Project Description
The Digital Lyceum is a suite of tools specifically designed for the choreography of audience attention.  It is an open source, scalable platform built to enable audiences to harness their collective distraction towards or in relation to a lecture, performance or event. In simple terms, the Digital Lyceum is an aggregator of digital backchannels - including chatrooms, web links, virtual environments, photo archives, etc. that can be easily implemented and easily recorded. 

By encouraging and enabling an audience’s use of backchannels, the controlled economy of attention that disciplines focus towards the center of any room can give way to a complex economy where individual thoughts and actions of audience members are integrated into an event’s overall meaning.  The Digital Lyceum not only enables the easy use of these channels; through its unique ability to timecode an entire event (aligning video with posted links, comments, pics, etc.), it acts as an archive for this new economy, promising to make events and their annotations as searchable as articles and books.

Choreography of Attention

The Digital Lyceum

Floating Points 6, 2009

Credits
The Digital Lyceum is a funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has received additional support from Emerson College.

Co-Principal Investigators: Eric Gordon, Ph.d. (Assistant Professor of New Media, Emerson College), John (Craig) Freeman (Associate Professor of New Media, Emerson College)

Software Developers: Cyle Gage (Visual and Media Arts student, Emerson College), John Richardson (Visual and Media Arts student, Emerson College)

Research Assistant: Aubree Lawrence (Visual and Media Arts graduate student, Emerson College)