Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, professor of screen studies and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, was the invited keynote speaker for the 5th Annual Digital Witness Symposium held jointly at Hamilton College and Syracuse University.

Her lecture was entitled "Towards a Theory and Praxis of Open Space New Media," which explored a range of participatory new media projects that deal with trauma and conflict in non-confrontational ways through collaboration, participatory interfaces, and distributed archiving. She lectured at Hamilton College on October 1, and Syracuse University on October 2.

This research is excerpted from her forthcoming book coauthored with Dale Hudson, Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 

The Digital Witness Symposium examines how digital code and computation are reengineering both the ways in which independent media are made, and especially how contemporary human rights and social justice media are thinking through digital media.

The symposium is sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Syracuse University Humanities Center, the S.I.Newhouse School of Public Communication (all at Syracuse University) and the Digital Humanities Institute at Hamilton College.