From the Wall Street Journal online I learned about a restaurant in Soho, London called, inamo. The restaurant has projectors over the tables so the table top is an interactive screen. You can project menu choices onto your plate, change the mood, play games, and even order a taxi. I wonder if we are going to see a lot more table-top displays? Will advertising pay for interactive tables all over? What could we do with a seminar room?
The Google Book Search Settlement, if approved by Judge Chin, may be a turning point in textual research. In principle, if the settlement goes through, then Google will release the full 7-10 million books for research (“non-consumptive”) use. Should get even the 500,000 public domain books for research we will have a historic corpus far larger than anything else. To quote the Greg Crane D-Lib article, “What can you do with a million books?” and “What effect will millions of books have on the textual disciplines?”
There is understandably a lot of concerns about the settlement especially about the ownership of orphan works. The American Library Association has a web site on the settlement, as do others. I think we need to also start talking about how to develop a research infrastructure to allow the millions of books to be used effectively. What would it look like? What could we do? Some ideas:
Update: Matt pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal on Tech’s Bigs Put Google’s Books Deal In Crosshairs.
Garry pointed me to Percussa AudioCubes. These cubes communicate by infrared to communicate distance information that you can use as input.
Location, orientation and distance information is passed to the software, while you interact with the cubes. The software can connect via MIDI or OpenSoundControl (OSC) to any software or hardware for music or visuals which you already have, or you can use it within your DAW (digital audio workstation) software as a VST plugin, or as a host for VST instruments to let you create sound immediately. (From How do they work?)
Stéfan pointed me to a neat site that has an animated visualization of the History of the Australian Web. The visualization show the rise of sites lik ebay, facebook and google.
I like the use of tabs to control what the dimensions show. The tab is right where the axis is.
Dear Readers,
My apologies, but in upgrading this site I have lost the blog posts since May. I am trying to recover them.
Yours,
Geoffrey Rockwell
Now this is something I want to build – a Open-Source, Multitouch Display, but with a fine wood cabinet.
I came across an interesting article in D-Lib that summarizes some of the work at Xerox PARC, Research in Support of Digital Libraries at Xerox PARC Part II: Technology. This is, as the title suggests, is the second part of an extended survey. The article covers some projects on subjects like “visualization of large text collections, summarization, and automatic detection of thematic structure.” There are some interesting examples of citation browsing tools like the Butterfly Citation Browser here.
On Humanist there was an announcement that John Dawson, the Manager of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre of Cambridge (LLCC), was retiring and they were having a 45th year celebration conference and retirement party. What the announcement doesn’t say is that with the retirement of Dawson the Cambridge Computing Service is decommissioning the LLCC. I found this on a Computing Service page dedicated to the LLCC:
John Dawson, Manager of the centre will be retiring in October 2009. The LLCC will then cease to exist as a distinct unit, but Rosemary Rodd, current Deputy Manager, will continue to provide support for Humanities computing as a member of the Computing Service’s Technical User Services. She will be based on the New Museums Site.
It seems symptomatic of some shift.
The online journal Human IT has an issue on gaming with an interesting article about mobile gaming (or augmented reality gaming) for education. See Elisabet M. Nilsson & Gunilla Svingby: Gaming as Actions: Students Playing a Mobile Educational Computer Game. The article has a clear and short summary of the literature around serious games and education that points out that there isn’t yet much evidence for the theoretical claims.
The overall conclusion seems to be that even if several studies show effects on learning as well as on attitudes, empirical evidence is still lacking in support of the assumption that computer games are advantageous for use in educational settings. (p. 28-9)
The article touches on the problem we all have when we ask students to role play (whether as part of a game or simulation), which is how seriously they take it.
Some of the groups had a clear ironic touch on almost all of their utterances, at the same time as they were taking on the assignment with a serious attitude. When playing the game, they seemed to constantly oscillate back and forth between the imagined game world and their own reality. They played their alloted fictive role, and at the same time referred to their own personal experiences. (p. 43)
I’m convinced this irony has to do with how comfortable students feel playing roles before others. What does it mean in the web of class relationships to ask a student to act before others? Should they have a choice? Obviously they handle the uncomfort with irony as a way of preserving their identity in the class. That they can do both (play a fictive role and their ironic self) at the same time is impressive. On page 53 the authors suggest that a context where students can alternate (motivations) could make for an “engaging learning experience.”
Augmented reality is almost real according to a BBC story by Michael Fitzpatrick, Mobile phones get cyborg vision. Developers like Layar have made it possible to get realtime information about your surroundings overlayed over what your camera sees.
Launched this June in Amsterdam, residents and visitors can now see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs on offer in the area, and a list of local doctors and ATMs by scanning the landscape with the software.
The social media implications are tremendous – imagine having a myPlace site where I can add meaning to locations that others can view. Historical tours, ghost stories, contextual music, political rants and so on could be added to real locations.
Thanks to Sean for this.