HASTAC II: Lightning Talks

The first set of "lightning talks" took place today at UC Irvine at the start of the 2008 HASTAC II conference on "Techno-travels."

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UC San Diego) spoke about "ExpressiveProcessing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review." Working with colleagues from the group blog Grand Text Auto, Wardrip-Fruin has attempted to make the scholarly composition and peer review process more public. Working on his upcoming book Expressive Processing, Wardrip-Fruin created a blog-based peer review format that allows users to post comments in response to specific passages of his book draft. In addition to an academic audience, this project encourages other types of experts and enthusiasts to contribute to the writing process.

Tom Boellstorff (UC Irvine) spoke about "CreationistCapitalism." In his recent work, Boellstorff performs ethnographic research in the popular synthetic world Second Life. His project explores the ways that anthropological methods might be applied to online worlds. In his book Coming of Age in Second Life, he defines virtual worlds as "places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet." The book explores key similarities and differences between virtual and non-virtual worlds. Moreover, Boellstorff explores "creationist capitalism": a concept that has to do with the intersection of religion and economics in which production is understood in terms of creation. As he argues, in Second Life, creativity itself becomes a mode of production. This fusion of creativity and capitalism operates both as a business model and an emergent social form. Through this study, Boellstorff thinks about the fusion of work and play.

Brian Goldfarb (UC San Diego) spoke about "Global Tourette." Global Tourette is a media exchange project developed by and for people with Tourette Syndrome and their extended networks. Goldfarb's work is an intervention into situated disability studies. The project attempts to reframe the concept of "disability" and work through it in a transnational framework. More concretely, the work attempts to return the diagnosis of and response to Tourette back to the patients. Part of the media component of this global initiative involves the production of self-made media by people with Tourette Syndrome.

Eric Kabisch (UC Irvine) spoke about "Datascape." Datascape is a digital world that is coextensive with the planet Earth. Kabisch's system allows users to take real-world data sets and use them to create their own virtual worlds by mapping information over physical space. Theoretically, the project contributes to the move from a disembodied view of the Internet to a locative vision of emerging technologies. Instead of separating physical and digital spaces, Kabisch sees all objects as material-virtual hybrids. As such, databases represent not an external construct but a substrate of the embodied world.

Patrick Jagoda (Duke University)