No expenses, just scholarly success. -- Semi-final call for abstracts: Facing the Future, Facing the Screen

Your gain: without paying fees or spending money on travelling, you will be able to publish, in both an online and a printed volume, surrounded by the company of exquisite scientists/scholars, a brief paper you can then assuredly put on your official publications list. Your immensely greater gain is that you will be forced to write a really good paper, getting ready for it by necessarily reading important literature you have to date not been acquainted with, and of course reflecting deeply on problems you have perhaps hitherto not been aware of.

The Facing the Future, Facing the Screen physical--online blended conference (10th Budapest Visual Learning Conference, Nov. 17, 2022, 13:00--18:00 CET) is planned as an interdisciplinary encounter of communication and media theory, picture theory, psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, history, political science, and other specialties. We absolutely expect new scholarly results, aiming at an essential scientific step forward. The central question: what image of the future can we conceive of in a world based ever more strongly and diversely on digital devices and online communication, what new patterns of life and in particular forms of education should we strive to create, what possible distortions in our way of life should we be prepared for? If on the one hand we assume that primordial thinking emerged not as a verbal but as a pictorial one, as well as of course do recognize the scientific value of today’s image creation and image reproduction techniques, and in particular of visual simulation bringing together vast amounts of data in an easily understandable animation; but on the other hand clearly perceive the often destructive effects of phoney images disseminated via social media: in what direction should we then search, under such contradictory conditions, for the right pattern of a pictorial education for the future?

Facing the Future, Facing the Screen -- suggested topics:

– Facing the Past

■ How the Cave-Man Saw Language

■ Plato’s Cave: Literacy and the Human Mind

– Reading from Paper, Reading from Screen

– Postmodernism Made Easy

■ Post-typography

■ Letters and Fonts in Digital Environments

– Human–Computer Misinteraction

■ The Sherry Turkle Miracle

• A New Gender Future? Screening Black Matter

■ Asocial Media?

– Artificial Intelligence -- bien fait or counterfeit?

■ Motor Understanding

– Scientific/Scholarly Research in the Online World

■ Working with Big Data

■ Mathematics Tactile, Mathematics Visual

■ Engineering and the Mind’s Eye

– Online Publishing

■ predatory publishers

■ author/publisher imbalance

■ how to cite?

■ dilemmas of peer-reviewing

■ paradoxes of open access

■ copyright in an online world

■ books vs. extracts, long vs. short compositions, texts vs. videos

– New Localism

- Being Home at Home

- Brick-and-Mortar Universities? Mass Universities?

Virtual Universities?

- Don’t Travel – Communicate!

- Publishing in small languages

The conference will be held physically at the wonderful venerable main building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as made available via Zoom and streamed live. The event will be opened by the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, world-renowned neurobiologist Tamás Freund. At the conference we aim to host some 50 to 100 papers. Obviously such a number of talks cannot be fitted into the given time frame of a few hours. The solution we propose is the same one we applied at the 9th Budapest Visual Learning Conference, please look at http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/ VLC9/graph_1.pdf. The papers -- very short papers: 5000 characters main text plus footnotes, images and image captions, as well as a 5-minutes video -- will be made available online prior to the event. Please do not feel the limited length to be a yoke, experience it, rather, as a liberation. Being brief is the new normal. The conference itself will then serve mainly as a forum to discuss all accessible papers by all participants. Also, there will be a number of actually held 15-minutes plenary talks. Invited speakers:

Réka Benczes (Corvinus University of Budapest)

James E. Katz (Boston University)

Jean-Rémi Lapaire (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)

Kieron O’Hara (University of Southampton)

Irma Puškarević (Wichita State University)

Seamus Ross (University of Toronto)

Barry Smith (University at Buffalo)

Stephen Turner (University of South Florida)

Alfredo Vernazzani (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Subsequent to the event, within months, we plan to publish edited collections of a selection of the talks in journals, as well as the entire lot of the talks in a bulky volume, with colour images, both online and printed.

Dear All! Are you interested in participating (online or physically – fate might decide…)? Do you have suggestions as to further topics/subtopics? Feel free to informally write to me (Kristóf Nyíri, nyirik@gmail.com). Or indeed submit an abstract to the combined three addresses:

<petra.aczel@uni-corvinus.hu>,

<benedek.a@eik.bme.hu>,

<nyirik@gmail.com>,

<eszter.deli@uni-corvinus.hu>.

The abstract should not be longer than 2000 characters, with a bio (affiliation, main research interests) of max. 500 characters added. In the abstract please do not use the (author, year) reference style, nor do have a list of references at the end. Just apply, if you need to, informal references, like e.g. “as Seymour Papert wrote in his Mindstorms”, or e.g. “the theory put forward by Kosslyn et al. in 2001”. We look forward to your messages & submissions. The final aim, remember, is for us to produce a truly important and widely disseminated volume in the classical humanities tradition but adapted to the new online environment.

The conference is organized by the Committee for Communication and Media Theory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and by Corvinus University of Budapest. Scientific Committee: Prof. Dr. Petra Aczél, Corvinus University of Budapest, Prof. Dr. András Benedek, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Prof. Dr. Kristóf Nyíri, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Organizing Committee: Eszter Deli (coordinator) <eszter.deli@uni-corvinus.hu>, Judit Sebestény <judit.sebes@uni-corvinus.hu>, Evelin Horváth <evelin.horvath2@stud.uni-corvinus.hu>, Márton Rétvári <martongergely.retvari@uni-corvinus.hu>, Lilla Szabó <lilla.szabo@uni-corvinus.hu>.

Following upon the present semi-final call for abstracts, in the course of the following months many circulars and personal messages will be sent out, but please note that the best way to inform yourself about how our preparations proceed is to look at the http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/FFF/ FFF.pdf page.