Main content for "Category: Science and Technology Studies"

Beginning R and Python Workshops

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Beginning Monday, April 9, the Athenaeum will host a short series of structured workshops developed to introduce humanities faculty, students, and interested staff to R and Python, specifically for humanities projects. There will be a total of four sessions, two workshops for each programming language. The workshops are intentionally conceived with the absolute beginner in mind. In essence, we hope to provide a pathway for anyone who has become aware that R and Python may be of use to their work and simply need a means to get started.

The schedule:

M 4/9, 11:30a-1:00p: Beginning Python for DH I

W 4/11, 11:30a-1:00p: Beginning R for DH I

M 4/16, 11:30a-1:00p: Beginning Python for DH II

W 4/18, 11:30a-1:00p: Beginning R for DH II

Sessions will be facilitated by Chris Miller, Nick Bolin (Python), and Rohan Joseph (R). We look forward to hosting participants, who are welcome to join any combination or all of these workshops. We will provide laptops pre-loaded with needed tools for the sessions.

Please do share broadly among your networks, and feel free to send any follow-up questions directly. RSVPs, while not required, are appreciated in advance for a general count. Please contact Chris Miller, Digital Humanities Coordinator for more information or to RSVP. https://lib.vt.edu/spaces/athenaeum.html

Please join us in Athenaeum for this Friday’s DH and STS Seminars:

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10:30a-12:00p

Christopher A. Miller
A multi-modal, media-enhanced performance of John Cage’s 45′ for a Speaker (1954)
Athenaeum Classroom (Newman 124)
*hot teas and donuts served

Published in Silence, a collection of John Cage’s writings, 45′ for a Speaker is a performative series of lectures that provide insight into specific pieces of the prepared piano repertoire in addition to Cage’s general notions of composition by chance operations and consultation of the I-Ching. Such processes were also central to John Cage’s two artistic residencies in the local area, orchestrated primarily by Ray Kass, in 1983 and 1988 (Mountain Lake Workshop). This performance takes full advantage of the mediated classroom of Athenaeum to project selections from Cage’s New River Watercolors (1988) in complement with Cage-inspired digital art from Tony Obr and Kalak, photographs by LS King, and musical compositions from Bob Pillow and Kalak. Post-performance discussion will focus on Chris’ research on archiving as performance practice and the archives as a space for performance, which was the focus of his recent artistic residency at the Seoul Dance Center.

2:30-4:00p

Professor Matthew Goodrum (STS, VT)
“Celts, Cavemen, and Other Contested Ancestors:  Identifying the Prehistoric Peoples of Europe.”
Athenaeum Classroom (Newman 124)
*refreshments and conversation begin at 2:00p
Abstract
By the middle of the nineteenth century archaeologists had extended human history into a deep prehistory, and soon paleontologists would extend that prehistory back into the geologic past of the Ice Age.  For anthropologists the primary question was to identify who these prehistoric people were and what relationship they bore to modern Europeans or other existing peoples.  My paper examines how anthropologists during the last half of the nineteenth century developed methods to examine and interpret prehistoric skeletons and formulated theories to explain how Europe became populated by successive waves of peoples (races).  I then link this to my earlier research on the origins of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline.

The First Extermination Event: Re-thinking the Sixth Extinction as the Necrocene – In the Athenaeum

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Please join us for the next Science, Technology & Society Seminar:Friday, February 9
1:30-3:00p
Athenaeum Classroom

Justin McBrien,
Department of History
University of Virginia

“The First Extermination Event: Re-thinking the Sixth Extinction as the Necrocene.”

Abstract
This talk argues that the contemporary Sixth Extinction Event is not the result of the Anthropocene, or humanity becoming a geological agent, but rather the Necrocene, or capitalism becoming an extinction event. The Necrocene – the New Epoch of Death-Necrosis – reveals how capitalism’s logic of “accumulation by extinction” has erased not just species, but peoples, cultures, and languages, a process that reached a planetary scale by the mid-Twentieth Century. By tracing the material dialectic of accumulation and extinction and its coevolution with a conceptual dialectic of risk and environment from the Eighteenth Century to Present, this talk shows how capitalism did not ignore environmental risk – it invented environmental risk and made it the central problem of its very survival. The history of Western environmentalism has been caught between two contradictory impulses. One has aided capitalism’s continued accumulation through a technocratic ethos of conservation.  The other has embraced a misanthropic transcendentalism that argues it is the innate parasitic character of the human being itself that is driving ecological catastrophe. This dialectic produced both the scientific basis and ideological content of “planetary catastrophism.” Planetary catastrophism points to human nature as the agent of planetary destruction, obscuring who and what is responsible for the growing extinction crisis. But the First Extermination Event is something fundamentally different than the sixth iteration of a deep time bio-geological process. Only through awareness that it is global capitalist system of production, and not an undifferentiated “humanity,” can we begin to conceptualize what exactly this historical moment in the deep time of life entails.

Snacks and conversation to begin at 1:00. Josh Earle will handle your WebEx requests.