Digital Technology and Culture

A blog for students and friends of Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture Program

Jobs

Here are four (4) positions you may be interested in:

1. Web Designer/Developer
- Are you looking for your next new challenge? This is it! If you have a few years of experience and want to take your next step – here it is…
- This position will be $19-$22/hr DOE.
- To learn more or apply today go to www.CampusPoint.com or email Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.

This is your opportunity to work for a global software leader enabling our customers to effectively develop, deploy, and manage complex applications and business processes.

Job Duties:
Collaborate with the marketing team members on new features and design requirements. Develop and implement solutions to streamline content delivery on the corporate website. Manage requirements, usability, and overall user experience, including design, look and feel, and workflow.

Responsibilities:
• Graphics Production for online properties
• Template Design
• Flash Production & Development
• Front end development (JavaScripting, CSS, XML, xHTML)

Required Skills:
• Ability to learn and utilize new technologies. Able to administer and debug systems, and to configure, code and script as required.
• Highly motivated and independent, well organized and detail oriented, strong problem solving skills
• Strong listening, written, verbal and telephone communication skills.
• Experience in requirements definition and management
• Experience working with double byte characters,
• Technologies: Photoshop; Flash; ActionScript; Dreamweaver; Visual Studio; xHTML; JavaScript; CSS; XML ; content management tools

Design Skills:
Understanding of good composition design (layout design); web template management - master templates, content templates; web site design patterns; web usability; web production

The ideal candidate will have 3-5 years of professional experience but depending on combination of education, skills and experience there is room for flexibility.

Compensation: $19-$22/hr DOE

Learn more and apply via www.CampusPoint.com or email your resume to Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.


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2. Search Engine Optimization Specialist
- Amazing opportunity within a growing firm that is one of the best places to work in Portland!
- This position will be paying $32-$35K/yr.
- To learn more or apply today go to www.CampusPoint.com or email Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.


A rapidly-growing Portland Search Engine Marketing firm is looking for an individual to perform search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for commercial Web sites and media agencies.

Job Functions:
• Learn and implement search optimization strategies and techniques
• Perform campaign analysis and management functions
• Implement HTML and site content enhancements into Web pages
• Organize and manage large volumes of data
• Fulfill client requests and respond to inquiries
• Work closely with both Client Acquisition and Search Strategies personnel
• Thrive in a dynamic, challenging work environment

Job Qualifications:
• Search Engine Optimization skills
• Basic understanding of SEO keyword research and analysis
• Experience with Website reporting and analytics tools
• Paid Search campaign management knowledge (a plus)
• Proficiency in HTML and CSS (not a Web design/development position)
• Excellent organizational and analytical skills
• Willingness to aggressively take on new responsibilities
• Complete proficiency of Microsoft Office suite
• Integrity, independence, and a desire to apply your skills

Compensation: $32-$35K/yr

Learn more and apply via www.CampusPoint.com or email your resume to Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.


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3. Help Desk Specialist
- Great opportunity to join a very fun IT team and work for one of the best firms in town!
- This position will be DOE.
- To learn more or apply today go to www.CampusPoint.com or email Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.


Want to join a team that has a 100-year tradition of excellence as a leading U.S. law firm?

Responsibilities:
This position has the responsibility within the MIS department to answer firm-wide support calls and resolve user problems or questions in a professional manner.

Qualifications:
Expert knowledge of firm software including:
• Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
• Interaction, Interwoven FileSite, Nuance PDF Professional
• DeltaView, SharePoint, Netsupport
• Audix Voicemail, Carpe Diem.

Previous law firm experience required. Selected applicants will be skill tested.

This is a great opportunity with an amazing company with some great benefits and tons of potential growth potential!

This is not a position that will be open long – so if you’re interested – APPLY TODAY!!

Located in the heart of beautiful downtown Portland this is an opportunity that does not come open often!

Compensation: DOE

Learn more and apply via www.CampusPoint.com or email your resume to Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.

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4. Marketing Coordinator/Web Designer
• This is a once in a lifetime opportunity with an amazing company for the right person!
• This position will be start out paying $15-$18/hr DOE
• To learn more or apply today go to HUwww.CampusPoint.comUH or email Hirav at HUhirav@campuspoint.comUH.

Responsibilities would include:
 Develop and update current and future websites for our company and our customers
 Promote publications and websites to relevant audiences
 Troubleshoot and implement new marketing and promotional ideas for our company and our customers
 Update company’s customized Access database structure
 Layout and design publications for print or web
 Develop multi-user pdf forms
 Knowledge and ability to expand our services into the mobile-phone market

Abilities:
 Comfortably and confidently uses a computer (PC) with following software: Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat; Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook.
 Strong written and verbal communication skills
 Ability to prioritize and multi-task, with ability to follow instructions and take directions.
 Willingness and aptitude to use own discretion in finding solutions to problems. Take on additional responsibilities when both big and small tasks need to be done.
 Ability to constructively critique the work of others and to take criticism of one’s own work. Work with the team to produce the best product to fit each customer’s needs.
 Working knowledge of print publishing. Tasks include working with customer to gather materials, layout, proofing of others’ work, making revisions, preparing final files and reviewing press proofs.
 Working knowledge of tools for web and interactive design. Ability to create for web and develop new solutions for our customers.
 Must have mental processes for reasoning, remembering and language ability (reading, writing, and speaking the English language) to perform the duties proficiently.

Compensation: $15-$18/hr DOE

Learn more and apply via www.campuspoint.com or email your resume to Hirav at hirav@campuspoint.com.

posted by: grigar at 02:47 | link | comments |

DTC News!

The DTC Program offers Open Lab Hours in VMMC on MW 9-10:30 and 12-1:15 to all DTC students and students taking DTC courses, as a way to provide access to the Mac computers and design software. Dr. John Barber makes himself available during the lab hours and offers assistance to those who need it.

Fine Art Fridays return on February 6 with a workshop on “Easy Drawing Techniques,” at 12-2, taught by Erin Dengerink Madarang. The workshop takes place in VMMC 107. You can register by going to: http://radicalcupcake.com/fineartsfriday/workshops.php

The Yellow Cat Gallery & Media Lounge is soliciting student work for its next show. Interested students should submit new videos, animations, elit webtexts, or other digital media art. Contact Dr. Dene Grigar, at grigar@vancouver.wsu.edu, for submission requirements. Visit the gallery to see the current show at http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/gallery/index.html

posted by: grigar at 17:32 | link | comments |

Fine Arts Fridays Are Back!

The Fine Arts Program is happy to bring back their popular Fine Arts Fridays series of free workshops open to current faculty, staff, and students.

Erin Dengerink Madarang and Jeannette Altman are back and ready to show you how easy and rewarding making art can be! They have added some new workshops and brought back some favorites from last semester, as well as varied the times to allow as many people as possible to join us.

Online registration is now available. Simply click the “Fine Arts Fridays” link on the Fine Arts web page (below) and when you find a class that strikes your fancy, click the “Register” button below it.

View this semester's offerings and register! They are looking forward to your participation!

http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/finearts/
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Jeannette Altman
Classroom & Instruction Technician II, Fine Arts
Washington State University Vancouver
.(P). 360.546.9491 .(F). 360.546.9074

posted by: grigar at 14:37 | link | comments |

Digital Media Primer and the DTC Program

Here is a brief explanation of the various areas of study relating to digital media. Academic departments and programs have been built up around all but Medium Studies, which seems to remain an approach rather than a field. Wikipedia has a definition for most of these and examples of programs from around the world, but here are my own definitions I have created for my own use:

1. Media Studies: Critique and study of media (both analog and digital); theory-based program.

2. Medium Studies: Focus on why and how medium (orality, inscription, print, digital) affects the message; theory-based.

3. Digital Humanities: Production and examination of texts, with a focus on digitalization of analog objects for the purpose of preservation and dissemination; theory and practice.

4. Media Arts/Digital Media/New Media: Production and examination of objects produced by and for computer technologies, such as video, animation, website, digital installation or performance, etc., theory and practice.

Other names and foci exist (i.e. Human Computer Interface, Multimedia Design) but the four mentioned above constitute the major categories under which many programs or scholarship fit.

As you can see, the DTC Program is based on the last of these. From what I learned from since my arrival at WSUV in the fall 2006, creating a Media Arts/Digital Media/New Media Program was the original intent when they envisioned and/or continued to build out the DTC Program. Essentially John and I have made sure that the DTC Program remains current with the field and address the needs of the community. To do so, we needed to add more opportunities in the area of production. Production, however, was already suggested, by the way, in such courses as DTC 355 Multimedia Authoring, DTC 477 Advanced Multimedia Authoring, and DTC 335 Digital Animation and Storytelling.

For the record, digital media are essentially objects produced or distributed by information technologies. There are currently 13 forms/genres of digital media. Ten of these were first identified by Lev Manovitch in his seminal text, The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), but three others have been added to his list since the publication of his book:

Websites
Virtual Worlds
Virtual Reality
Multimedia
Computer Games
Interactive Installations
Computer Animation
Digital Video
Digital Cinema
Human-Computer Interface
Digital Music/Sound (includes podcasts)
Internet Radio
Digital Photography

Because there are many different types of digital media, John and I have worked very hard to find ways to include them in our courses or to provide courses that address them. This is why the DTC 338 Special Topics course is so vital to the Program. It allows us the ability to teach courses that address cutting edge ideas but also cover these genres without having to offer an individual course for each. The DTC 338 Community Media we are offering this spring is a case in point since it will include both a video and internet radio component. Working with FA also fills in the gaps nicely in that the FA Program offers FA 434 Time Based Media and FA 435 Interactive Media. The former makes it possible to teach digital music; the latter, interactive installations.

Additionally, a theoretical approach to thinking about digital media has emerged over the years, some of which was borrowed from mass media/communications studies. They are:

1. A computer is not a tool or prosthesis that helps us to accomplish something; rather, it is what we do. (Oliver Grau, New Media Art History, 2007 )

2. The medium affects the message. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967)

3. Text is any form of information by which we communicate an idea, feeling, or concept. (Mats Dahlstrom, “When Is a Text Text?,” 2002 )

4. Digital media are material texts. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

5. Criticism of digital media should be specific to digital media and relies on the sensory modalities of the body for that critique rather than abstract ideas or theories. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

6. The artifact of new media is just as important as the process it took to produce it. (Jan Van Looy & Jan Baetens, Close Reading New Media, 2003)

7. New media involves an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary study of art, science, and technology (Edward Shanken, Telematic Embrace, 2003 ) & the Humanities.

To these seven I add this 8th one:

8. Designers of new media "seek to edify more than persuade, to exchange ideas rather than foist them on us" (Robert Jacobson, Information Design, 2000).

I should also mention that the research methodology used by new media scholars is Action Research, which involves Research into/about Design, Research for Design, and Research through Design. According to Stefano Vannotti, it:

“[S]upports” the idea “that practice and research could establish an effective liaison under specific circumstances”

“[P]oints out that as opposed to other research activities the intentional interference of the investigator is central to practical research”

Allows for one to “generate communicable knowledge through practitioner action.” (in Interface Cultures, 55)


Just to put these concepts into perspective, seeing the computer as the thing we do rather than something external to our “real” work” distinguishes digital media scholarship from other Humanities scholarship. Moreover, that we see the end product––the animation, the video, etc.––as important as the process it took to produce it, we are different from those in Rhet/Comp who argue that the process of writing is preeminent over the actual essay that is eventually produced. Finally, although many digital media scholars looking for a theoretical base turned to print based theorists like Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc., a movement has been afoot to develop theories unrelated to print based texts. Hayles’ Media Specific Analysis is one such digital media specific theory to have emerged in the last five years.

In terms of organizations, conferences, and scholarship, when the DTC Program was created in 1997, digital media did not exist as its own field but found expression in conjunction with many other programs like computer science, music, architecture, dance, theatre, visual art, social sciences, and the humanities. The only digital media conference that addressed a full complement of digital media was the Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) conference that came about a year later in 1998. Other conferences existed before DAC, but these generated out of Europe, had a specific purpose, and did not address academic scholarship. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, for example, was founded in the Netherlands in 1990 and was aimed primarily at computer-based visual art; SIGGRAPH, founded in 1975, was essentially a computer graphics and interactive art conference for the film industry. Computers and Writing and the 7Cs of the 4Cs arm of the National Council of Teachers of English focused narrowly on the relationship between writing/rhetoric/composition and computers. But it was Manovich’s book as well as publications by Kate Hayles (2002), Roy Ascott (1980s-present), Jay David Bolter (1990, 2000), Janet Murray (1997), and others that built the field as it has come to us today. New media morphed into digital media through a series of rigorous debates among its theorists and practitioners, and 13 genres, instead of Manovich’s 10, were identified as those relating to the field. Many more will no doubt arise in the next decades, so fluid is the field and its forms. Despite this fluidity and hybridity, what can be seen as the establishment of a fully conceptualized articulation of digital media for academic contexts was expressed with the 2004 publication of the International Digital Media and Arts Association’s National Directory of Digital Media Program in the US.

So since the inception of the DTC Program, a whole field has developed and is firmly established at predominately top, cutting edge research institutions like Brown, Duke, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. As the iDMAa reported at its annual meeting last week, the field has grown from 500+ programs in 2004 to 800+ in 2008. The DTC Program in Vancouver was one of the pioneering universities in the field––a position we should be very proud of.

As John and I tried to make clear, a robust digital media program is not narrowly defined by a focus solely on criticism but rather seeks to include critical assessment as part of its combination of theory and practice at the intersection of technology, arts, sciences, and the humanities. Taking such an approach means that we will continue to provide the foundational education, the in-depth critical understanding, and the hands on practice needed by WSUV’s students in order to be successful citizens, creators, and users of digital media, technology, and culture.

posted by: grigar at 00:05 | link | comments |

Art Fair

posted by: grigar at 05:23 | link | comments |