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Kensington Market: Hidden Histories in Science Rendezvous 2018

This Saturday May 12, 2018, I will be showcasing Kensington Market: Hidden Histories in The SciArt Gallery, a feature exhibition in Sidney Smith Hall, UToronto, St. George St. entrance.

Looking forward to sharing our fantastic S.T.E.A.M. project, augmented reality app and interactive maps, with student scientists, future students and the curious. Stop by if you’re in the area! 11 am to 4 pm.

You can download the app on iTunes and Google Play. And because we are SO CLOSE to Kensington Market, you could walk to the Market to experience on the AR app on site.

The AR app & maps were created for CDN355 Digital Tools, Canadian Studies Program, University College, University of Toronto and information on the course is here.

Description of Science Rendezvous’ 2018 theme from the website:

“For 2018, the unifying theme of SR is “Full S.T.E.A.M. Ahead!” and emphasis will be put on the Art that appears in all disciplines of S.T.E.M. From the vibrant shapes and colours of diverse living organisms, to the graceful designs of aerodynamic vehicles, and the stars and planets that paint our night sky, 2018 will see the inauguration of the SciArt Gallery. The SciArt Gallery will host artists from the Toronto area whom have been inspired by S.T.E.M. to create different forms of art. Here, artists will be encouraged to engage attendants in discussion about their work and what aspect(s) of science inspired them to start creating.”

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Prufrock Descending: An Experiment in Collaborative Reading

Prufrock Descending documents an investigation of mood shifts in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.” This interactive website is the result of a collaborative investigation in reading moods undertaken as a class project (150 students!) in ENG 287 The Digital Text (University of Toronto). We engaged in passionate debates re. tagging moods via phrases, lines, and stanzas, and wrestled with the subjective nature of literary analysis (training & expertise be damned!). The interactive poem offers three version reflecting more expansive and more fine-grained readings as there was no way to arrive a definitive single reading.

From the site:

From Conrad Aiken’s early 1916 review, Eliot’s dramatic monologue has had almost a century of being read as a psychological character study exploring the fluent mutability of an anxious, indecisive self-consciousness. Key to this interpretative approach is the dynamic interplay and range of emotions that Prufrock voices and which are readily discernible to both the scholarly and common reader (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s term). Undertaken as a collaborative TEI encoding project by the students in The Digital Text, a second year English course (University of Toronto, Fall 2014), our initial question approaching this text was whether we could map the moods articulated in the poem as we as readers perceived them? What would the aggregate of our collective readings look like? Would we see a marked convergence of opinion in our close readings? Or would we see striking divergences? What we discovered was both. Remarkably, as we dove deeper into our project, what was increasingly foregrounded was the ambiguity of reading and the instability of literary analysis as a methodological process. To paraphrase one student’s response, ‘the whole poem could be defined as expressing a single mood and then the TEI process challenges the reader to parse the nuances.’ The collaborative class process of deciding on a list of mood terms became an investigation of the rationales for individual close readings and a realization that there is no way to determine or argue for a definitive reading of mood and meaning in Eliot’s poem.

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Prufrock Descending: A Collaborative Class Experiment in Reading

Prufrock Descending documents an investigation of mood shifts in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.” This interactive website is the result of a collaborative investigation in reading moods undertaken as a class project (150 students!) in ENG 287 The Digital Text (University of Toronto). We engaged in passionate debates re. tagging moods via phrases, lines, and stanzas, and wrestled with the subjective nature of literary analysis (training & expertise be damned!). The interactive poem offers three version reflecting more expansive and more fine-grained readings as there was no way to arrive a definitive single reading.

From the site:

From Conrad Aiken’s early 1916 review, Eliot’s dramatic monologue has had almost a century of being read as a psychological character study exploring the fluent mutability of an anxious, indecisive self-consciousness. Key to this interpretative approach is the dynamic interplay and range of emotions that Prufrock voices and which are readily discernible to both the scholarly and common reader (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s term). Undertaken as a collaborative TEI encoding project by the students in The Digital Text, a second year English course (University of Toronto, Fall 2014), our initial question approaching this text was whether we could map the moods articulated in the poem as we as readers perceived them? What would the aggregate of our collective readings look like? Would we see a marked convergence of opinion in our close readings? Or would we see striking divergences? What we discovered was both. Remarkably, as we dove deeper into our project, what was increasingly foregrounded was the ambiguity of reading and the instability of literary analysis as a methodological process. To paraphrase one student’s response, ‘the whole poem could be defined as expressing a single mood and then the TEI process challenges the reader to parse the nuances.’ The collaborative class process of deciding on a list of mood terms became an investigation of the rationales for individual close readings and a realization that there is no way to determine or argue for a definitive reading of mood and meaning in Eliot’s poem.