People
metaLAB is a community dedicated to exploring networked culture, developing curatorial experiments, building tools, and devising transformative approaches to the use of technology in the classroom. The core team is comprised of faculty, fellows and students engaged in research, making, and teaching. The core team works in close collaboration with metaLAB fellows and a growing network of partners, advisors, and research affiliates.
people
Foundersfounders
Core Teamcore
metaLAB Fellowsfellows
Research Affiliatesresearchers
Senior AdvisorsseniorAdvisors
James Burns
Founder
Relational Knowledge Fellow
james [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Personal Website
james
Daniele Ledda
Founder
Senior Design Strategist
daniele [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Personal Website
daniele
Kara Oehler
Founder
Documentary Arts + Media Innovation Fellow
kara [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Personal Website
kara
Gerard Pietrusko
Founder
Embodied Informatics Fellow
rgp [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Personal Website
bobby
Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are Speed Limits and The Electric Information Age Book. His pioneering work in the domain of the digital humanities and experimental approaches to cultural programming has included curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His Trento Tunnels project — a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels repurposed as a history museum– was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale and is currently on exhibit at the MAXXI in Rome. He is Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, is on the faculty at the Graduate School of Design, and serves as faculty co-director of the Berkman Center.
Trained in symbolic systems, mathematics, and theoretical economics at Stanford and Harvard, James Burns designs and develops new digital and intellectual frameworks for relational knowledge. An avid hacker, James built the API-driven website Mapping Main Street, constructing a system that automatically interrelates media feeds from across the web into thematic and geographic pathways. Currently, he is focused upon developing Zeega into an enterprise publishing platform that allows scholars, journalists, artists and ordinary citizens to easily create sophisticated interactive projects through participatory media, algorithmically curate and visualize large-scale media and data collections, and a suite of parametric authoring tools. James’s work in economics investigates topics in Game Theory, Market Design and Decision Theory. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Daniele Ledda is one of Italy’s leading graphic designers and art directors, and runs the Milan-based studio XY Communications. Among his clients are Bianchi bicycles, Cosmit, Condé Nast Italia, Egea, Enel, the IBM Foundation, iGuzzini, Marazzi, Luceplan, Rossi di Albizzate, Samsonite, Samsung Italy, Saporiti Italia, Spalding, Sony CP Laboratories, Stop Rare Diseases, Tiscali, the Triennale di Milano, and the University Press of the Bocconi Business School. Between 2002 and 2011, working in collaboration with the design historian Enrico Morteo, he has worked on a number of influential publishing and exhibition projects including the “Prontuario” series, the magazines Abitare and MRZ (for Marazzi) and designing the exhibition “Olivetti: una bella società”. In 2005 Ledda was named creative director of Mondobiotech, a pioneering Swiss firm dedicated to developing therapies and cures for rare and neglected diseases.
Kara Oehler is a 2011-2012 Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. She is a radio documentary producer and media artist whose work over the past decade has focused upon pushing the boundaries of narrative journalism both on the air and across multiple platforms, combining investigative storytelling with participatory media, building new systems and opportunities for education and artistic practice. Kara is the creator of multiple transmedia projects on which she has pioneered new forms of interactive experience, including the collaborative documentary Mapping Main Street; Capitol of Punk, featured in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition; Zeega; and the UnionDocs Collaborative. Since 1999, her radio stories and media projects, often created with longtime collaborator Ann Heppermann, have received George Foster Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, Associated Press, and Third Coast International Audio Festival awards and been exhibited at MoMA, among other venues.
Robert Gerard Pietrusko is an engineer-designer focusing on the relationship between contemporary technology and spatial products. His work has been exhibited at the SF MoMA, The Venice Architecture Biennale, and The Foundation Cartier, among others, and has been featured in Metropolis, Architectural Record, and Esquire. He has held visualization research positions at Parsons School of Design and Columbia University’s GSAPP. Prior to his involvement with metaLAB, Gerard was a junior architect with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York City. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Jesse Shapins is a media artist, theorist and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, and Wired, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. Over the past decade, he has developed a hybrid scholarly and artistic practice focused upon mapping the perception of place between physical, virtual and social space. He is on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-teaches the courses Media Archaeology of Place and The Mixed-Reality City. Previously, he taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP and Pratt Institute. He is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Architect of Zeega, a startup non-profit, along with Yellow Arrow, Mapping Main Street, UnionDocs, and The Colors Berlin, amongst other projects. His dissertation is titled “Mapping the Database Documentary: Utopias of Panoramic Perception, Sensory Estrangement and Participatory Media.”
Matthew Battles
Managing Editor + Curatorial Practice Fellow
matthew [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Managing Editor + Curatorial Practice Fellow
matthew [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Matthew Battles is a writer, poet, and a cofounder of HiLobrow. The author of Library: an Unquiet History (Norton 2004), his forthcoming books include Letter by Letter, a history of writing; and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention. Matthew has taught in Harvard Extension School and at Emerson College; as an editor for the Harvard College Library and later for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he produced exhibition catalogues and advanced scholarly communication.
Kyle Parry
Project Manager + Digital Commons Researcher
kyle [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Project Manager + Digital Commons Researcher
kyle [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Kyle Parry works in information and media design and earns his keep through writing, research and strategy. Along with his work at the metaLAB, he is a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard, interested in learning how to write critical histories of vision and media in relation to systems and communication theory. He is working on the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters and an emerging project among the woody plants of the Arnold Arboretum.
Jeffrey Schnapp
Faculty Director
jeffrey [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Faculty Director
jeffrey [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are Speed Limits and The Electric Information Age Book.
Jesse Shapins
Associate Director
jesse [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Associate Director
jesse [at] metalab.harvard.edu
Jesse Shapins is a media artist, theorist and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, and Wired, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. He is on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-teaches the courses Media Archaeology of Place and The Mixed-Reality City.
Travis Bost is an architectural designer and graduate student at the Graduate School of Design studying the role of large scale urban infrastructure on the form of the modern metropolis. Working across fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design, he uses techniques of mapping and data visualization to identify opportunities for synthetic forms of ecology and urbanism.
Stephanie Frampton has just completed a dissertation on social and cultural aspects of writing in the Roman world, Towards a Media History of Writing in the Roman World. Her curatorial innovation project will interrogate institutional histories and receptions of the world’s writing systems by bringing together objects related to the history of writing from across Harvard’s library and museum collections.
Christopher Gilbert is an advanced doctoral student in the History Department of Harvard University working on issues of imperial ideology and cultural identity in the Roman empire. He is an adjunct lecturer on the ancient art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and both works as part of a team creating a digital map of the ancient and medieval world using ArcGIS software and assists in the conservation and restoration of Akkadian tablets at Harvard’s Semitic Museum, including those returned to the Iraqi people in 2010.
Jeff Goldenson works at the intersection of libraries, technology and fun. As the designer in the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, he imagines and builds new library experiences. Along with the Postal Service, he sees the library as the most compelling design opportunity out there. He was an artist-in-residence at EdLab, Teachers College, Columbia University. Jeff earned a Masters from the MIT Media Lab identifying new metaphors for media browsing, and received his BA in Architecture from Princeton University. You can find him online at buildingways.com.
Jo Guldi is a historian whose interests range over the transition from pre-modern to modern societies. As a historian, she specializes in the study of infrastructure, land use, and capitalism. As a digital researcher, she has co-taught courses at the University of Chicago on the visualization of time, geoparsing, and other new methods applied to the study of long-term historical trends. Her first book, Roads to Power, tells the story of the infrastructure state and made abundant use of keyword text mining to understand interactions between strangers on the public street. Another project, the Spatial Humanities site, examines the “long spatial turn” that stamped the academic disciplines with a concern for landscape at the point of their formation. She is currently working on The Future of History, a book concerned with how digital methods impact the discipline of history-writing. Her next major research project, Participation Restored, employs text-mining over longue-duree data sets to tell the history of the ancient peasant commons, its enclosure, and its restitution through radical legal movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her blog, landscape.blogspot.com, documents some of her collaborations on big-data, visualization, and geo-parsing projects and the shared interests of digital researchers and the humanities.
Jeanne Haffner is a twentieth-century intellectual historian with special interests in urban planning history and theory, the history of technology, and the history of the social sciences. Her book, Flight from Modernity: Aerial Photography and the Science of Social Space (The MIT Press, forthcoming) explores how the ‘social’ and the ‘spatial’ came to be conceptually linked in twentieth-century French social scientific research and urban planning practice via the deployment of aerial photography and other “quantitative” techniques of vision and representation. It won a Presentation and Production Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in 2011. She has been a visiting fellow of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Harvard University Department of the History of Science, the ETH Department of Architecture in Zürich (with a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and has taught at the ETH in Zürich and Brown University. In connection with metaLAB, Jeanne is developing a project called “The Science of Public Space,” using digitized lantern slides from the “American Landscape and Architectural Design” collection at the GSD in association with maps, plans, and other source documents to produce a multimedia account of Frederick Law Olmsted’s construction of the “natural” park system in Boston in the late-nineteenth century. “The Science of Public Space” is the first piece in a series Jeanne is producing for Places magazine called “The Environment Built.”
Lauren Ianni is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Comparative Literature with a secondary field in Visual and Environmental Studies and Certificate in French.
Iain Large is a first year PhD student studying early modern European history, with a particular interest in the visual and material culture of the period. Originally from Somerset, England, Iain has worked on expressions of urban identity in sixteenth-century English cartography in the past; he is now looking forward to getting to grips with the treasures of Harvard’s own extensive early map collection
Diana Limbach Lempel is a second-year Masters in Urban Planning student at the graduate school of design, with a background in food, archival research, and the arts. Since her academic focus is on the relationship between cultural heritage and neighborhood development, Diana hopes to use the curatorial innovation program to find new ways to communicate and understand the experience of a place.
Mac McAnulty comes to metaLAB having worked on site research and a curatorial design for Diller Scofidio+Renfro, the NYC firm. Many of his favorite places he knows from DS+R projects: the unfinished Museum of Image and Sound in Rio, the unfinished High Line in New York, the local Institute for Contemporary Art. And from travel: 798 Art District in Beijing, the Peruvian Amazon. He studies writing at Harvard and is writing a creative thesis in literary nonfiction. He is interested at the intersection of writing, place, and the Internet. He lives in Dunster House.
Laura Lee Schmidt is a Harvard graduate student in History of Science Department and received her SMArchS at MIT in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She studies the reconstruction of historical technology, industrialism and the idea of science in the 19th and 20th centuries. Laura is interested in Left politics and Marxist critical theory, curatorial practices and interfaces, and the modern Middle East.
Judy Sue Fulton is a third-year Masters in Architecture student at the Graduate School of Design, with a background in the History of Art and Interior Architecture. Her current work is focused on architectural hybridity as it relates to program and varying degrees of interiority. Her project with metaLAB will focus on creating a bridge between two disparate “environments” that focus on the work of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Dennis Y. Tenen is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a member of the research team at Harvard’s metaLab. His scholarly work focuses primarily on the intellectual history of the information age: the emergence of digital culture, software studies, and the impact of new media on the ways in which we read, write, think, construct social identities, find (and lose) things, aggregate knowledge, and create cultural capital. Currently, he is working on a book on the poetics of human-computer interaction, and has plans to develop an applied research program in experimental criticism, with an emphasis on data mining, text visualization, and content analysis. Dennis is a former software engineer and a recent Ph.D. graduate of Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature. In September of 2012, he is joining the faculty of the English Department at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media. More at: d3nten.com
Christopher T. Bavitz is Assistant Director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is also a Lecturer on Law at HLS and a Clinical Fellow at the Berkman Center. Christopher has concentrated his practice on intellectual property and media law, particularly in the areas of music, entertainment, and technology. Prior to joining the Clinic, Christopher served as Senior Director of Legal Affairs for EMI Music North America. From 1998-2002, Christopher was a litigation associate at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and RubinBaum LLP / Rubin Baum Levin Constant & Friedman, where he focused on copyright and trademark matters. Christopher received his B.A., cum laude, from Tufts University in 1995 and his J.D. from University of Michigan Law School in 1998.
Joseph Bergen is an engineer and designer whose interests revolve around technology, data, and art in relation to physical place. A self-taught programmer, he enjoys the challenge presented by large, complex, and dynamic data sets and teasing out otherwise hidden relationships with interactive visualizations. His work has been featured on FastCoDesign, the Wall Street Journal blog, and visualizing.org and has received top awards from Google. More at: www.josephbergen.com.
Jeremy Blatter is a PhD candidate in the History of Science with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Jeremy’s research focuses on the history of psychotechnics and applied psychology in Europe and America from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth century. As Student Curator for Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments Jeremy will be co-curating this fall (2011) the exhibition “Cold War in the Classroom: The Material Culture of Mid-Century Science Education.”
Dan Borelli is an artist who is currently focusing on the relationship between the town of Ashland and the Nyanza Superfund Site within the town. The Nyanza site is one of the first ten projects to launch the Superfund program, and the lasting legacy of these projects is often the records and archives from the landscape remediation process, aptly named the Field Repository. As a means of transparency, these important documents are made available by being placed within the local public library. Dan and a network of collaborators are exploring the impact this archive has on the local population, their cultural identity, memory, and perception of place. This project aims to expand the archive by populating it personal stories and other narratives that are currently absent, making the information – both sociological and ecological – as current, visual, and legible as possible. Dan is also the Director of Exhibitions at the GSD, where he works with metaLAB on experiments in augmented exhibitions.
Christina Davis is the Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, one of the largest poetry audio archives in the country. Since her arrival at Harvard, she has worked to digitally preserve and expand access to the WPR’s inimitable collection of spoken-word materials and has founded a series of innovative public programs that contribute to a new generation of recordings. Such programs include the Oral History Initiative, WPR Recording Sessions, WPR Works in Progress, the Omniglot Seminars, as well as multidisciplinary installations, experimental walking tours, and linguistic interventions into the Harvard landscape that actualize poetry’s potential to bring together unlike entities into a new and unusual nexus. A recipient of the 2011 Dean’s Distinction Award and a member of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, Christina is also an award-winning poet whose works include Forth A Raven and the forthcoming collection, An Ethic.
Adam Muri-Rosenthal is fifth-year graduate student specializing in Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is completing secondary fields in both Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice. His research interests include post-war and contemporary Italian cinema and literature, documentary and ethnographic cinema and Sicilian culture, on which he produced a lyrical ethnographic documentary in 2010. This summer he will begin shooting for his next documentary video project as a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Center.
Joana Pimenta is a media scholar and artist, with a particular interest in exhibition practices. She is a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard, where she is developing her research on the exhibition of cinematic objects, as well as her practice-based work on installation and augmented exhibition spaces. She directed three short films and worked in film production, and more recently created the database documentary Revere Double Exposure using Zeega.
Alix Reiskind is the Visual Resources Librarian at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Frances Loeb Library. At the Loeb Library she has worked to increase student and faculty awareness and use of images and visual media. Alix works closely with colleagues across Harvard University on collecting and using visual materials. Alix earned her Masters in Library Science at Simmons College and her Bachelor’s degree from Colgate University in English and Religion.
Sam Richman is a graphic designer, filmmaker, artist, and undergraduate at Harvard College. In the spring of 2010, Sam founded Graphicality Design, a design collective that has worked with community members, businesses and organizations from across the United States. His studies focus on the interaction of art, culture, and technology in both historical and contemporary society.
Matthias Röder is a College Fellow at Harvard. His main research interests include social history of music, digital musicology, as well as developing new methodological approaches to study the sketches of Ludwig van Beethoven’s late style works. Matthias’ research has been founded by the Whiting Foundation as well as the Alfred Krupp Foundation. In addition to his scholarly work, Matthias is the founder and editor of zeitschichten.com, a web magazine for music and history. Before coming to Harvard, Matthias studied music at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. In addition to his academic and scholarly projects, Matthias is also active as an artistic advisor and music manager for several New Music projects in the United States, Turkey,
Germany, and Austria for which he produced CD recordings, concerts, video, and educational events.
Germany, and Austria for which he produced CD recordings, concerts, video, and educational events.
Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, artist and cultural anthropologist with an interest in media practice, space, the senses, and processes of making. Her works have been screened at international film festivals including the Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico, Rio de Janeiro, the Nordic Anthropological Film Association, Stockholm, South Asian International Film Festival, New York, and the Montreal Ethnographic Film Festival. Julia has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University where she is currently working on a PhD in Anthropology (with Media). She is the founding editor of Sensate, a new online journal committed to fostering vital explorations in shaping the emergent future of media-based scholarly discourse and artistic practice. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (UK).
Hugo Van Vuuren is based at Harvard University where is he is a Fellow at the Berkman Center and student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Hugo helped launch The Laboratory at Harvard whilst completing a fellowship at The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Born and raised in South Africa, Hugo graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Economics and studied in Germany and Africa. Previously he worked for Apple, co-founded MenSpeakUp, started Y Combinator startups in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, and later directed Artscience Labs initiatives in Paris and Boston. He was selected as a 2009 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, a TED2010 Fellow, and, with his Lebone co-founders, won the 2009 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for an off-grid dirt-powered battery design.
Ann Whiteside is Librarian/Assistant Dean for Information Resources in the Frances Loeb Library and is project lead for the SAHARA (SAH Architecture Resources Archive) project. The focus of her work is expanding digital resources in close collaboration with scholars, digital library collection building, and the use of technology to support teaching and research. Her experience includes the development of metadata element sets and guidelines, planning for production and delivery of digital content, and investigation of the preservation of original CAD drawings and other electronic architectural documentation. Ann is co-editor of “Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Works and their Images”, a data content standard. She served as project director of SAHARA, a digital humanities project in architectural history, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Ann was previously Head of Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning at MIT, and before that, Director of the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library at the University of Virginia. Ann has lectured and written extensively on visual resources, digital content management, and scholarly communication.
Svetlana Boym is a writer, theorist, and media artist who leads parallel lives. She is the author of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), the novel Ninochka (2003), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (with photos by Adam Bartos, 2003), Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Art (2006) Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008) and Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (2010). Her recent media exhibits include “Phantasmagorias” in Copenhagen and Kaunas (2009), “Historiar_Imaginar” in Madrid, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, CA2M (2009), “Nostalgic Technologies” (2006 in Ljubljana and Cambridge), “Unforeseen Past” (2007, NYC) and “Skipping the Page” (Center for the Book Arts, NYC). She has contributed to many journals, including Art Forum, ArtMargins, Cabinet, Punto de Vista, Critical Inquiry, Representations, Poetics Today, and Harpers’s Magazine. When not doing art projects, Svetlana Boym teaches in Comparative Literature at Harvard University and is an Associate of the Graduate School of Design.
Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She has published numerous books and articles internationally, including her latest Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT Press, 2007). For Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1995), she won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for best book in film studies. Her seminal book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for “the world’s best book on the moving image” and was named a Book of the Year in 2003 by the Guardian. In 2008 Bruno was featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers as one of the most influential intellectuals working today in visual studies.
Jimena Canales is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago University Press, 2010). She specializes in the history of science, architecture, media, and philosophy. Some of her works include: “El Duelo del Tiempo,” ABCD: Las Artes y las Letras, 16 Enero 2010, No. 932, p.18-19; “Pieles Criminales,” ABCD: Las Artes y las Letras (13 Septiembre 2008), pp. 6-7; “Movement before Cinematography: The High-Speed Qualities of Sentiment,” Journal of Visual Culture 5 (2006): 275-294; “Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations,” Modern Language Notes, 120 (2005); and “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ in Science and its Alternatives,” Isis 93 (2002): 585-613.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences; Director of The Sensory Ethnography Lab ; Director of the Film Study Center; and Co-Director of Graduate Studies, Critical Media Practice. Castaing-Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life. He recently recorded Sweetgrass (2009), a film (produced by Ilisa Barbash) that is an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals. He is currently completing a related series of video and photographic Westerns that variously evoke the allure and ambivalence of the pastoral, including Hell Roaring Creek (2010) and The High Trail (2010). In 2010, he was commissioned to make a four-channel video installation by the Kino Arsenal to commemorate the four decades of the Berlinale Forum, The Quick and the Dead / Moutons de Panurge (2010).
Peter Der Manuelian is Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University. He joined both the NELC and Anthropology Departments in 2010, after teaching Egyptology at Tufts University for ten years. Since 2000, the “Giza Archives Project” aims to collect and present online all past, present, and future archaeological activity at Giza. Interested in both ancient and modern graphic design-”publishing” in the widest sense of the word-he believes in bringing new technologies into his research and into the classroom. Among his current projects are the publication of elite Giza tombs west of the Great Pyramid, a biography of Harvard archaeologist George A. Reisner, and the development of electronic tools to aid in teaching Egyptian hieroglyphic grammar.
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University; his doctoral dissertations were at Harvard in the history of science and in particle physics (electroweak theory). Galison’s work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory, and all focus on the role of visualization and materiality in scientific work. Among his books are: How Experiments End (1987), Image and Logic (1997), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), L. Daston, Objectivity (2007) and (among other co-edited volumes) The Architecture of Science, Picturing Science, Producing Art, Scientific Authorship, and Einstein for the 21st Century. To explore the relation of scientific work with larger issues of politics, he has made two documentary films: “Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma” (2000), and, with Robb Moss,”Secrecy” (about national security secrecy and democracy), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. At present, he is completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking (on technologies that re-form the self) and has just begun a new documentary film project on the long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, “Nuclear Underground.”
K. Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Co-Director of Doctoral Programs and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2000 he was appointed the first Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a position he held until 2009. Hays was the founder and editor of renowned scholarly journal Assemblage, which was a leading forum of cultural and architectural theory in North America and Europe from 1985-2001, publishing work by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenmann, Andreas Huyssen, Slavoj Zizek, and others.
Ernst Karel is Lecturer on Anthropology, Lab Manager for the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and Assistant Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University. In his audio projects, he works with analog electronics and with location recordings, sometimes separately, sometimes in combination, to create pieces that move between the abstract and the documentary. He also does sound editing, mixing, and sound design for nonfiction film and video. He received his PhD from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, where his fieldwork research on sound in South India crossed between the disciplines of cultural psychology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology. Recent CD publications include Swiss Mountain Transport Systems (Gruenrekorder, 2011) and Heard Laboratories (and/OAR, 2010). His often collaborative work in electroacoustic improvisation and composition has been released on Another Timbre, BoxMedia, Cathnor, Dead CEO, Formed, Kuro Neko, Locust, Lucky Kitchen, and Sedimental record labels, among others.
Shigehisa Kuriyama is Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University. He was born in Marugame, Japan, and studied for two years at Phillips Exeter Academy and two years in France before attending Harvard College. After obtaining his A.B., he trained as an acupuncturist for three years in Tokyo, and returned to Harvard where he received a Ph.D. in History of Science in 1986. His professional appointments (the Humanities Program at the University of New Hampshire; the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University; and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies) prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2005 have been notable for their explicit emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry. His publications, for their part, have been marked by a consistent effort to probe broad philosophical issues through the prism of specific topics in comparative cultural history. He has also long been interested in techniques and styles of presenting knowledge.
John Palfrey is Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. He is the co-author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives” (Basic Books, 2008) and “Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering” (MIT Press, 2008). His research and teaching is focused on Internet law, intellectual property, and international law. He practiced intellectual property and corporate law at the law firm of Ropes & Gray. He is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Outside of Harvard Law School, he is a Venture Executive at Highland Capital Partners and serves on the board of several technology companies and non-profits. John served as a special assistant at the US EPA during the Clinton Administration. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School.
Hanspeter Pfister’s research lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision. It spans a wide range of topics, including visualization, computational photography, point-based graphics, appearance modeling, 3D television, and face animation. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991. Prior to his appointment at Harvard, Pfister worked for 11 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) where he was most recently Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist. He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s award-winning real-time volume rendering hardware for PCs.
Jake Shapiro, previously Associate Director of the Berkman Center, now oversees various media projects. Jake is Executive Director of The Public Radio Exchange, a nonprofit online clearinghouse and community site for audio content. Jake has been producer and director of business development for Lydon McGrath Inc.; he was a producer for “The Connection with Christopher Lydon”–a nationally syndicated public radio talk show. He also has extensive experience in both research and web development at Harvard; among other endeavors, Jake developed web resources for the Davis Center for Russian Studies, the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, and the Harvard Central Asia Forum. He also spent two years in Moscow, Russia as program coordinator of the Moscow Institute for Advanced Studies. Jake is co-founder of L-Shaped Records, guitarist for the local rock band Two Ton Shoe, and studio cellist on many independent and major label recordings. Jake graduated from Harvard in 1993, majoring in History and Literature; he is a fluent Russian speaker, plays guitar and cello, and lives in Arlington with his wife Elena Gorodenskaya.
David Weinberger writes about the effect of technology on ideas. He is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous, and is the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Too Big to Know, about the Internet’s effect on how and what we know. Dr. Weinberger is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center. He is also co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory at Harvard Law School, and is a Franklin Fellow at the United States Department of State. He has a doctorate in philosophy.
