Editor's note: URL has been updated to show proceedings from the conference. 9/3/07

International HASTAC Conference
 "Electronic Techtonics:  Thinking at the Interface”
April 19-21, 2007

HASTAC ( "haystack”—Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is now soliciting papers and panel proposals for "Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” its first international conference. The interdisciplinary conference will be held April 19-21, 2007, in Durham, North Carolina, co-sponsored by Duke University and RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute). Details concerning registration fees, hotel accommodations, and the full conference agenda will be posted to http://www.hastac.org as they become available.

Highlights include a keynote address by John Seely Brown (The Social Life of Information), a talk by legal theorist James Boyle (co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Science Commons), a conversation among leaders of innovative digital humanities projects led by John Unsworth (chair of the ACLS "Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities and Social Sciences” commission), and a presentation by media artist and research pioneer Rebecca Allen. The conference will also include refereed scholarly and scientific papers, multimedia performances, an exhibit hall of innovative software and hardware, plus tours of art and scientific installations in virtual reality, learning-game, and interactive sensor space environments.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Six sessions will be devoted to panels with refereed papers on spects of "interface” spanning media arts, engineering, and the human, social, natural, and computational sciences.  Panels will be topical and cross-disciplinary; they will be comprised of papers that are themselves interdisciplinary as well as specialized disciplinary papers presented in juxtaposition with one another.
 
Deadline for Proposals:  December 1, 2006.

From the "We make our buildings, then our building make us" Department...

Retro-tech as solution to Information Overload
The time-management maniacs over at 43 Folders pointed to Paul Ford's recent piece on NPR entitled Distracted No More: Going Back to Basics . Ford provides an all-too-familiar criticism of the web: it is a time-sink and a major distraction. He isn't against distraction altogether, and muses eloquently on the importance of random associations that appear as one writes and thinks. His issue with the web is its superficiality, a sense that it is broad but not deep. His solution: retrotech. He hasn't given up on the web, but when he wants to do some serious thinking and writing, he takes out a low-tech laptop with a black and white screen and no internet connection, and boots up wordperfect for DOS. What's interesting about this is that he doesn't advocate a return to really old technology (the pen and the notepad), but older technology that doesn't afford the same level of immediacy and access. What does this mean for us on campus who are bathing every last inch of our social spaces with wireless internet? Who push laptops like drug-dealers push their wares? How does the web handle the human need for reflection?


For those of us who sometimes work the Information Literacy side of the street, Ford's piece and its link from 43 Folders is suggestive of new ways of thinking about information literacy and liberal arts education. What if part of information literacy has to do with the selection of the appropriate technology (both hardware and software) for a given task? In a world awash in too much unmediated information, should we be paying more attention to the time management gurus (Stephen Covey, David Allen), whose work increasingly has to do with managing the flow of information in your life? Allen's latest title "Ready for Anything " could almost be an advertisement for what we want to say about our graduates, suggesting that there may be a strange confluence between some of the claims we make about liberal arts education and the goals of content-neutral time management systems.