The conference for the annual Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory [organizers pronounce the HASTAC acronym as “haystack”] will be hosted in Orlando for the first time by UCF and the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. The 10-year-old conference previously was held at Duke University, UCLA, University of Illinois, York University in Toronto, the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru, and elsewhere around the world.

“This conference is a venue where digital humanists from across the world and across disciplines come together to share their research, their pedagogical methods, and their experiences. This sharing of knowledge in both the practical and the theoretical allows us to broaden our own world,” said Amy Giroux, managing director for the conference and a UCF computer research specialist at the university’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research.

This year’s conference theme, “The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities,” highlights new opportunities for digital humanities and allows attendees from the more than 400 member organizations an opportunity to discuss and explore new research and creative work. The program will include scholars from around the globe interested in topics such as the humanities across disciplines, gaming, social media, archives, and other fields. There will be roundtables, demonstrations, maker sessions, workshops, media art projects, and other sessions.

“Having the HASTAC annual conference at UCF allows us to see the superb work being done in the digital humanities around the world, and to show off what we’re doing here at UCF to help interpret our meaningful world using digital tools,” said philosophy Professor Bruce Janz, conference director and co-director of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research. “HASTAC has always focused on the ways education and society have changed and must adapt in the Information Age, and this fits into the forward-looking and socially conscious orientation of programs at UCF such as Texts and Technology, Digital Media, and Digital History.”

One of the conference sessions asks: What can other disciplines learn from Digital Humanities and what can Digital Humanities learn from other disciplines?

“This particular panel is made up of a group of scholars who work both in traditional academia and also on the cutting edge of innovative digital spaces,” Giroux said. “They hope to foster a good discussion on how digital humanities practitioners can grow within institutions which may not be as interested in supporting digital humanities work and how the current institutional level research infrastructure may need to be modified to allow digital humanities research to flourish.”

Many digital humanities projects draw from a number of disciplines including history, anthropology, computer science, data science, digital media, traditional media, and other fields.

For example, Giroux said, one project her team will present at HASTAC is ELLE, the EndLess Learner, a second-language learning video game in which her colleagues from the Office of Instructional Resources (Don Merritt), the Games Research Lab (Emily Johnson), and modern languages (Sandra Sousa and Gergana Vitanova) teamed up with a group of computer science undergraduate students to create a database-driven learning game.

“It is this type of inter/multi-disciplinary project that allows the digital humanities to emerge from many different fields,” she said. “The five of us will be doing a roundtable discussion on the project and the undergraduate students will be displaying the 2-D and 3-D versions of the project.”

Other UCF students will showcase their research and work in front of the international audience and will serve as moderators at many of the conference sessions. HASTAC also has a scholars fellowship program, whose digital-age members blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events. UCF’s three HASTAC scholars – Nicholas DeArmas, Jennifer Roth Miller and David Morton from the Texts & Technology doctoral program – will host a professionalization workshop for conference attendees.

Some of the conference speakers are: Purdom Lindblad, assistant director of Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; T-Kay Sangwand, librarian for UCLA’s Digital Library Program, and Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor of English and director of the Futures Initiative and HASTAC @ CUNY at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Tours for registered attendees also are scheduled for the Orange County Regional History Center, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture.

The conference will be presented at several venues around campus and is open to everyone. Advance registration is encouraged, but registration also can be done at the door at Classroom Building I. For the schedule and registration, visit .

These are lines in the sand, points past which people have said they will not pass. They are, in essence, breakdowns of dialogue.

In most situations, we think of dialogue as being what will save us. It is fragile, to be sure, but always what must be rebuilt.

Is that true, though?

Will dialogue save us — if we can only get it to work? Perhaps, but that last qualifier is the hard part. What happens when we do not trust our dialogue partners, and there is no “referee” or disinterested third party that can be trusted?

Dialogue has, at times, been used to delay action on a pressing issue. It has been improperly structured such that there might seem to be two equal and opposite sides to an issue, when in fact there might be more. And, it can be seen as completely odious in some cases – do we really want to, for instance, treat perpetrators of violence as mere “dialogue partners,” as if none of what had happened before tilted the scale or raised the threat level?

What is clear is that it is a short step from thinking that “I am right” and the other person merely holds a different opinion, to thinking that the other person has some mental or moral deficiency. We can see this in many intractable struggles – very quickly, dialogue breaks down into the worst possible depictions of the other side.

Can these breakdowns be avoided?

Clearly it is not easy, or it would happen all the time. We tend to think of these large-scale questions as simply being extensions of our individual relationships with each other, but often they are not. Evidence shows that having a personal relationship with someone different from oneself softens hostility and opens people up to difference.

Large-scale breaking points depend on stereotypes – “those people,” whoever they are, can be vilified. They are irredeemably bad, corrupt, and wrong. But listening to one person, away from places where we feel like we have to defend our intellectual and moral territory, is perhaps the only place that can forestall these breakings points.

There’s no guarantee. It’s still possible to think that our friend is “one of the few good ones,” but everyone else is bad.

But what’s the alternative? Does anyone really want to live in a world of breaking points? Will things really be better when those we disagree with are finally vanquished, humiliated, and sent packing?

Is the movie over at that point, and we all get smiles, ice cream and jet flyovers? The fact is that the movie is never over. There is never a point when one idea wins for all time, or another idea is vanquished, never to be heard from again. The differences never go away, and proceeding as if one side has won and can march triumphantly into the future is an illusion.

Dialogue is often inadequate, frequently suspect and too prone to be used against us. And yet, we don’t have a lot of other options.

Let’s find a way to make it work. Resist making an echo chamber.

Find the person you don’t agree with but can still talk to. And listen to them, not with a view to how to respond, but with a view to understanding why a belief or position makes sense to someone else.

That’s how it all starts. It’s all we’ve got.

Bruce Janz is a professor in the UCF Department of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. He can be reached at Bruce.Janz@ucf.edu.

Why do I go to African countries so regularly? I could say that it is related to my academic research, and that would be true, but it wouldn’t capture the whole story. Some might think that it’s just a holiday in disguise. That’s not it either – I don’t usually have the time to do much sightseeing, although I have done some. I’m not looking for my heritage – I’m a white Canadian/American, and as far as I know I don’t have any recent heritage in Africa. If we go far enough back, of course, we all come from there, but according to a recent DNA test I’m pretty solidly northern European.

I’m also not going to fulfill some moral mandate. I’m not trying to help anyone, at least no more than someone from South Africa might come here to help us. I don’t have the answers to their problems, and even more importantly, I have no interest in defining what those problems are. That’s their business. There is, in fact, nothing noble about me going to South Africa, much less exotic. I have no higher purpose, or more accurately, I have no higher purpose in going than I would in staying in Orlando.

So why go, then? The short answer: to be pushed outside of my comfort zone. The world, my world, is pretty much constructed for my benefit and convenience, as a white straight male. You know it’s true – most people in power look like me and talk like me. If I didn’t actually make the effort, I could make my way through life dealing with the myriad tasks and challenges I have, but without ever really having to think about myself in the midst of that.

There are those who live outside of their comfort zone pretty much all the time. There are women who are abused, and who can’t yet find a way out of their situation. Some never do. There are African Americans who live in fear every time they walk out their doors, and every time they look at the news. There are transsexuals who worry about who’s around the corner, who’s watching which bathroom they enter, and what it all might mean for their safety. There are those who are in all sorts of threatening situations on a daily basis, at home, at work, just walking around. These people do not need to learn to live outside of their comfort zone – they already know it intimately. That doesn’t mean that those in precarious places can’t benefit from being outside familiar places as well.

But those of us who aren’t regularly subject to the systematic and structural forces that make the world a precarious place, we need to take the risk of finding a space where we don’t already know everything that will happen, where we can’t predict every action of everyone around us, where we have to think about the effects of our actions on the world around, because they might just be misunderstood.

We carefully construct safe and predictable places for ourselves, as much as we can. Sometimes what seems safe turns out not to be – people are abused at home, gay and allied youth are murdered in a club – but we at least strive to make our places safe, by making them predictable. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s also value in unpredictability.

My answer is to travel. That’s not everyone’s answer – but what’s yours? Do you have a way of thinking about your own place at arm’s length, rather than from the inside? Where would you go to step out of your world, and experience another place for a moment? And, what do you think you might learn from that experience?

That’s why I go to various places in Africa. There are good people there, who have entirely different hopes, fears and histories from mine. When I learn about them, I also learn about myself – and in the process, learn what it means to empathize with someone who isn’t in my world.

What I bring back to the classroom, to my research, and to my relationships is incalculable. Learning to empathize and understand is like using a muscle – if you don’t exercise, you’ll lose it. So, find a new place – you might learn something about your own familiar place in the process.

Bruce Janz is a professor in the UCF Department of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. He can be reached at Bruce.Janz@ucf.edu.

No, I’m not talking about the presidential race. I’m talking about the Summer Olympics. And the narratives I’m interested in are not the ones created by the athletes themselves, but rather by the media.

The Nielsen ratings for this year’s Olympics were down about 17 percent from the London Games in 2012. There are many possible reasons – Americans might prefer watching the games in another English-speaking country; people are watching on screens that Nielsen has a harder time tracking; interest in the Olympics among younger viewers has been waning; television watching in general has declined, especially among younger viewers.

NBC has the contract for Olympic coverage, both summer and winter games until 2032, to the tune of $12 billion. And it has contracts guaranteeing to advertisers a household percentage rating in the high teens during prime time. It averaged a 15.4 rating, lower than hoped for, although the night that Usain Bolt won gold in the 100 meters and Simone Biles won gold in the vault, the rating went up to 17.4.

Ratings are obviously about money, but I am more interested in the kinds of narratives that seem to draw those ratings. In the United States we love to see stories of those overcoming personal challenges or hardship to win. We generally love to see winners win more, at least if we like them as people – that is if they are great characters.

NBC’s strategy for coverage has been controversial for some. It has emphasized the human drama, even the reality-show nature of the competitions, as opposed to the sports themselves. Scandal sells, as does a recognizable cast of characters fitting defined roles.

They have been criticized for diminishing the significance of the successes of women and racial minorities. These narratives, in other words, can have an inertia to them, and can be slow to change to recognize new characters and new audiences. Simone Manuel’s gold medal in the 100 meter freestyle swimming event is a narrative full of significance, but only if we recognize that it happened against the background of racial exclusion in the United States.

Mount Olympus was where the gods of the ancient Greeks lived. More importantly, it was the focal point for their myths. We think of myths as stories that aren’t true, but in fact, myths are stories that make sense of our world, that help us to give a narrative to our world. They help to tell us who is friend and who is foe, what happens if we stray too far from the accepted practices of our people, and how the world is put into the order it has. We might think that we now have science, and so we don’t need these myths. But in fact we now just tell myths about science, as well as about everything else.

These myths we have are not just hard-wired into our culture. They are repeated over and over in different ways, and that makes them seem natural, but what they really are is familiar and comforting. In a world of uncertainty, it is good to see Michael Phelps and Simone Biles do exactly what we expected they would do.

But being open to new narratives, even ones that do not fit our comfortable patterns, are absolutely essential. Simone Manuel’s medal brings up narratives of race in the United States. Non-African-Americans must find space for those narratives as well, not just as another gold medal but as a triumph over racial barriers.

For the first time ever, the International Olympic Committee decided to honor the competitive spirit of refugees by allowing them to compete without a country. We must be able to honor their ability to rise above their circumstances, but then also include in the narrative the question of why these capable people ended up as refugees in the first place, and how our refugee policies could improve the lives of those like them. We need to be open to Muslim women competing in hijabs – their athleticism is the real story.

So Gabby Douglas didn’t hold her hand over her heart during the national anthem. There is no rule, and many other athletes didn’t do it at other times. But there was a narrative, a myth about what makes a real American, and for some people, at least, her little action in that moment was enough to question her loyalty. Years of dedication on her part apparently meant nothing in comparison to that action.

Our narratives define us, but we have to do better on telling which ones make us better and which just diminish us.

And, we have to do better on listening and hearing new narratives, those that matter to others around us, rather than just fitting their stories into the ones we already have. We’re all richer when we can empathize with these stories.

Bruce Janz is a professor in the UCF Department of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. He can be reached at Bruce.Janz@ucf.edu.

Maybe it was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or witnessing birth, or walking along the beach at sunrise.

A team of ��AV researchers thinks those feelings of awe and wonder can be scientifically studied, and recently finished a two-year project to better understand the experiences of those emotions and their relationship to religious and spiritual beliefs.

As part of the project, the researchers held an Orlando conference attended by about 60 neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and art historians from around the world to discuss their findings and how to apply them to future uses, from providing  medical treatments to swaying movie audiences.

The research, supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, got its genesis from the frequent comments of returning astronauts who talk about how they were changed by the emotional experience of spaceflight, often spiritually, said Lauren Reinerman, assistant research professor in the UCF Institute for Simulation and Training.

“We wanted to know if we could assess the physiological and psychological responses of awe and wonder and better understand that experience,” she said.

For the purposes of the study, the researchers defined awe as “a direct and initial feeling when faced with something incomprehensible or sublime.” Wonder was defined as “a more reflective feeling one has when unable to put things back into a familiar conceptual framework.”

Researchers used an interdisciplinary approach to create a simulation of space travel for the purpose of gathering neurophysiological and phenomenological data. Phenomenology is the study of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness.

“Even though astronauts come from a variety of backgrounds, including military, engineering and science, the awesomeness of viewing earth from a shuttle or gazing into the vastness of the universe from the ISS [International Space Station] elicits states of AW [awe and wonder],” according to the study, “Going one step further, many astronauts report a paradigm of feeling that there must be something bigger out there, something holding everything together. Many astronauts have written about these deeply aesthetic, spiritual and religious experiences.”

For the study, researchers individually tested 79 people in rooms designed to mimic space vehicles. On a 120-degree screen, test subjects visibly experienced a countdown, liftoff and spaceflight around the earth and through deep space.

The “flights” of the subjects lasted 12 minutes.

Beforehand they were questioned about their backgrounds, traits and religious beliefs. During the tests, monitors recorded brain and heart functions that correlated to the visual and emotional timeline. And afterward, the subjects were questioned about stress, their reflections and thoughts of themselves.

Results showed that the test subjects said they experienced varying degrees of awe and wonder.

Reinerman said the people who identified themselves as more religious actually were less prone to report awe and wonder. Perhaps they just thought “This is God’s work,” and already expected it to be awesome, she said.

Reinerman said the team’s findings are relevant for better understanding and predicting what astronauts might experience during long-term space flight, and that commercial space flight might benefit by informing training simulators how to prepare people for experiencing space.

The researchers said they imagine that one day their findings can be applied to other fields.

“It is expected that our results will inform future research for investigating the development of improved or alternative treatments for people with PTSD, autism, anxiety disorders, maybe even diabetes, or even just everyday stress,” Reinerman said. “The sense of peace and the introspection that was reported to occur while participants viewed our simulated space visuals might be beneficial for incorporation into therapeutic practices. The simulation is a way, in a sense, to help people ‘meditate’ or reflect; it puts life to the idea of visualization that is often practiced in treatment.”

She said that capturing the visual stimuli that influence the experience of awe, wonder, curiosity, humility, and other emotions also could help the entertainment industry construct environments that invoke those experiences.

Bruce Janz, a philosopy professor involved with the project and the chair of the department, said the study’s approach was a different way of doing philosophy that focuses on the human experiences we have, and how they relate to who we are.

“Thinking about experiences like awe and wonder…rarely do we get a chance to think about what those experiences mean for us as humans in such an unusual place as space,” Janz said. “To be able to rethink how we ask about awe and wonder from the point of view of life in space adds an important perspective to how we think about philosophy.”

Others involved in the study were Shaun Gallagher, a former Ů��AV philosophy professor who helped start the project and now is at the University of Memphis, and Brandon Sollins, a research assistant at UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training.

The research team is working to secure additional funding to expand the project.

“Some findings surprised us,” said Patricia Bockelman, a graduate research assistant. “We’d like to think everyone experiences awe and wonder sometimes but empirically nobody is looking at this across the board.”

“It’s Skype on steroids,” Janz said of how they plan to teach their courses. “We can have B-roll material, we can have PowerPoint and slides, and we can edit that in seamlessly in a live broadcast.”

The overseas portion will be taught through a series of 90-minute live webcasts using wireless cameras to feed video to a video mixer. This will allow the professors to introduce the video clips, slides and other media to the students via satellite.

The trip will begin in Johannesburg and continue on through Swaziland, Durban, Grahamstown and then end in Capetown.

Howard first saw the potential for this technology during a trip to Bermuda in the summer of 2008.

Phil Peters, a film and digital media professor at UCF, was on a cave-diving and conservation trip in Bermuda with Interactive Expeditions and learned that Howard would be conducting research in the country during the same period.

Peters invited Howard to see the work he was doing with this technology.

“I was totally fascinated by what they were doing,” said Howard.

She also said that, as a cultural anthropologist, the possibility for her to be able to have contact with people in rural locations and urban locations at the same time and to be able to broadcast the interactions in real-time would serve as a great learning tool.

Though the original goal was to do a full-term trip from Cairo to Capetown, Janz said the original plan had to be scaled back due to various reasons such as the concerns over the financial cost of a semester-long trip.

Peters, who has been responsible for laying the groundwork for the project, will travel with Janz and Howard to provide technical support for the equipment that will be used.

A portion of the funds for this trip will come from UCF, but most financial support will come from corporate sponsors, like Cobham Plc, an international company that develops, delivers and supports aerospace and defense systems.

The other main sponsor is the Florida’s High Tech Corridor Council, a regional economic development initiative of UCF, the University of South Florida and the University of Florida.

Peters also serves as executive director of Interactive Expeditions, a research partnership between Cobham and UCF.

It makes excursions like this one possible, Peters said of the partnership that developed four years ago.

Also made possible is Peters’ goal of providing students that are not able to travel abroad with an opportunity to have that experience in real-time.

“I was working on a way to create a distance learning model that allowed people to go and be able to go on classes the best that they possibly can through technology,” Peters said.

The work with the African courses isn’t the first time Peters has worked with UCF students on experiencing different countries and cultures.

In the summer of 2009, Reuben Rogak, a graduate digital media student, traveled to India with Peters as a member of Interactive Expeditions.

The trip to India was not part of an actual course, but Peters and his assistants did several broadcasts from that country that discussed the ethnobotany of the region.

Rogak worked as a cameraman and editor during the trip.

“I do think it was pretty successful because we were able to go to very remote locations and very different atmospheres and broadcast live,” Rogak said.

Rogak said the ability to interface with students and have them ask questions of the professor at these remote areas went very well.

The success of that trip served as a prototype for developing the plan for the trip to Africa, especially in ensuring that the technology was fully operational would allow for professor and student interactions.

The final broadcast is scheduled for Dec. 9 from Capetown, according to a draft of the schedule provided by Peters.

Source: Central Florida Future, ,  by Adolfo Ceballos,  contributing writer.  Published: Wednesday, September 15, 2010,  updated: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 20:09