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The time has come for our graduating seniors in the Emerging Media and Communications program to showcase their capstone projects that they have been working hard on for the past semester. Many of these students have been thinking about this project for their entire Undergraduate or Graduate career here at UT Dallas. This year the Arts & Humanities school really wanted to make this presentation a celebration of our students’ outstanding work.

This year a prize of $250 will be awarded to one outstanding undergraduate and one graduate. We will provide light refreshments and snacks during intermission.

If you are not able to attend the celebration because you are out of town, don’t fret because we will be recording the event and will post a video on our YouTube channel after the event. Also, if you would like to follow the Twitter chatter surrounding the event, you can follow the event hashtag, #emacC2.

View the program notes online.

The EMAC Lab, formerly the Mobile Lab, which has previously created projects such as Undetweetable and Enemygraphis working on a new software project, which should be ready for release next month. The project, called Github Syllabus, is designed to allow college instructors to quickly and easily share copies of their syllabi on the Github platform. Github, was originally designed as a mechanism to allow programmers to quickly and easily share source code files and collaborate. However, recently the platform’s capabilities have attracted attention from academics in the humanities and social sciences as well. This is mostly because of how the github platform handles files. It stores information about every revision made to a file, allowing the evolution of a complex document, even one contributed to by multiple authors, to be recovered. It also allows users to “fork” files, creating a new version for themselves with a link back to the original version. This allows for flexible collaboration and sharing of materials. University instructors are interested in using these collaboration and sharing functions to work together on teaching and research materials. At present, uploading material to github in a format that it uses gracefully can be difficult and time consuming. Github Syllabus is designed to help with that. It is a plugin for the popular WordPress blogging platform that allows syllabi shared using this platform to be quickly and easily transferred to github. As many faculty use WordPress for classes, this connection will help them more readily make use of the github platform. Look for Github Syllabus, the latest creation from EMAC Lab, in the coming weeks!

Class registration opened this morning and for Fall 2013 we are offering two sections of the special topics course EMAC 4372. You may be asking yourself what course is the better fit for you? Below are the course descriptions for Dave Parry’s course as well as Andrew Famiglietti’s course to help you decide which one is the best fit for you.

EMAC 4372.002: Unlike prior forms of broadcast media, the digital network distributes the means of production and dissemination within the populace as a whole, replacing one to many communication with the many-to-many. While by no means egalitarian, the shift away from broadcast media to a more distributed form opens up a range of possibilities for communities to leverage the digital network and computational technologies to not only to communicate with each other but to work to solve their own problems.In this class we are going to work to understand how the digital network can foster civic engagement, and be purposed to solve a wide range of citizen concerns.To accomplish this goal, the class is divided into three sections: theory, research, and practice. In the first part of class we will read some of the key works on community building and the media’s role in empowering/disempowering citizens, with particular focus on the effect the digital network is having. Second, we will look at particular examples of Citizen Media and research what groups are doing, what has worked, and what has not. Finally the class will work in groups to make their own Civic Media projects. (class taught by Dave Parry)

EMAC 4372.001:This EMAC 4372 teaches basic computer programming literacy with an eye towards the humanistic application of digital tools and techniques. With this goal in mind, EMAC 4372 focuses on the practical application of higher level scripting languages to tasks common in the humanities. Students will learn basic code design patterns, regular expressions, and web API use, and practice applying these tools to real-world research and communication tasks. (class taught by Andrew Famiglietti)

Looking for capstone registration? Are you worried because it doesn’t appear in Coursebook? Don’t worry, there will be capstones in the Fall. The course just does not appear in Coursebook. To register for capstone you should download the Undergraduate capstone form or the Graduate capstone form, and talk to the professor you want to supervise your project. Keep in mind that each professor only has a limited number of students that he or she can supervise, so you want to talk to that professor sooner rather than later. Also in the Fall semester Capstone meetings will be Tuesday evenings. This doesn’t mean you will meet every Tuesday evening, but it does mean that several Tuesday’s out of the semester you will be required to meet as a group (i.e. don’t take classes from 5:00-10:00pm on Tuesday as that would make it impossible for you to meet).

The Summer and Fall 2013 schedule is now live in Course Book and Galaxy. Please refer to Course Book (http://coursebook.utdallas.edu/) to find updated information on days and times. As a reminder, the schedule is subject to change, and official course information should always be found via Galaxy or Course Book.

NOTE: Room locations will be updated at a later date and time once the new ATEC building has been completed.

Undergraduate EMAC students please contact Melissa Hernandez-Katz (last names A-K), melissa.katz@utdallas.edu, or Tara Lewis (last names L-Z), tara.lewis@utdallas.edu, with any questions regarding holds and/or registration.

Graduate students please contact Tara Lewis with any registration/hold information.

Fall 2013 Schedule (Subject to change) – Find specific times in Course Book (http://coursebook.utdallas.edu/).

Undergraduate Courses

ATEC 2321- Writing and Research for Emerging Media, M/W, A. Famiglietti

ATEC 2321- Writing and Research for Emerging Media, T/TH, A. Famiglietti

ATEC 2321- Writing and Research for Emerging Media, M/W, Staff

ATEC 2322 – Theories of Emerging Media and Communication, T/TH, D. Parry

ATEC 2322 – Theories of Emerging Media and Communication, M/W, Staff

ATEC 3326 – Emerging Media Production, W, Staff

ATEC 3326 – Emerging Media Production, F, Staff

ATEC 4326 – Advanced Emerging Media Production, W, Staff

EMAC 4325 – Digital Writing, T/TH, K. Knight

COMM 3300 – Reading Media Critically, T, J. Johnson

COMM 3300 – Reading Media Critically, TH, J. Johnson

COMM 3342 – Topics in Communciation, M/W, L. Bell

COMM 3342 – Topics in Communication, T/TH, Staff

COMM 4314 – Persuasion, M/W, L. Bell

COMM 4314 – Persuasion, M/W, L. Bell (Yes, there are two sections. Not a typo.)

EMAC 3328 – The Digital Society, M/W, C.Shen

EMAC 4372 – Topics in Emerging Media and Communication, M/W, A. Famiglietti

EMAC 4372 – Topics in Emerging Media and Communication, T/TH, D. Parry

COMM 4340 – Small Group Communication, M/W, M. Schlobohm

Please consult your degree plan and Course Book for other required courses being offered in Fall 2013.

Graduate Courses

EMAC 6300 – Interdisciplinary Studies in EMAC, TH, K. Knight

EMAC 6361 – Creating Interactive Media, T, C. Nazir

EMAC 6372 – Approaches to Emerging Media and Communication, M, C. Shen

EMAC 6373 – Emerging Media Studio, T, D. Terry

New elective courses for Fall 2013:

ATEC 4370 – Topics in Arts and Technology: Multidisciplinary Research (counts as upper level elective), TH, M. Schich (www.utdallas.edu/atec/schich)

Gather, organize, analyze, and communicate is an essential sequence in almost every field of research. Looking at commonalities and differences in this sequence, we explore opportunities and hurdles of multidisciplinary collaboration. We draw inspiration from a variety of fields, including Arts & Humanities, Arts & Technology, Emerging Media and Communication, data science, information design, computer science, natural science, entrepreneurship, and classic rhetoric.

ATEC 6389 – Topics in Arts and Technology: Networks and History (counts as prescribed elective), TH, M. Schich (www.utdallas.edu/atec/schich)

Networks and history are intertwined. As we study history, we are confronted with a non-intuitive heterogeneity of complex networks. These complex networks connect things, concepts, individuals, locations, and events. Understanding the non-trivial dynamics and evolution of these networks becomes mission critical to historical inquiry. In this course we will combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify and tackle the challenges of long and networked data.

Spring 2014 Schedule (TENTATIVE – Subject to Change)

Undergraduate Courses

ATEC 2321 – Writing and Research for Emerging Media, A. Famiglietti

ATEC 2321 – Writing and Research for Emerging Media, A. Famiglietti

ATEC 2322 – Theories of Emerging Media and Communication, D. Parry

ATEC 2322 – Theories of Emerging Media and Communication, Staff

ATEC 3326 – Emerging Media Production, Staff

ATEC 3326 – Emerging Media Production, Staff

ATEC 4326 – Advanced Emerging Media Production, Staff

EMAC 4325 – Digital Writing, K. Knight

COMM 3300 – Reading Media Critically, J. Johnson

COMM 3342 – Topics in Communication, J. Johnson

COMM 3342 – Topics in Communication, Staff

COMM 4314 – Persuasion, L. Bell

EMAC 3343 – Social Networks, C. Shen

EMAC 4372 – Topics in Emerging Media and Communication, C. Nazir

EMAC 4372 – Topics in Emerging Media and Communication, Staff

COMM 3311 – Interpersonal Communication, M. Hernandez-Katz

COMM 3301 – Public and Professional Speaking for Communication, L. Bell

Graduate Courses

EMAC 6300 – Interdisciplinary Studies in EMAC, D. Parry

EMAC 6342 – Digital Culture, A. Famiglietti

EMAC 6374 – Digital Textuality, K. Knight

EMAC 6383 – Emerging Media Studio II, D. Terry

EMAC 6375 – Research Methodologies in EMAC, C. Shen

photo taken by Chachi Flores

FEATURE is written by Chachi Flores who is an EMAC Junior, he comes from a history of English, journalism, and film studies. He loves to connect with people over social media; honing his skills at EMAC in social, SEO, and content creation.

If you didn’t stay connected during South by Southwest (SXSW) to your network of sources through social media this year…you lost out. Networking guru and one of the EMAC 4372 instructors, Nico Martini would agree: staying connected was imperative in 2013 to maximize the SXSW experience.

For the foreseeable future, the secret to SXSW is maximizing your digital presence and having what author Howard Rheingold calls “attention literacy” to understand and accumulate information constructively, as we learn in EMAC’s 2321 class.

Leading up to SXSW, you had minutes to RSVP to exclusive parties like FADER Fort presented by Converse or Justin Timberlake’s MySpace show. If you didn’t follow Twitter accounts when they tweeted RSVP links to their parties, or Facebook login to secret shows like the Smashing Pumpkins at Red Bull Sound Select, you did it all wrong. Your network and your sources are everything at SXSW. You can see all the live music you want for free, no badge required, all you need is your smart phone.

In EMAC 2322, students explore, among many topics, Pierre Levy’s theories on collective intelligence. It was amazing how useful those lessons were as I saw these theories put into play through social media.

There were live tweets and retweets being shared by networks of SXSW attendees to get info on waiting lines for events. Beyond that if you were looking to know where the best hangouts and events were there’s information on that via social media. A simple proximity search on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter brought results with location based-info and maps. Videos and photos of Prince’s last minute gig at La Zona Rosa were posted and shared by thousands just seconds after it happened. I got a free t-shirt at FADER Fort just by checking-in on Foursquare after searching the #FaderFort hashtag.

It’s amazing how useful EMAC’s curriculum was when the tools and knowledge you’ve acquired can help give you that competitive edge over everyone else. SXSW was no different. While people were walking around aimlessly, I was on flexing my EMAC muscle and having a good time doing it.

photo credit: Amy Pickup

As South by Southwest (SXSW) is taking over Austin, TX in Dallas the team at KERA was busy working on a story about how high-tech is meeting high-fashion. The Art+Seek article written by Lauren Silverman covers the role of technology and it’s history in fashion starting with MIT’s “wearable computer.”  Silverman spoke with Designer Jennifer Darmour who was at SXSW interactive talk about the movement to blend technology and fashion more seamlessly.

In Silverman’s article she mentions a prototype garment using the LilyPad Arduino which is what Professor Kim Knight uses in her Fashioning Circuits class here on the UTD campus.

“Ping” allows you to send messages to your friends on Facebook with different gestures. Then there’s custom software that translates your gestures into messages. You could then customize the messages, a flip of your hood could send a note you’re leaving home and untying a belt could send a message you’ve finished work or are relaxing.”

Fashioning Circuits course also uses products from SparkFun Electronics and Silverman interviewed Dia Campbell about their wearable technology.

“marrying technology and fashion is empowering.”

Dia Campbell was also part of EMAC graduate student, Amy Pickup’s Fashioning Circuits camp to spark young girls interest in art and technology. Silverman spoke with Amy about her drive to create a summer camp for girls at Oil and Cotton appropriately titled Electronic Fashion Camp. Over three days, girls learned about circuitry, coding, and crafting to create their own LilyPad Arduino project. Amy Pickup continues this project through her website, etiquette creative.

photo credit: Amy Pickup

This summer EMAC senior Joe Posada-Triana was selected to attend a national session of the LeaderShape Institute. A seven day immersive leadership training for students, LeaderShape focuses on empowering leaders “to create a just, caring, thriving world”. Joe’s attendance at LeaderShape was the culmination of his year long experience as a NASPA Undergraduate Fellow, a mentoring program for students looking to gain experience and knowledge in the field of higher education and student affairs.http://www.naspa.org/programs/nufp/

Joe Posada-Triana

Part of the LeaderShape Institute is to spend time working on a vision that has a positive impact on your campus, community, and even the world. Joe dedicated his vision to a non-profit that he has been working on for the past year:

“The whole week was just an amazing experience because it helped me learn new things about myself and also pushed me into fifth gear in my vision to create a non-profit that provides first generation latino/a student’s the resources they need to attend college.” See Joes post on the leadershape blog.

Joe and his colleagues at Great Minds are using blogs, Facebook, text messages, and more to create an academic support network for first generation Latino/a students. He plans to continue working on Great Minds for his senior capstone project, and hopes to see the project continue well into the future.

Move over engineers, you’re not the only ones who can build robots.

That’s what students in Professor Andrew Famiglietti’s EMAC special topics class, which focused on hacker culture and practice, learned this semester.

“People often use the word ‘hacker’ to refer to a sort of digital thief, someone who breaks security with malicious intent” Famiglietti explained, “but it can also refer to anyone who plays with technology in creative and unexpected ways.” The goal of the class was to teach students both how to engage with technology in the “hacker” mode, and to show them how this method emerged over the course of recent history. To accomplish this, the class blended readings and hands on exercises to create a unique learning experience.

Students Wiring E.C.H.O. Project

During the first three weeks of class, students read some of the most important academic research and journalism documenting the hacker subculture. These included Steven Levy’s famous and influential “Hackers,” and selections from the more recent work of the anthropologist Gabriella Coleman. Based on these readings, students and instructor worked together to composed collaboratively authored documents that captured what they believed to be key principles of hacking as practice.

“We used a version of the open-source alternative to Google docs hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party, called piratepad,” Famiglietti said, “it’s the same site used by anonymous and other hacker organizations to write some of their collaborative documents. I thought that was a nice touch.”

With the theoretical frame of the course thus established, the activity of the class turned to putting this theory into practice. Students started working with the Arduino prototyping platform, a low-cost open-source computer designed to be connected to a variety of sensors and other devices to interact with the physical world.

“Arduinos were designed to be used by artists,” Famiglietti explained, “you don’t need an engineering degree to learn how to code for one.”

After an initial introduction to the Arduino, students participated in a week-long exercise called “Arduino Chopped!” inspired by the Food Network gameshow “Chopped!” Students were given a random bag of electronic parts and asked to design and build a device using these parts and their Arduinos. The device had to embody some aspect of the hacker principles they had previously enumerated in their collaborative document.

“They really impressed me,” Famiglietti said, “they came up with some really creative devices in a short amount of time. One group managed to build a sort of dead-reckoning self-driving toy car. They managed to solve some tricky problems in creative and unexpected ways.”

Students spent the rest of their semester working on group projects employing the skills they had learned programming for the arduino platform and the hacker principles. One group created an automated “noise music” installation that used the arduino to trigger different sounds based on different hashtags used on the twitter platform. The group hoped to reveal something new about how people used twitter, and re-mediate this experience in a novel way.

“It was a creative project,” Famiglietti said, “it showed me they had thought about how to ‘hack’ media affordances.”

Overall, students found the class to be a unique learning experience.

“It was a humanities approach to a topic commonly seen as tech-only. Very in-depth for such a broad topic,” EMAC senior Will Parsons said.

International copyright is a thorny issue that creative digital projects are often choosing to “route around,” rather than directly engage with.

Visiting Assisstant Professor Andrew Famiglietti

That was the impression Visiting Assisstant Professor Andrew Famiglietti took away from his recent participation in the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) workshop on “Authorship Dynamics and the Dynamic Work.”

Dr. Famiglietti was invited to participate in the one-day workshop in Cambridge, England on the basis of his unique expertise on the culture and practices of the Wikipedia project, the subject of his dissertation
and further publications.

The workshop focused on the problem of updating copyright and other forms of intellectual property law to meet the needs of emerging forms of digital authorship and collaboration. “It was really eye-opening for everyone involved,” said Famiglietti, “the way we study digital production often has a US-centric slant we don’t even recognize. It immediately became apparent to me that, for European scholars, the problems with copyright in the digital environment are only compounded by international boundaries.”

“They had a phrase for the process of syncing up IP law across different countries in the Euro zone, ‘European Harmonization,’ and I very quickly came to recognize the sort of tone of exhaustion and disdain that always went along with it.”

In Famiglietti’s opinion, the discussions surrounding Wikipedia’s relationship to copyright law were some of the most fruitful. “There was a long analysis of how poorly Wikipedia fits into the categories assumed by existing copyright law. It never really has a ‘fixed’ version, and the potential pool of ‘authors’ is very fluid. I pointed out that, in my experience, this misfit had never caused much of a problem for the community because they used alternate licensing schemes that served to de-emphasize these issues. In some cases, they added to this with ad-hoc practices, like encouraging re-users to link back to Wikipedia articles to provide attribution, that also served to ‘route around’ potential problems.”

While these practices have served Wikipedia well so far, Famiglietti wonders if they may not represent a final answer for the problem of copyright in the digital world.

“These sort of private, contract based solutions are what we expect from a somewhat libertarian hacker community,” Famiglietti points out, “and they work well enough, but they leave larger public policy questions unresolved. They may even mask the existence of these questions from members of the community.”

Ultimately, he thinks that calls for a better understanding of how categories like “author” and “work” are evolving as digital collaboration becomes a more important part of the social and economic landscape. “I’ve been talking to some of the other workshop participants about using the work of Bruno Latour to start trying to frame some of these issues. Maybe if we stop thinking of works as fixed things tied to fixed authors, and start thinking about how they function as networks of associations, we might make some headway.”