BayCHI: Rael Dornfest & Jeffrey T. Schnapp

What is To Be Learned from "Crowds"
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, director Stanford Humanities Lab

"Crowds" synthesizes a wide ranging set of analyses of crowds "of most every variety: political crowds, sports crowds, captive crowds, masses, packs and mobs, etc". The book represents the main output of one of the Stanford Humanities Lab’s prototype “Big Humanities” projects and is supported by an extensive website (http://crowds.stanford.edu) which includes virtual galleries, video capture of the November 2005 Crowds seminar, and a database of early social science readings on modern crowds.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp has been the director of the Stanford Humanities Lab (http://shl.stanford.edu) since its foundation in 2000. He occupies the Pierotti Chair in Italian Studies at Stanford University where he is professor of French & Italian, Comparative Literature, and German Studies. He has played a pioneering role in several areas of transdisciplinary research and led the development of a new wave of digital humanities work. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing such domains as the material history of literature, the history of design and architecture, and the cultural history of engineering. He is the author or editor of eighteen books and over one hundred essays on authors such as Virgil, Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, Petrarch, and Machiavelli, and on topics such as late antique patchwork poetry, futurist and dadaist visual poetics, the cultural history of coffee consumption, glass architecture, and the iconography of the pipe in modern art.

What It Takes to Build a Left-Justified, Text-Only, Asynchronous Application
Rael Dornfest, founder and CEO, values of n

Why does email continues to thrive despite "email overload" and the occasional need to declare "email bankruptcy." Why hasn’t it gone away? What does it want from us? Where is it going (aside from my inbox)? What is its ongoing role in a Web 2.0 world? Email is a thin wrapper of technology around the innately understandable medium of the written word. It provides context and conversation—both explicit and implicit—like nothing else. It is inherently social and collaborative—for lack of a better term, it might even be called a "social network." Rael will go into the lessons we’ve learned from email, what it still has to teach us about simplicity, virality, frequency, distribution, and timeliness, and how much more it still has to contribute to the conversation. He'll survey the landscape of historical, current, and future killer email apps with an eye to building left-justified, text-only applications that allow email to do more, not just suck less.

Bio: Rael Dornfest is Founder and CEO of Values of n, a Portland, Oregon company that is passionate about product, cautiously optimistic about software, and fascinated by the clever ways in which people have adapted technology to fit their needs. You'll find this reflected in Values of n's products: Stikkit: Little yellow notes that think, and I want Sandy — Your personal email assistant. Prior to founding Values of n, he was O'Reilly's Chief Technical Officer, program chair for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which he continues to chair), series editor of the bestselling Hacks book series, instigator of O'Reilly's Rough Cuts early access program. He built Meerkat, the first web-based feed aggregator, was champion and co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, and has written and contributed to six O'Reilly books. When not programming, Rael can be found writing all-but-illegibly on whiteboards, sketching on reams of butcher-paper, or expounding on the virtues of same.