Kevin Hamilton

Ground Works is an award-winning peer-review platform for arts-integrative research that I co-founded and continue to advise. Many years of iterative consultation produced a design that is as distinctive for its review processes as for its affordances of media and argumentation. We reflected some on this process here.

As new Editor in Chief for the Leonardo Series at MIT Press, I support the production of books designed in form and argument to support new transdisciplinary approaches to the arts, sciences, and technology.

As Editor in Chief of Media-N, I brought the journal from a WordPress and bespoke typeset print object to implementation on the Open Journal Systems platform, increasing the citability and exposure for contributors.

As an early adopter of the multimodal publishing platform Scalar and Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication for the Humanities Research Institute, I helped guide my institution into implenting Scalar into efforts such as SourceLab and the Publishing without Walls project.

With scholar and professor Lou Turner I helped design and create a new online textbook for an interdisciplinary course on the arts and aesthetics of Africa and her diasporas. The course explicitly drew on expertise from every discipline in my broad home college through interviews with faculty for which I led production and editing. The textbook serves both a general education course at the University of Illinois and instruction at area public schools – the latter achieved through service workshops with instructors and online access granted to high school students.

• Feature story on FAA201 Black Arts Today
• Mini-documentaries on FAA faculty

The rising prevalence of practice-based methods in humanities scholarship has put me in mentoring roles to both faculty and student scholars seeking to incorporate digital media, performance, and more into their work. I supported faculty in this regard as a mentor in the Training in Digital Methods for Humanists program; for students I helped found and lead the four-year Learning to See Systems initiative, which established new introductory methods courses for students across the university. I also serve as an advisor to the PhD in Creativity Program at Rowan University.

• Learning to See Systems
• Training in Digital Methods for Humanists

Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, I spent part of my earliest years as a professor co-designing and co-teaching interdisciplinary courses that produced new critical frameworks and techniques to facilitate more reflective collaboration across the arts and engineering. These resulted in workshops, courses, and teaching tools that brought me more deeply into the world of design and design pedagogy from my home base in place-based aesthetics.

• Adamczyk, Piotr, and K. Hamilton, S. Levin, L. Long, "Mobile Mapping for Everyday Spaces,” in Imaginary Syllabi, ed. Jane Sprague (Berkeley: Palm Press, 2011): pp. 139-148.
• "StoryCubes in action: workshop on Critique, Collaboration, Prototyping," diffusion.org.uk
• "Tools in Support of Creative Collaboration," ACM SIGCHI Workshop, 2007

The co-design of symposia, event series, other gatherings has played a key part in my learning how to host disparate voices in productive conversation, putting the academy to new uses. Some examples include:

• At Risk U : the Past, Present, and Future of Academic Freedom (Mellon Sawyer Seminar, 2026)
• Publishing Art Online: An Editor’s-Eye View (online panel, 2021)
• FAA Away (Podcast interview series, 2020)
• Illinois 150: The 21st Century Research University & the Public Good (symposium, 2019)
• A2RU Conference Plenary Panel: Arts, Critical Media, and Interdisciplinary Scholarship (2019)
• Writing Another Future: Science Fiction, the Arts and Humanities (two-day symposium, 2013)
• Walking as Knowing as Making (with Nicholas Brown, 2005)

From 2013-2019 a group of faculty convened at the Coordinated Science Lab to found and operate the Center for People and Infrastructures. Together we published some of the earliest scholarship on bias in algorithmic systems. Some of our group even won a lawsuit against the United States to ensure that other researchers could conduct important audit work that would have been illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

• Sandvig, Christian, and K. Hamilton, K. Karahalios, C. Langbort, “When the Algorithm Itself is a Racist: Diagnosing Ethical Harm in the Basic Components of Software,” International Journal of Communication, vol. 10 (2016): pp. 4972-4990.
• Hamilton, Kevin, "Beyond the Reveal," essay series for Hedgehog Review, 2015.
• Eslami, Motahhare, and A. Rickman, K. Vaccaro, A. Aleyasen, A. Vuong, K. Karahalios, K. Hamilton, C. Sandvig, “’I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]’: Reasoning about invisible algorithms in the news feed,” in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2015): pp.153-162.
• Sandvig, Christian, and K. Hamilton, K. Karahalios, C. Langbort, “An Algorithm Audit,” in Data and Discrimination: Collected Essays, eds. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Virginia Eubanks and Solon Barocas (Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation, 2014): pp.6-10.
• Hamilton, Kevin, and K. Karahalios, C. Sandvig, C. Langbort, “The Image of the Algorithmic City: a Research Approach,” Interaction Design and Architectures, no. 20 (Spring 2014): 61-71.

Over the years at University of Illinois I've regularly sought opportunities to commission or exhibit new temporary or permanent artworks from artists outside the academic art world. Current works-in-progress include a documented performance from Roberto Carlos Lange (aka Helado Negro) and an interview-based sound work from Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us). Previous efforts have included (with Nicholas Brown) a performance and exhibition from Hamish Fulton in 2005, and site-specific works from Jill Magid, Jane Benson, Mark Bain, Jennifer Danos, James Buckhouse, M. Simon Levin, and Laurie Long during the mid-2000s for a then-new computer science facility.