Digital Scholarship Research Symposium

On May 25th, 2022, Digital Scholarship at UCSC Libraries held the 6th Annual 2022 Digital Scholarship Symposium.  This year's event was hosted in person with portions of the event streamed via Zoom.  UCSC students were provided with two unique opportunities within the symposium to present their digital scholarship projects - an interactive digital poster session and an opportunity for a short VizWall talk.  The event showcased the independent, digital research and classroom work of UCSC undergraduate and graduate students.  Below you will find the recorded documentation of the event. Please explore these public-facing, media-rich, critically engaged, and creative student research projects.

Cult and Copper: Intra-Actions from the Bronze Age to A-Life

Casondra Sobieralski
UCSC PhD candidate, Class of 2022

Session:  Keynote Speaker

Through a media archaeology lens, this research project re-casts Bronze Age Levantine goddesses of love and sexuality, who were also goddesses associated with copper, as “proto-cybergoddesses.” This is because copper has played an important role in media technology history, including the history of networked information systems from the telegraph to the internet. Further, the project offers a glimpse into a speculative future in which copper plays a role in quantum computing, and hence the faster evolution of artificial life, or “a-life.”

This story of cult and copper then served as a case study for a cyber-archaeology piece, a meditative VR “game”/experience that focuses on the relationship among smelting, shamanism, and goddess cults. Sobieralski worked with graduate students in the UCSC Serious Games program–a subset of the Engineering department–to realize a playable prototype/proof of concept of this game, which is intended for a museum setting. The cyber-archaeology project’s focus on intangible heritage–herein a techno-craft process and associated belief systems–challenges the tendency of digital heritage projects to only document material remains of the past such as sites and monuments. The VR piece emphasizes embodiment and interoception (bodily awareness) as a means of learning via an interface and a game play process driven by breath. Additionally, the work redefines interaction design as “intra-action” design to show relationality among people, tools, natural elements, environment, processes. In so doing it breaks subject/object binaries and establishes animism as a design metaphor.

The presentations listed below are available only during the in-person Interactive Digital Poster Session.  Digital Projects that are also presented as a VizWall Session can be found in their VizWall Session below.

Hyperreal Dinosaurs

Alessia Cecchet
PhD, Film and Digital Media, 6th year
alcecche@ucsc.edu 

Session:  Digital Project Showcase

Even if no human has ever seen a dinosaur, everyone knows what they looked like. My project is a film that juxtaposes images of dinosaurs. Through animation, differences and similarities in dinosaur representations emerge in a way that can only be afforded through the film apparatus, allowing the viewer to grasp the constructed and hyper-realistic dimensions of dinosaur representation.

History in Focus Podcast

Myles Rider-Alexis
UCSC 3rd Year Undergraduate

Project Collaborators:
Daniel Story (dstory@ucsc.edu)

Listen to the Podcast here!

Session:  Digital Project Showcase

History in Focus is the official podcast of the American Historical Review. It use the most recent content of the journal as a jumping off point to explore the various ways and diverse contexts in which history is done in the 21st century. The University Library's Digital Scholarship Department partners with the AHR to produce the podcast, with digital scholarship librarian Daniel Story serving as host and producer and Myles Rider-Alexis as audio engineering assistant. Recording for the podcast is done the DSC's Audio Production Studio and all audio editing and mixing is done in Logic Pro X.

Shabazz Overgrown

Diego Agurto

Session:  Digital Project Showcase

Named after Betty Shabazz, an American educator, civil rights advocate, and Malcom X's wife, the Shabazz building houses students at Oakes college. The Shabazz building has a lovely environment with trees, bushes and a basketball hoop decorating the forest cabin vibe most Oakes buildings have. I created a model of Shabazz in 3D, trying to capture its resemblance and the feeling of being there. I also thought it would be interesting to imagine what it would look like abandoned, having nature take over. The two buildings and assets were modeled in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush, textured in Substance Painter and finally rendered in Unreal Engine 5.

Slugcast: UCSC's Official Podcast

David Duncan
UCSC History Phd Candidate and Senior Podcaster with Slugcast
dtduncan@ucsc.edu
emsumanj@ucsc.edu

Project Collaborators:

Erick Msumanje, Gwen Pardon, Isabel Cordova, Jenna-Rose Hards, Jennifer Valdez, Keely Gwynne, Kyle Keller, Tarund Singh, Nitya Tripathi, Bailey Dyson

Website || Instagram || Spotify

Session:  Digital Project Showcase

Slugcast is the official podcast of UC Santa Cruz hosted by the Divison of Student Affairs and Success and is run by both undergrads and graduate students. The Slugcast team produces weekly episodes that stem from their own interests or experiences on campus. Slugcasters continually share ideas and brainstorm future episode topics by looking to the past and future, as well as capturing audio of the present day. 

Slugcast’s first episode aired in February of 2021 and has maintained a weekly presence on all major podcast listening platforms. With a growing audience and Slugcaster team, the podcast explores numerous topics that include COVID protocol updates, prepping for graduate school, in-depth introductions of different departments, local history, student tips for success, interviews with UCSC leaders, world events, and any other new and noteworthy people and events on campus. The team at Slugcast meets regularly for team building, podcast planning, as well as consistent workshops, training, and guest speakers. The team continues to experiment with different audio recording software and equipment in order to maintain the professional and unique sound that makes Slugcast unique. Slugcast is still relatively new and is continuing to experiment with different ways to cover important topics, tell interesting stories, and represent the UCSC community through our podcasts.

The presentations listed here will be presented in VizWall Session 1.  Some projects will also be available to view during the Interactive Digital Project Showcase.

Judge my Vow

Ardent Eliot :-) Reinhard
4th year Undergraduate, AGPM major

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 1

Judge my Vow is a fiction webzine in seven parts. It takes place on a cube-shaped world where everything relates to magical pangrams, sentences that contain every letter in the alphabet. Examples of these pangrams are “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow,” and “A wizard’s job is to quickly vex chumps in fog.” The story follows Xanax, a ghost who seeks the deific Sphinx of black quartz to have him judge her marriage vow. Along the way, she meets a group of loving transgender friends and creates details about her past that she had lost. Thematically, Judge my Vow is about alternative uses of language, weird characters in a weird world, and leaving home. The story is radically strange, but also personally important, especially on the subjects of gender, mental illness, and friendship.

Judge my Vow was created in HTML using Bootstrap and jQuery. I used a combination of vector and raster graphics in Illustrator and Photoshop as well as collage pieces taken from the internet. I designed and typeset the print version in InDesign. The covers on the physical versions were made with the Cricut.

Diatom World

Anya Chytrowski
UCSC 3rd year Undergraduate, Art major

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 1

"Diatom World" is a documentary about micro-algae, and how we feel about it. Diatoms, microscopic photosynthesizing phytoplankton, play a huge role in regulating climate, supporting oceanic food chains, and generally make the earth a habitable place for human beings. Visually, they are equally compelling, made up on silica walls that form complex and varied shapes.

The project seeks to paint a portrait of diatoms from a variety of angles, speaking with scientists and diatom novices alike. By inserting my perspective and experiences into the film, I examine both the subject, and the act of exploration and research as a personal process.

Heaven

Valerie Jackson
4th year Undergraduate, Art major
allisonjackson340@gmail.com 

Project Collaborators:
Kai Tattersall, Max Von der Horst, Diya Correa, Partho Gupte, Katherine Montes, Jason O'Connor, Sebastian Sack, Madison Kloeber, Cassie Howell, and Cas Pryer

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 1

Heaven is an animated film utilizing artificial intelligence tools and visual sampling in the animation process. Filmed on a 360⁰ camera, this animation works with footage that is stylized with AI and then composited. This project visualizes a possible future for animation and digital media, as well as illustrates the power that AI offers filmmakers. It is our hope to create a workflow that produces animations at a much lower cost and time commitment, making it more accessible to independent artists.

The presentations listed here will be presented in VizWall Session 2.  Some projects will also be available to view during the Digital Project Showcase.

Random World Generation with Modern Technology

Sky Casey
UCSC 3rd year Undergrad, Computer Science: Game Design major
skythecreative@gmail.com

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 1

I'm working on an adaptable algorithm for random dungeon generation and world-building. I've been wanting to adapt this to as many different types of media as possible, and the main goal is to create a world within the holographic pyramid that the DSI will be receiving.

POP

Brandon Victoriano
UCSC 4th year Undergraduate, Film & Digital Media and Psychology Double Major, Economics Minor || Class of 2022

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 2

My project is the production of a large scale student short film titled "POP". With a crew of over 30 students, I wanted to see what it would look like producing a project of this scale. This project will provide an introspective and insightful look into my own processes as a filmmaker. This project has pushed me to question each step of production as I shifted strategies in order to address creative constraints such as dealing with COVID restrictions. I have documented the production of this film in various ways and I hope by analyzing my own process, I can inspire others to take a look at their own processes and see how they can shift traditional methods of production in order to cater to whatever constraints they may face.

Audible Memories: Palestine-Israel during the COVID-19 Pandemic & Ramadan

Nona Golan
Class of 2022, Anthropology major, GISES minor
nona.golan@gmail.com  

Session:  Digital Project Showcase, VizWall Session 2

Occupation and its intricacies are audible. In Juha's Guesthouse, Binyamina Square, and Jaffa, I recorded (with an iPhone 8, Audio Memos App) the sounds of my family and friends, strangers and loved ones, chaos and calm. This exhibit is a compilation of audible memories that is meant to engage us in dialogue with the sounds of my time in Palestine/Israel during September to June of 2020-21. Throughout this time, the COVID-19 pandemic, high holidays, and fighting took place. What may seem like cacophony has been placed with intention, chaos and meaning, and is a piece of a greater (sometimes overwhelming) sensorium. 

You are encouraged to listen to the overlapping moments in my memory and imagination. The process of listening and recording kept me from disassociating in times of chaos, curious in times of loneliness, and nostalgic in times of feeling home and love.

I hope these pieces that I brought back with me stir feelings and thoughts that you'll share with us. There are sounds in here that maybe only you will hear, and which we need to better hear the world around us.