Plenary Sessions

Opening Plenary Session
Monday — 1:15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Presentation of the 2011 Paul Evan Peters Award to Christine L. Borgman Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles

Following the award presentation, Dr. Borgman will present the
Paul Evan Peters Lecture:

Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet:
Reflections on Three Decades in Internet Time

The previous recipients of this distinguished award (Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, Brewster Kahle, Paul Ginsparg, and Daniel Atkins) each laid essential building blocks for today’s information infrastructure. They addressed problems of scale and sustainability, and imagined new approaches to old practices. This talk will examine how networked information, infrastructure, and the internet have evolved from the 1970s to today, asking how we got here, where we are now, and where we might go from here. Themes to be considered include the transition from a closed scholarly world to the open web, the shift in content and context of networked information, information services for readers and for authors, and differences between publications and data. The talk concludes with reflections on the future of libraries, librarians, and information policy.

About Christine Borgman:

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Borgman’s current research clusters in two areas. One area is empirical research on the creation, use, and management of scientific data and its implications for science policy, which is associated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. Her second area of interest is analytical work on the changing nature of scholarship in an environment of ubiquitous computer networks and digital information. She has authored more than 200 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication, and both of Borgman’s books, Scholarship in the Digital Age and From Gutenberg to Global Information Infrastructure have received the American Society for Information Science and Technology Best Information Science Book of the Year award.

Presentation (PDF)

Press Release
More information about the Paul Evan Peters Award

Closing Plenary Session
Tuesday — 2:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Todd Presner Professor Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies Director Center for Jewish Studies Chair Digital Humanities Program University of California Los Angeles

HyperCities:
Using Social Media and GIS to Archive and Map Time Layers in
Los Angeles, Berlin, Tehran, Rome, and Cairo

Bringing together social media, the analytic tools of GIS, and traditional methods of humanistic inquiry, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Built on the Google Maps and Google Earth APIs, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all stories take place somewhere and sometime; they become meaningful when they interact and intersect with other stories. Using examples from Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, Tehran, and Cairo, Presner will discuss the HyperCities platform focusing on the role of temporal GIS to critically map and interpret a wide range of cultural, historical, and social dynamics. He will foreground a recent project that the team completed (HyperCities Egypt), which archived and mapped more then 300,000 twitter feeds during the recent Egyptian revolution.

About the Speaker:

Todd Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. He is Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and the Chair of the new Digital Humanities Program. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body.

Presner is the founder and director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. Awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008, HyperCities is an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities. The first HyperCities are Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, Rome, Ollantaytambo, and Tel Aviv, with many more in the works. The project co-project investigators are: Dean Abernathy, Mike Blockstein, Philip Ethington, Diane Favro, Chris Johanson, and Jan Reiff.

HyperCities

Presentation (PPT)