Digital Archives – Theoreti.ca

The Next Generation Frontiers Symposium

The Next Generation Frontiers Symposium is in full swing in Banff! From sustainability to culture, yesterday’s sessions showcased the breadth of ideas shaping the future of AI. In a panel moderated by Hsiao-Ting Tseng, researchers Anfanny Chen, Shih-Fang Chen and Hsien-Tien Lin shared how AI can drive sustainable practices — from smarter agriculture and resource management to greener supply chains and reduced carbon emissions. Later, Annie En-Shuin Lee, Dane Malenfant, Chi-Jui Hu, and Yun-Pu Tu led a fascinating discussion, moderated by Geoffrey Rockwell, on Indigenous AI and Culture, exploring the relationship between AI, cultural diversity and Indigenous knowledge. The day highlighted how meaningful interdisciplinary exchange can spark fresh perspectives and lead to new frontiers in research. (From here)

I’ve just come back from the Next Generation Frontiers Symposium which was organized by CIFAR, Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council, (NSTC), and the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET). This brought researchers from Taiwan and Canada to talk about Responsible AI, Sovereign AI, AI and Sustainability, and Indigenous AI and Culture. I moderated the Indigenous AI and Culture theme which looked at how AI might impact indigenous communities in both Taiwan and Canada. Some of the reflections include:

Indigenous community are often poorly represented in LLMs. We need ways for communities to be able to personalize models for their community with knowledge from their community.
The mass scraping of the Internet with little regard for ownership or consent of content creators is more of the extractive and colonizing behaviour that leads many indigenous communities to distrust settler nations.
There are knowledge practices and types of knowledge like gendered knowledge, age-specific knowledge, and location-based knowledge that simply cannot be datafied and modelled if they are to maintain their character.
Datafication and modelling work with measurable evidence. Anything that can’t be captured, sampled, and measured can’t then be datafied and thus can’t be modelled. Further, there is the danger that such evidence and knowledge will be deligitimized as unmeasurable and eventually excluded and fiction or mysticism. We could end up believing that only what we could datafy and model is knowledge.
Western espistemological practices of openness, science and replicable results should not be imposed on communities with different epistemological practices. AI is the product of Western epistemology and thus may never be compatible with indigenous wisdom.
We need to respect the desire of some communities to be forgotten and thus not scraped at all for measurable knowledge. Some may choose opacity.
Knowledge and its materials taken from communities should be returned. Communities should be supported to develop their own ways of preserving their knowledge including ways of datafying and modelling their knowledge, if they so wish.

Margaret Tu, one of the participants in the session, wrote a moving essay about the need for cultural safety for indigenous communities in the face of disaster in Taiwan. See Taiwan’s Barrier Lake Disaster Intersects With Its Troubled Indigenous Policy. It ends with this wisdom,

Disasters demand speed, but recovery demands reflection. For the Fata’an, healing will not come from relocation alone; it must be rooted in both land and culture.

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database

The starting point for information about the AI Incident Database

Maria introduced me to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database. It contains summaries and links regarding different types of incidents related to AI. Good place to get a sense of the hazards.

The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems. Like similar databases in aviation and computer security, the AI Incident Database aims to learn from experience so we can prevent or mitigate bad outcomes.

Media Monitoring of the Past · impresso

Leveraging an unprecedented corpus of newspaper and radio archives, **Impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past** is an interdisciplinary research project that uses machine learning to pursue a paradigm shift in the processing, semantic enrichment, representation, exploration, and study of historical media across modalities, time, languages, and national borders.

I just learned about the Swiss project Impresso: Media Monitoring of the Past. This project has an impressive Web application that lets you search across 76 newspapers in two languages from two countries.

Key to the larger project is using machine learning to handle multiple modalities like:

News text and radio broadcasts
Text and Images
French and German
Different countries

A Data Lab that uses IPython is coming soon. They also have documentation about a Topic Modelling tool, but I couldn’t find the actual tool.

Anyway, this strikes me as an example of an advanced multi-modal news research environment.

Replaying Japan 2023

Replaying Japan 2023 – The 11th International Japan Game Studies Conference – Conference Theme – Local Communities, Digital Communities and Video Games in Japan

I’m back in Canada after Replaying Japan 2023 in Nagoya Japan. I kept conference notes here for those interested. The book of abstracts is here and the programme is here. Next year will be in August at the University of Buffalo and the Strong Museum in Rochester. Some points of interest:

Nökkvi Jarl Bjarnason gave a talk on the emergence of national and regional game studies. What does it mean to study game culture in a country or region? How is locality appealed to in game media or games or other aspects of game culture?
Felania Liu presented on game preservation in China and the challenges her team faces including issues around the legitimacy of game studies.
Hirokazu Hamamura gave the final keynote on the evolution of game media starting with magazines and then shifting to the web.
I presented a paper co-written with Miki Okabe and Keiji Amano. We started with the demographic challenges faced by Japan as its population shrinks. We then looked at what Japanese Game Companies are doing to attract and support women and families. There is a work ethics that puts men and women in a bind where they are expected to work such long hours that there really isn’t any time left for “work-life balance.”

The conference was held in person at Nagoya Zokei University and brilliantly organized by Keiji Amano and Jean-Marc Pelletier. We limited online interventions to short lightning talks so there was good attendance.

Signing of MOU

See https://twitter.com/PTJCUA1/status/1630853467605721089

Yesterday I was part of a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Agreement between Ritsumeikan University and the University of Alberta. I and the President of the University of Alberta (Bill Flanagan) signed on behalf of U of A. The MOU described our desire to build on our collaborations around Replaying Japan. We hope to build collaborations around artificial intelligence, games, learning, and digital humanities. KIAS and the AI4Society signature area have been supporting this research collaboration.

Today (March 2nd, 2023) we are having a short conference at Ritsumeikan that included a panel about our collaboration, at which I talked, and a showcase of research in game studies at Ritsumeikan.

Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States

The LARB has a nice essay by Dan Sinykin on how researchers have used data to track how poetry prizes are distributed unequally titled, Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States. The essay talks about the creation of the Post45 Data Collective which provides peer review for post-1945 cultural datasets.

Sinykin talks about this as an “act as groundbreaking as the research itself” which seems a bit of an exaggeration. It is important that data is being reviewed and published, but it has been happening for a while in other fields. Nonetheless, this is a welcome initiative, especially if it gets attention like the LARB article. In 2013 the Tri-Council (of research agencies in Canada) called for a culture of research data stewardship. In 2015 I worked with Sonja Sapach and Catherine Middleton on a report on a Data Management Plan Recommendation for Social Science and Humanities Funding Agencies. This looks more at the front end of requiring plans from people submitting grant proposals that are asking for funding for data-driven projects, but this was so that data could be made available for future research.

Sinykin’s essay looks at the poetry publishing culture in the US and how white it is. He shows how data can be used to study inequalities. We also need to ask about the privilege of English poetry and that of culture from the Global North. Not to mention research and research infrastructure.

The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – The New York Times

For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.

The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.

The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.

The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.

The Lost Digital Poems (and Erotica) of William H. Dickey

In 1987, William H. Dickey, a San Francisco poet who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award to launch his career and published nearly a dozen well-received books and chapbooks since, was …

Matthew Kirschenbaum has written a great essay on recovering early digital poetry, The Lost Digital Poems (and Erotica) of William H. Dickey ‹ Literary Hub. Dickey wrote some HyperPoems on HyperCard and so now they are hard to access. Kirschenbaum rescued them and worked with people to add them to the Internet Archive that has a HyperCard emulator. Here is what Kirschenbaum says,

Dickey’s HyperPoems are artifacts of another time—made new and fresh again with current technology. Anyone with a web browser can read and explore them in their original format with no special software or setup. (They are organized into Volume 1 and Volume 2 at the Internet Archive, in keeping with their original organizational scheme; Volume 2 contains the erotica—NSFW!) But they are also a reminder that writers have treasures tucked away in digital shoeboxes and drawers. Floppy disks, or for that matter USB sticks and Google Docs, now keep the secrets of the creative process.

This essay comes from his work for his new book Bistreams which documents this and other recovery projects. I’ve just ordered a copy.

SimRefinery and Maxis Business Simulations

SimRefinery was the first simulation developed by a Maxis spin-off company called Maxis Business Simulations (MBS). The simulation was for Chevron and was developed using the development tools Maxis had developed for their games like SimCity. Phil Salvador tells a wonderful story about MBS and SimRefinery in a thoroughly research essay When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery. Take some time out and read it.

Part of what is interesting in the essay is how Salvador documents the different views about what such simulations were good for. SimRefinery was not a accurate simulation that would cover the complexity of the chemical engineering of a refinery; so what was it good for. Chevron apparently wanted something to help the staff who weren’t engineers to understand some of the connectiveness of a refinery – how problems in one area could impact others. Will Wright, the genius behind Maxis, didn’t think serious simulations were possible or something they wanted to do. He saw SimCity as a caricature that was fun. At best it might give people a “mental model” of the issues around city management. It was for that reason that MBS was a spin-off designed to contract with businesses that felt serious simulations were feasible and useful.

I learned about the Salvador article from a Ars Technica story about SimRefinery and how A lost Maxis “Sim” game has been discovered by an Ars reader [Updated]. The story talks about how someone found and uploaded to the Internet Archive a prototype of SimRefinery only to later take in back down so it is no longer available. In the meantime Phil Salvador recorded a Twitch stream of checking out the game so you can get a sense of how it worked.