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The book’s eight patterns are especially appropriate for those just beginning to explore digital scholarly methods, and one goal of Critical Making in the Age of AI is to provide structure for work that is both meaningful and achievable with limited resources and time. By centering critical making through a design-justice and feminist lens, the coauthors model how inclusive and expansive approaches to making in research and teaching are vital to shaping the humanities of the future.

A collection of essays engaging with digital scholarship and new technologies.

Contributors to this volume engage with digital scholarship in several ways: by creating digital projects, often in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments; by applying digital methodologies and tools to explore research questions; and by speculating about the potential directions that digital scholarship can take to tackle existing research areas that could benefit from new perspectives. Together, the chapters demonstrate how various digital approaches—from network analysis to web mapping, VR and AR technologies, digital editions, databases, and archives—are all contributing in creative and effective ways to expand our knowledge of the past, to help ask and answer questions at a scale that was unimaginable before the digital turn, and to reshape early modern studies in the twenty-first century. 

Tracing the Origins of Digital Poetry Before the Web Revolution

For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.

Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication.

In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.

 

For anyone interested in visual communication, a training guide for evaluating and developing visual representations for the big ideas in science and technology, essential skills for journal submissions, grant applications, and public understanding.
 
As a scientist, engineer, or other researcher, you may have written an abstract. In a paragraph, you explain the purpose of your research, your approach, the questions you have asked and answered, and your work’s impact. The abstract is a summary and an invitation—to read the paper, attend your talk, and join you in your thinking. You may even have been asked to create a visual abstract—a single image—to achieve the same goals. As a designer or public information officer, you may have had a similar brief—to explain a compelling subject with a visual for a journal cover or press release. And yet, this important skill—devising visual metaphors—isn’t typically taught. With her decades of experience creating compelling images and instructing MIT researchers, award-winning photographer and science communicator Felice C. Frankel helps readers evaluate and create their own visual abstractions.
 
Like in her other books in the Visual Elements series, on photography and design, Frankel asks readers to evaluate different choices—for example, in conveying the uncertainty of a hurricane’s path or the organization of the Standard Model for elementary particles. But in Abstraction, she offers more. With examples from science, engineering, and beyond, the book helps readers consider and evaluate the visuals around them and determine how they work and when they fail: Is this representation the best for communication? Will these abstractions encourage others to engage with my work? Will they mislead? Will they help my ideas evolve? Frankel invites researchers to think about the many meanings behind their images—and, in turn, to think more deeply about their research.

Wendell Castle (1932–2018), master furniture maker, designer, sculptor, and educator, was in the sixth decade of his extraordinary creativity when an emblematic exhibition of his signature works was mounted by the Museum of Art and Design in 2016. It blended the artist's seminal works with his latest collection, produced with digital technology. In part a self-reflection, this eponymous, full-color companion book examines some of Castle's historically representative works as well as significant contemporary furniture pieces, continuing his highly respected and acclaimed sculptural/functional dialogue. Castle, ever the innovator, was remarkable for his openness to new technologies; he not only embraced an initially complex practice but has "remastered" it. His vast oeuvre represents a prodigious lifework that began in 1958 and aligns with the development of the American art furniture movement.

The solo exhibition was a somewhat self-reflective examination of his early ground-breaking works that tested the boundaries of traditional furniture making by presenting his later innovations using new digital technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling, and computer-controlled milling—a digital "remastering" of his immense oeuvre. Unique perspectives on the master's work are presented by informative essays by authors well-versed on Castle's celebrated career.