussion at
http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/suggestions_for_the_mw2011_program

* NEED FURTHER DETAILS? *
Review the MW2011 Call for Participation on-line at
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2011/call.html

Contact the MW2010 Conference Co-Chairs
David Bearman + Jennifer Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics
mw2011@archimuse.com

Visualizing Human Rights Anti-Conference (from Safia Swimelar)

This is an early announcement about the third annual Visualizing Human Rights Anti-Conference taking place at UNC-Chapel Hill on Nov. 5-6.  SAVE THE DATE!

***
The third annual Visualizing Human Rights (VHR) Anti-Conference will take place on November 6, 2010 from 10am-3pm with a Special Film Screening the evening of November 5.  All activities will take place at the FedEx Global Education Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. In an unconventional forum, “Visualizing Human Rights” brings together painters, photographers, writers, poets, filmmakers, and printmakers to put a human face on human rights in an effort to reach beyond traditional academic approaches. The day will start with an intimate interview by WUNC’s Dick Gordon (“The Story”) followed by interactive studios and discussion salons.  You can sign-up to be notified as soon as the schedule is released and registration is open by visiting the VHR website. We also seek proposals (Due Oct. 1) for break-out studios and salons and welcome t-shirt design submissions which will be printed “on-demand” the day of VHR.  

Learn more: http://unc.edu/vhr.      

Conference opportunity for "Image-Driven scholarship"

VISUALIZING ASIA IN THE MODERN WORLD:
A CONFERENCE ON IMAGE-DRIVEN SCHOLARSHIP
Harvard University
May 20 & 21, 2011

Jointly sponsored by the Visualizing Cultures project at M.I.T. and the following programs at Harvard: Asia Center, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. 

This two-day conference will consist of image-driven presentations addressing both Asian and non-Asian representations of 19th and 20th-century developments in the history of East and Southeast Asia.

The conference will be open to the public. Contributors will be provided lodging, but should be prepared to cover their travel expenses. “Visualizing Asia in the Modern World” follows a lively conference on this same subject held at Yale in the spring of 2010, and we again look forward to international participation in opening these new windows of perception and understanding.

The presentations themselves will be relatively brief, no more than 20 minutes in length. Proposals for presentations, up to 3 pages double spaced, plus a small number of representative images, should be submitted by December 1, 2010 to Scott Shunk, Program Director of Visualizing Cultures at shunk@mit.edu.

For a suggestive sense of possible topical and thematic approaches, including innovative formatting of online scholarship and pedagogy, see visualizingcultures.mit.edu as well as the list of presentations made at the Yale conference http://www.visualizingasia.com.  Priority will be given to those who did not present at the previous conference.

Manifesto (in Helvetica, well on the web it's Arial) for Viz Cult @ Elon

Dear Members of the General Studies Review committee:

It is not enough to say, as we do often, that we live in an increasingly visual world.
First of all, some would argue we have always lived in “a visual world”.
And that, in fact, we have lived in even more visual worlds than we do now.
But no matter how visual our world today, there is no arguing that the visual is an essential way of making meaning.
Making meaning lies at the heart of all our academic disciplines.

A few years ago an interested group of faculty and staff from disciplines and departments as diverse as physics, business, history, economics, art history, english, art, religious studies, computing sciences, communications, instructional design and development, and the library got together to investigate visual culture as it pertains to our scholarly work, our teaching and our ethos at Elon. The resulting working group has collaborated to raise awareness of the significant impact of visual pedagogies on our campus and in academia -- and appropriate classrooms for them, the significance of research dedicated to visual culture, and the necessity for an educational core that develops visually literate global citizens.

Because of these reasons and others, the Visual Culture faculty-staff working group urges the General Studies review committee to consider the following statement as they review the General Studies curriculum at Elon.

To be critically literate our students need to be able to
interpret visual material,
construct knowledge in visual modes, and
understand how the visual is constructing them.

The membership of the Visual Culture working group ask the committee to consider:

• Curricular options that encourage multi-modal processes of inquiry and knowledge production.
• A practice of visual literacies that requires students to interpret and translate visual material with the same critical lens we ask them to apply to other types of texts.
• Encouraging this practice vertically and iteratively over the undergraduate career of our students and at increasingly richer and deeper levels, as well as across disciplines and curricular contexts.

We might suggest the following curricular models:

• Designated “Visual Literacy” (VL) courses across departments and at all levels but with shared emphases.
• Upper-level course offerings that foreground visual methodologies for inquiry or communication.
• A required visual-intensive element to 300-level GST courses similar to the intensive writing component already required.
• A model similar to that used for writing as communication (wac), such as a visual communication across the curriculum (vcac) program. Or an expanded version of the visual emphasis already included in Elon’s writing curricula.
  

Letter for the GST review committee/Declaration of the "Year of Viz Cult"

Everyone,

Welcome new peeps, glad to have you here. Yeah, whatever oldies.

So we are still planning on a meeting in Arts West at 4:15 on September 30th, with whining, yeah you know what that means (and if you don’t — I’ll give you a hint, that means there will be refreshment), but I thought it might be best to go ahead and circulate a draft of a letter we have been working on to send to the GST review committee.

The letter (or manifesto in helvetica, as I have nicknamed it) asks the committee to consider the following statement as they review the General Studies curriculum:
“To be critically literate our students need to be able to interpret visual material, construct knowledge in visual modes, and understand how the visual is constructing them.”

It would be better to get this letter to the committee sooner rather than later so I am attaching a copy of the draft here. I welcome comments, suggestions, additions, omissions between now and Tuesday morning, September 14th. After that time I will edit what we have and get it in the hands of the review committee.

It’s going to be a good year for viz cult. In fact, I declare this “the year of viz cult” That’s howe good it’s going to be.

Best,

Evan