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Cyberinfrastructure: Coming to a Neighbourhood Near You

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
Monday, November 3
10:45 am - 12 pm

Social scientists and humanists may not immediately come to mind when talk turns to cyberinfrastructure (CI), but it’s only a matter of time. With advanced networks, mass storage, high-performance computing and other core technologies in place, new network applications are enabling, in ways not previously imagined, new forms of collaboration and research by scholars concerned with the human experience and understanding the richness and diversity of the social and cultural worlds. The session will open with a presentation on the nature of the humanities and social science research that CI enables and an overview of current Canadian research activity, in particular in the humanities. The presentations that follow will provide specific examples of research in this emerging area.

Session Chair: Gale Moore, Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto
Professor Gale Moore is the former Director of KMDI, a leading trans-disciplinary institute and intellectual incubator at the University of Toronto that has been engaged in digital media research and postgraduate education for over a decade. Gale is a member of the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Communication and Culture at the University of Toronto - Mississauga. As a sociologist-designer, her primary interests for the past 15 years have been the social impact of information and communication technologies in everyday life, and on bringing an understanding of peoples’ experience into the design of technology and technology-mediated interactions. She is a co-inventor of KMDI’s ePresence Interactive Media, an interactive webcasting, archiving and media production system, the academic lead on KMDI's Project Open Source | Open Access and co-founder of MediaGenerator, a student-led, faculty-supported initiative to imagine and create the student media of the future. She is also a member of the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group on Understanding Scholarly Outputs in a Digital Age. Her current research interests are in the phenomenon of openness, including open innovation, video as knowledge media, design research, institutional innovation and the changing nature of scholarly communication across the disciplines.

Presenters:

Michael Macy, Professor of Sociology, Cornell University
Michael Macy is Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology at Cornell. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, he uses computational models, controlled experiments in virtual laboratories, and digital traces of computer-mediated interaction to study peer-influence and tie-formation in dynamic networks (http://people.cornell.edu/pages/mwm14). Macy pioneered the use of agent-based computational models in sociology and now heads a team of social, information, and computer scientists who are building tools that will make the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) accessible for research on social and information networks (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104477). From 2005 to 2008, he led a Cornell initiative to promote cross-disciplinary collaborative research and teaching on social and information networks (http://www.socialsciences.cornell.edu/0508/networks_desc.html). He is also director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell (http://hsd.soc.cornell.edu).
Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing, University of Alberta
Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Haverford College, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and worked at the University of Toronto as a Senior Instructional Technology Specialist. While at McMaster University from 1994 to 2008 he set up an undergraduate Multimedia programme. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. He is currently the project leader for the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funded project TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which has developed a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts (see portal.tapor.ca). He has published a book Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet with Humanity Books. More information is available at www.geoffreyrockwell.com.

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