Jeannette Haagsma, Paul Wouters, Clifford Tatum

Can You See What I Know?

A starting point for new cross-sector dialogues around shared visualizations of knowledge -- [workshop is full]

23 sep 2008
24 sep 2008

Creative experts from academia, audio-visual arts, creative industry and interactive design will develop novel ways to visualize transdisciplinary knowledge. Key themes: “visibility of interest” & “failure by design”. Keynote speakers: Garrick Jones (LSE and Royal College of Art, London) & Tara McPherson (University of South California, Los Angeles).

For information about all the Speakers see their PICNIC profiles linked below:

- Ernestine van der Wall, Workshop Opening - 23 September
- Garrick Jones, Keynote - 23 September
- Tara McPherson, Keynote - 24 September
- Esther Polak, 23 September
- Kitty Zijlmans, 23 September
- Bas Raijmakers, 23 September
- Eric Kluitenberg, 23 September
- Paul Wouters, Chair - 23 and 24 September

Facilitators:
- Caroline Nevejan
- Geke Van Dijk

NEW! Come check out the CYSWIK blog where we are featuring YOU! Each day between now and the workshop, we will introduce a new participant and/or organizer on the blog. And that's just a start. On the blog, we will also begin posting your contributions, both as way to get to know each other and as the beginning of our intellectual adventure together.

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Welcome! on behalf of the CYSWIK organizing committee: Paul Wouters, Caroline Nevejan, Jeannette Haagsma, Clifford Tatum, Kofi Aidoo, Charles van den Heuvel, Ernst Thoutenhoofd, and Anne Beaulieu.

------------------------------------ Schedule Overview ------------------------------------
Tuesday 23 September:
12.00 12.15: Opening by Ernestine van der Wall, Vice President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences KNAW.
12.15 13.00: Garrick Jones: Can You See What I Know?
13.00 18.00: Discussions, presentations and group work (lunch provided)
18.00 20.00: Show and tell buffet, during which all groups can show and discuss their results and ideas with the workshop participants from other discussion groups.
Wednesday 24 September:
09.00 10.00: Tara McPherson: Seeing Differently: Vectors and Multimodal Publishing
10.30 13.30: Discussions, presentations and concluding session, chaired by Caroline Nevejan (lunch included)
------------------------------------ Detailed Program ------------------------------------

This workshop develops ways to visualize transdisciplinary knowledge and bring together 60 creative experts and students from academia, audio-visual arts, creative industry and interactive design. Participants will work together on two challenging themes: visibility of interest and failure by design. The VKS will support follow-up initiatives after the workshop. The workshop is a starting point for new cross-sector dialogues and collaboration around shared visualizations of knowledge, and builds on earlier initiatives such as (Un)Common Ground and the NWO-programme CO-OP’S.

Keynote lectures by distinguished speakers will launch each of the days, and will be followed by discussions in smaller groups to maximize interaction between participants. In each group, presentations will focus on specific problems within the larger framework of the workshop. Participants will have ample opportunity to bring up their own experiences and cases.

On Friday 26 September the results of the workshop will be presented in a session prepared by PICNIC 08 about the outcome of all PICNIC specials. The results will also be displayed on the PICNIC 08 and VKS websites.

Tuesday 23 September:

12.00 – 12.15: Opening by Ernestine van der Wall, Vice President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences KNAW. Professor van der Wall's expertise is in Christianity, enlightenment, religious liberalism, free thought, and orthodoxy. At the beginning of the 21st century, political and social debates about the Enlightenment and its impact on culture give rise to specific questions about the relationship between religion and Enlightenment. Since the beginning of the Enlightenment in the late 17th century this relationship has been a major topic of discussion, so there is every reason to look at the issue from a historical perspective

12.15 – 13.00: Garrick Jones - Can You See What I Know? Visual thinking for individuals and for groups provides access to information, perspectives and differing mental landscapes. The active process of visual thinking is also a powerful tool for the constructive development of ideas. Garrick Jones will explore these ideas, and show how these approaches are being used by individual scientists as well as very large groups attempting to collaborate. He considers these practices from multiple perspectives including cognition, dynamic systems theory, decision-making, fuzzy logic and media theory. He will be accompanied by graphic facilitators, including the artists Yvonne Dröge Wendel, Lino Hellings, and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer from Architects of Interaction.

13.00 – 18.00: Discussions, presentations and group work (lunch provided): Following the first keynote lecture by Garrick Jones, we will work in smaller groups on the two challenging themes: visibility of interest and failure by design. In this way, exchange between the participants will be maximized. Spread among the smaller groups, presentations will be given focusing on specific problems within the larger framework of the workshop:

Esther Polak (artist) and Paul Wouters (VKS):
In this talk, Esther will provide an overview of her project as it follows dairy transporters (PEAKmilk brand) and Fulani nomadic herdsmen in Nigeria, tracking both their routes with GPS (Global Positioning System). By capturing locative traces Esther provides a visualization of economic knowledge embedded in Nigeria’s dairy industry. Read more...

Bas Raaijmakers (STBY):
Many researchers will have experienced that creating knowledge in teams, more loosely defined groups and online communities is not an easy nor a straightforward process. A first reflex is often to solve the problems researchers have, to make their collaborative knowledge creation more smooth and efficient. However, on second thought, it might be valuable too to accept the messiness of such collaborative processes and explore what happens if we do not attempt to design the mess away. Read more...

Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie):
In most people's minds De Balie, the centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam is a centre for debate, despite in-numerous other activities. Reflecting on how such a centre could work with on-line extensions of such debates it was one of the very first to start up a regular program of live streams, which are regularly conducted from the main space since 1999. In recent years our research has focused on how to create interaction around such debates, discussions and experimental projects as they are already streamed live on the internet. The Cool Media Hot Talk Show series on art & media, a project-series conceived by Tatiana Goryucheva, was one of the main trajectories where this research has been put in practice. The software architecture behind it is currently redeveloped into a generic and embeddable interactive discussion platform that is operated independently by the new Cool Mediators Foundation. The next step in our thinking is related to the question how to bring people from multiple locations together in such a shared discussion environment, and how to make such a distributed discussion a feasible, worthwhile, and sufficiently rich experience.

All participants will have ample opportunity to bring up their own experiences and cases in the discussions.

18.00 – 20.00: Show and tell buffet, during which all groups can show and discuss their results and ideas with the workshop participants from other discussion groups.

Wednesday 24 September:

09.00 – 10.00: Tara McPherson - Seeing Differently: Vectors and Multimodal Publishing. After offering a typology of the digital humanities, this presentation will explore several aspects of the international electronic journal, Vectors: its conception, its mandates, its infrastructure, and its innovative collaborative design process. Some questions to be considered include: What happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring different modes of engagement from the reader/user? How does "argument" shift when scholarship goes fully networked, visual and multimedia? How do you "experience" argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space? Can scholarship show as well as tell? What do humanities scholars gain from working with database structures and technologists? What kind of new partnerships will be required among libraries, designers, publishers, and scholars to foster new outcomes and new audiences for scholarship?

10.30 – 13.30: Discussions, presentations and concluding session, chaired by Caroline Nevejan (lunch included). On the second day, after the keynote lecture by Tara McPherson, the groups will give short presentations of their work including the discussions at the buffet from the preceding evening. Then, we will again split up in 2 groups to formulate key questions that are generic enough to be relevant for the participants in each sector, yet specific enough to be interesting. For example, this can mean elaborating a ‘solution’ for a problem identified, shaping a first outline of, or identifying cross-sector partners for a new research programme, finding a way of disseminating the findings, identifying similar issues in other spheres, or applying visualization to further explore aspects of the research.

Friday 26 September:

The workshop will publish its results on this page/space of the PICNIC Website. Also, a face to face presentation will be given at the plenary presentation of all PICNIC Specials. Furthermore, the workshop will be filmed so that a video report can be prepared. Last, we explore whether the speakers' presentations can be included in a special contribution, eg. for the journal VECTORS, which is particularly well suited for publication of the workshop proceedings.

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Workshop Background
  1. CYSWIK Inspiration
  2. What do we mean by "knowledge" ?
  3. The cultural canon (visibility of interest)
  4. Collaborative spaces (failure by design)
  5. References
The Physical Space

The Flex Bar (workshop location)

Interested?

Participants have been invited from all corners of creative industry, arts and academia.
CURRENTLY, THE WORKSHOP IS COMPLETELY FULL. Please send your name, affiliation, email address and motivation (one page in length) to cyswik@vks.knaw.nl, if you would like to be added to a wait-list.

More information

The organizers can be contacted at cyswik@vks.knaw.nl. This website is regularly updated and will expand over the coming weeks.