I have been collaborating with science fiction writer, singer, librettist and Renaissance scholar Ada Palmer and science historian and piracy expert Adrian Johns to put on a seminar series at the University of Chicago called Censorship & Information Control In Information Revolutions: every Friday, we gather a panel of interdisciplinary scholars to talk about parallels between censorship regimes during the Renaissance and the dawn of the printing press and the censorship systems that have arisen since in response to other new forms of information technology.
Though the series was fully funded through scholarly grants, we have been running a Kickstarter to fund some additional activities, including professional videographers to create an open-access video record of the series, subtitlers to make the videos accessible for people with hearing problems, a printed catalog for the accompanying exhibition and so on.
We're about to close out the Kickstarter, having funded nearly all of our stretch goals: we're just a few hundred dollars short of the funds needed to hire a sound-editor to create a professionally mastered podcast series. Any funds we raise after that will go to producing instructional materials and outreach to others so they can use the (all open-access) produced by the series.
If you'd like a preview of the podcast, there's raw audio of the first two sessions: Session 1; Session 2.
I'll be videoconferencing in to this Friday's session (it's 1:30 to 4:20 PM CST, on October 26, November 2, 9, 16, and 30, on the University of Chicago Campus, in Kent Chemical Laboratory, 1020-24 East 58th Street, 60637, room 107) and I'll be back in Chicago in person for the Nov 16 session. It's open to the public and you're more than welcome to attend!
Censorship & Information Control In Information Revolutions [Kickstarter]
