First international HASTAC conference set for April

Published: March 5, 2007

The Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “haystack”) will hold its first international conference April 19 – 21, at Duke University and the Marriott Civic Center in Durham, NC. It is sponsored by RENCI, Duke University and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Registration is now open and space is limited. For a registration form, hotel information and a full conference agenda, see www.hastac.org.


The conference, titled Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface, will be an unprecedented three-day forum of ideas, demos, exhibits, art and conversation, driven by digital visionaries and practitioners from across domains and disciplines. Topics will include race in cyberspace, theorizing interface, genealogies of old and new media, funding the digital future, games and narratives, and the future of the Internet and Web 3.0. The conference also will feature performances in virtual Reality, and in Second Life.
Keynote addresses will be given by:

  • John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Title: The Social Life of Learning in the Net Age.
  • James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds professor of law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. Title: CreativeCommons, ScienceCommons, and Open Source.
  • John Unsworth, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Title: The Foundations and Futures of Digital Humanities.
  • Rebecca Allen, professor of New Media, UCLA. Title: Intimate Interface: The Interface Between Art and Technology.
  • Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, MacArthur Foundation Project on Digital Media and Learning. Title:The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

HASTAC is a worldwide consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers from universities and other civic institutions committed to new forms of collaboration fostered by creative uses of technology. Since 2003 HASTAC members have worked to develop tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects.