Digital Storytelling: Celebrating the Uniqueness of Northern British Columbia is a partnership project between the University of Northern British Columbia’s Faculty of Computer Science, School District 91 and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
July – August, 2017 | Prince George, BC
Youth aged 15-19 learn narrative programming and visual modelling through the collaborative creation of an animated digital story. Emily Carr Faculty member Valerie Walker will lead an intensive workshop on design and the conceptualization of digital narrative. Participants in this unique program receive Computer Science credits from UNBC and course credits from SD 91.
Valérie Walker is an alchemyst of code, transmedia artist, educator, curator, Indigo Griot and radiowave creatrix & transmitter. She holds 5th level Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) & Chado (tea-ceremony) degrees with Urasenke-Kyoto. She enjoys exploring Stereoscopie, Virtual Spaces, Solar powered Circuits, Memory, environmentally beneficial studio processes, craft-based techniques, software-design, programming, sensoriality & magical story-telling. Walker has 17+ years of independent radio created on the XX Files Radio show online at Matricules, Canada’s only open-source, feminist digital media arts portal. Walker recently joined Emily Carr as Sessional Faculty from Montréal, where she taught TechnoCulture, Arts & Gaming (TAG) and computation arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Involved with Studio XX for 17 years, she started a number of alternative, feminist LGBTQ+ hacker spaces in MTL, which, like Studio XX, are thriving.
Alex Aravind is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), Canada. He holds two masters degrees one in Mathematics (The American College, Madurai) and the other in Computer Science (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpure), and a PhD in computer Science (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore). After his PhD, he briefly worked as a Scientific Officer in the Super-computer Education and Research Centre (SERC), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Then he moved to Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada as a post doctoral fellow in 1997. Alex joined UNBC in 1999. He has received several awards including Robert Tait Annual Lecture Award (2017), Mentorship Excellence Award (2015), Research Excellence Award (2015), Teaching Excellence Award (2012), Outstanding Leadership Award (2012). His areas of research interest include operating systems, concurrent and distributed systems programming, algorithm development, wireless networks, modeling and simulation, and computing education.
This project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), School District 91, and University of Northern British Columbia.
