2020 research seminars and series

The Digital Studio hosts a diverse range of seminars, leading debates and discussion for digital scholars; whether critics, creatives or champions.

Semester 1

Seeing Double: The Multiple Worlds of Virtual Reality

Histories of virtual reality routinely tell a story of progress, in which early attempts to simulate the real are trumped first by photography, then film, and now by the digital. This is perhaps why digital VR is often quarantined from its non-digital doubles – photography and film, but also literature, painting, theatre, and architecture. This seminar series will highlight this diverse repertoire of virtual realities, focusing on the exchanges between digital and analogue, and on the relations that contemporary virtual realities have, or may have, with their pasts. This seminar series is presented by the Digital Studio in partnership with the Enlightenment, Romanticism Contemporary Culture research unit.

Semester 2

Redefining Digital Keywords: From Digital Archaisms to (Post)Pandemic Neologisms

Curated by Dr Natalia Grincheva (Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Studio) In 2016 Benjamin Peters published his edited collection Digital Keywords (Princeton University Press). With provocative short essays from international digital media scholars in anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology, the book explored and critiqued the rich vocabulary of the growing field of digital humanities on 25 keywords, ranging from meme to surrogate, from forum to mirror, from cloud to digital. The pandemic outbreak has challenged and reconfigured human experience across physical, social and digital realities, and hence urges us to revisit our digital keywords vocabulary. This global webinar series will bring together leading digital humanities scholars to reflect upon their original contributions to the Digital Keywords. Each webinar will focus on two digital phenomena and their corresponding keywords to explore how their meanings are changing in the face of disruptions caused by lockdowns or social distancing, and what new cultural practices, social challenges and political implications emerge around the new digital vocabulary.