Events

New Media Lab general meeting

Join us Wednesday, February 21 from 12:30 until 2:00 in the lab (room 7388.01) for presentations by Christina Katopodis and Natalie O’Shea on their projects:
The Walden Soundscape
Christina Katopodis, English

The Walden Soundscape project is my effort to share the sounds at Walden Pond in Concord, MA with any interested reader of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in the form of an immersive website experience. I’m recording sounds at the pond in all four seasons, and creating companion stop-motion animation videos of a walk around the pond in each season. This project calls attention to the musicality of Thoreau’s philosophy and writing, and serves to immerse readers of Walden in the visual and sonic landscape of the pond. The project is part of my dissertation on the impact of sound and sonic vibrations on the American Transcendentalists, who were interested in maintaining harmony with nature (in a musical sense of active, reciprocal participation) and who understood music to be an experience not limited to the hearing world.
Modeling the paleodistribution of baboons and vervets: A primate model for early modern human biogeography
Natalie O’Shea, Anthropology

Early modern human demography and biogeography are related to a wide range of important issues in modern human origins research, from the earliest appearance of markers of symbolic culture in the archaeological record to the global dispersal of Homo sapiens by at least 60 thousand years ago. However, our ability to discern ancient patterns of population structure from the fossil record and patterns of variation in extant populations is limited. Patterns of genetic and morphological variation in other widely-distributed, ecologically-flexible primates can provide useful insights into past human demographic and biogeographic changes. Baboons (genus Papio) and vervets (genus Chlorocebus) are broadly co-distributed with each other and human populations in woodland and savannah habitats across sub-Saharan Africa, making them good ecological model taxa for early modern human populations. This study will utilize recently developed species distribution modeling techniques to map the current and past distributions of baboons and vervets to identify regions in which populations of the earliest members of our species may have persisted through difficult climate conditions in Africa over the past 130 thousand years. Overall, the results of this work will provide a model for early modern human demography and biogeography and also expand our understanding of African faunal evolution more broadly.

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