Teaching
metaLAB views teaching and research as intimately coupled. For us, every research project is a teaching occasion at one stage or another in its development and every teaching experiment is itself a form of research.
metaLAB understands tools, technologies, and media not as ready-made tools to be deployed according to instruction manuals or as commercial products to be consumed. Rather it understands them as opportunities for creative/critical use, adaptation, and recombination, and as occasions for making arguments, producing knowledge, and posing questions about the world.
In collaboration with colleagues across (and outside) traditional disciplines, the lab is committed to a project-based, object-oriented pedagogy that affirms the value of humanistic inquiry in a networked age.
teaching
Jeff Goldenson with Jeffrey Schnapp
GSD/ADV-09115-00
20 Sumner Road 201C
Thursday 11:30am – 2:00pm
Course Website
What form should the Harvard Library of the 21st century assume? Should it simply vanish into virtual desktops and merge into a timeless and placeless universal database? Should it alter its identity and become a workshop, a laboratory, an innovation incubator where emerging and future forms interact and dialogue with the relics of the past? Or should it simply merge with the university itself as a place of knowledge production and reproduction?
Matthew Battles with Jeffrey Schnapp and Jesse Shapins
www.metalab.harvard.edu/curation
This spring, we will continue holding a regular workshop series open to fellows in the GSAS/GSD curatorial innovation program and admitted undergraduates. Undergraduates who are interested, please email matthew [at] metalab.harvard.edu to set up a time to learn more about the workshops and to discuss your interest in curatorial and design practice. For GSAS and other graduate students, the workshop series is currently only limited to this year’s Fellows class.
Dennis Y. Tenen with Jeffrey Schnapp
Harvard College/GSAS: 36502
Arts @ 29 Garden
Wednesday 10am – noon
Design Studio TBA
FAS Course Website
What can literary analysis tell us about emerging textual practices: cooperation and co-authorship on Wikipedia, the usage of Twitter during protest movements, self-fashioning on Facebook, review culture on Amazon.com, and fundamentally, about the deluge of information that accompanies the advent of the information age? In this course, taught in conjunction with a graduate seminar sponsored by Harvard’s metaLab, we will learn to think big about digital archives, information architectures, live data, and large-scale textual corpora.
Jeffrey Schnapp + Dennis Y. Tenen
Harvard College/GSAS: 71716
Wednesday 10:00am – 12:00pm
FAS Course Website
A seminar and workshop for the development of semester-long projects, the course provides an introduction to new scholarly models in the arts and humanities via readings, case studies and conversations with expert practitioners.
Jesse Shapins + James Burns
GSD/DES-03448-00
40 Kirkland Street 401C
Friday 10:00am – 1:00pm
www.mixedrealitycity.org
The contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping, intermixing realities, articulated between built form and imagined space, individuated experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and digital mediation. Often, these multiple realities are invisible or illegible in physical space, with certain narratives dominating particular environments. However, realities always leave traces, to be excavated or constructed.
