Creative Residency Call for Proposals

iPearl Immersion Theater
Ask Us Video Wall
Hunt Library Visualization Wall
Hunt Video Walls

 

Visualizing Digital Scholarship in Libraries and Learning Spaces

Creative Residency Call for Proposals

Overview

Application Deadline: 8:00am EST, August 20th, 2018

Duration: 4-6 weeks

Start date: Flexible, Spring semester, 2019

Stipend: $25,000

The NCSU Libraries invites proposals from artists, scholars, and creative technologists for a four-to-six-week residency to create immersive scholarly visual content for one or more of the large-scale digital walls in the award-winning James B. Hunt Jr. Library at NC State University in Raleigh. The residency is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Visualizing Digital Scholarship in Libraries and Learning Spaces grant (“Immersive Scholar”), and is part of the NCSU Code+Art program.

Residents are encouraged to interrogate the intersections of data, knowledge, and culture through visual expression. This residency offers an opportunity for the selected project to influence the way that people look at the university’s role in supporting data visualization and digital art, similar to the manner that the Hunt Library has started to change the way that people think about academic libraries in the 21st century.

Libraries have long been places where people have explored new ways of interacting with information and data. The NCSU Libraries’ Code+Art program continues this tradition by bringing an aesthetic eye to the increasing role of data in our lives by combining creative and computational thinking in a library’s physical spaces. Code+Art provides the lens that focuses this residency program.

 

Program Details

The resident will produce a large-scale work of digital art or visualization. Creations could include generative art or dynamic, data-driven visualizations of high aesthetic quality. The data underlying the piece may or may not be literally interpretable, depending on the resident’s scholarly approach.

To generate broader impact and a larger audience, the work will:

  • Be open source

  • Follow principles of responsive design

  • Follow principles of universal design

  • Be documented using principles of literate computing

  • Be broadly distributed to other libraries and learning spaces with similar visualization facilities

Additionally, the work should be scholarly output that is citable and impactful. NCSU Libraries staff and collaborators will explore with the resident innovative approaches to peer review, sharing, and credit for the work created during the residency.

The work will be displayed on one or more of the Hunt Library’s large video walls:

Please see our Video Wall Guide for technical specifications of the walls. Additionally, the resident will have access to the Libraries’ full suite of spaces for creation and making.

The resident must have sufficient knowledge required to produce the work described in their application for this residency. Experience in open web technologies is strongly preferred, but other technologies could be considered if the requirements for open source and broad distribution can be met.

To further support the resident, the library will hire a student worker to assist the resident with content production. The resident can specify the student’s title and skill set. If additional technology skills are needed beyond what the student employee can provide, the residency stipend may be used to hire technical help.

The residency includes a stipend of $25,000 that can be used to cover housing, travel, and other expenses incurred by the project.

Women and historically underrepresented communities are especially encouraged to apply.

 

Support and Community Engagement

The resident will work closely with NCSU Libraries staff, who will facilitate engagement with the NC State community and the broader scholarly community. Libraries staff have expertise in visualization, making, data management, and other areas of research support, and will be available to the resident for consultation.

The resident will be expected to engage with the NC State community through a talk and/or workshop, to be determined and facilitated with Libraries staff.

NC State University is a pre-eminent research enterprise that excels in science, technology, engineering, math, design, the humanities and social sciences, textiles, and veterinary medicine. Collaborations with NC State researchers and students will grow from the vision and needs of the resident, and can be facilitated by Libraries staff, who maintain deep relationships with the campus community.

This residency is funded as part of a larger, “Immersive Scholar” grant. Immersive Scholar is a three-year effort funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop extensible models and programs for the creation and sharing of digital scholarship in large-scale and immersive visualization environments. The resident, therefore, will be part of a larger, national network of participating institutions and advisors. Work completed under this residency must be designed to be open source and will be shared to the grant’s participating cohort for display at their respective institutions.

 

Eligibility Requirements

  • Must be eligible to work in the U.S.

  • Must not be a currently enrolled student

  • Must not be a UNC system employee

 

Application

  • Statement of interest (500 words or less)

  • Narrative and visual sketches of proposed work (500 words or less)

  • Campus engagement plan outlining how the resident proposes to collaborate with faculty and students

  • Description of spaces, technologies, and support needed for project (500 words or less)

  • Resume/CV

  • Online portfolio of past relevant works

  • 1 letter of reference

 

Selection and Notification Process

Proposals will be selected by the Immersive Scholar personnel based on the following criteria:

  • Creativity of proposal

  • Whether the proposal is extensible, desirable, and feasible for distribution to multiple visualization installations

  • Proficiency in web or creative coding technologies

  • Good collaboration skills

  • Value of proposed outcomes to digital scholarship

  • How successfully the proposal advances a design philosophy that ensures accessibility of the finished work

  • How successfully the proposal incorporates the goals of diversity and inclusion
     

Applicants may be contacted for an interview or a presentation of previous work.

 

Questions

Please see http://immersivescholar.org for more information about the grant and send inquiries to immersivescholar@ncsu.edu.

Submit applications through this Google Form. All applications must be submitted by 8:00am EST, August 20th.


Frequently Asked Questions

Can NC State employees apply?

No. These residencies are designed for visiting scholars, artists, or technologists. 

Are there any guidelines on the data to be used or are there NC State-related data you would like to see incorporated into the piece?

There are no restrictions on the data sources, although it is our strong preference that the data be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). We will be distributing the project to other environments, so a piece that only resonated with NC State audiences wouldn't be as successful as one that was appealing across a spectrum of libraries and learning spaces.

That said, we would like the selected resident to be able to engage with our students and faculty during their stay, so to give you an idea of the character of our campus, you could take a look at this page: https://www.ncsu.edu/about/

Certainly, if there are any researchers at NC State who have data that is of interest to you, it would strengthen a proposal to include collaboration with that researcher.

Can students apply?

Students that are currently enrolled at any institution are not eligible.

Can I use library data in my proposal, like circulation records or resource logs?

Probably not. State law prohibits any kind of disclosure of personally identifiable library data. We also want the projects to be interesting outside of NC State. Just because the residency is in a library doesn't mean the project has to be about what libraries do or have.

What is the difference between the Statement of Interest and the Narrative of Proposed Work?

The Statement of Interest should address how the Immersive Scholar program's goals fit into your own thematic and/or biographical narrative as an artist/scholar/professional. It is an opportunity to tell us anything about yourself that may be relevant to your application but is not otherwise addressed in the application materials. The Narrative of Proposed work is a summary of your proposed project.