NYPL Labs: Mary Flanagan: Gaming Metadata

Date and Time
October 20, 2011
Event Details

A free brown bag lunch talk hosted by NYPL Labs & The Wertheim Study

 

Mary Flanagan, a Wertheim Fellow and the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College will visit to talk about how libraries and archives can take advantage of games to enhance their collections.

In this talk Flanagan will demonstrate her new open source image tagging system from her lab, Tiltfactor.org, that relies on games to fuel public interest and input. She'll also discuss the promising results from her lab's pilot study.
 
Talk: ~45 min, QA: ~30 min
 
Feel free to bring lunch!

About the Speaker

Mary Flanagan works as an artist, scientist, and humanist. Her groundbreaking explorations in these arenas represent an innovative use of methods, tools, and technologies to bind research with cultural production. Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary work, her commitment to a theory/practice dialogue, and contributions to social justice design arenas. Her work examines the boundaries between the personal and the public, perception, power, and what technology can teach people about themselves. Her artwork ranges from game based systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, Whitney, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist's Space, Guggenheim, Incheon Digital Arts Festival, and others. As a researcher, she focuses on popular culture, digital studies, and computer games to look at issues of representation, behavior, equity, and process. In the field of creative writing, Flanagan is known as a writer of electronic literature, and she is also a poet, with work in The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Saranac Review, and other books & periodicals. She has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters, and her books in English include reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002), re:SKIN (2007), and the most recent, Critical Play (2009), all with MIT Press. In her design practice, Flanagan created the first internet adventure game for girls and researches and creates socially conscious games, urban games, and software in the theory/practice laboratory she founded in 2003, Tiltfactor. Flanagan’s work has been supported by commissions, the NEH, the ACLS, and she has been PI or co-PI on six National Science Foundation research grants. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

NYPL Labs

NYPL Labs is an experimental technology unit that works closely with curators to create tools that expand the range of interaction, interpretation and reuse of research library collections and data. Labs hosts public talks and workshops on a roughly monthly basis on advanced topics in the digital humanities. Keep an eye out for future events @nypl_labs. Get in touch at labs@nypl.org