Espen Aarseth: (What) Can the Humanities Contribute to Game Research?

Espen Aarseth gave the closing plenary at the Gothenberg ALLC/ACH 2004. His talk was a masterful tour through the field of computer games research leading to thoughts on what the humanities have to offer. Espen reminded us that he used to go to the ACH/ALLC but didn’t find it appropriate to his interests.
What follows are some notes from his talk.
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Newsmap: Google News Visualizer

Newsmap is an effective visualizer of Google News stories that creates treemaps based on the volume of stories for each topic. The interface allows you to compare different national news sets and to show/hide different types of news (world, nation, business…). What’s more, it actually works visually and for looking at the information.
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Child Porn and the Internet

The issue of how we can block porn on the Internet, especially child porn, is heating up here in Canada as the programmer, Briere, who kidnapped and killed a 12 year old girl, Holly, confessed that, "I don’t know how it is for other people, but for myself, I would say that, yes, viewing the material does motivate you to do other things … the more I saw it, the more I longed for it in my heart.". (See CJAD 800 : News.) Conservative leader Steven Harper has now made it an election issue accusing Martin of being soft on child porn.
Like the question of whether violent games encourage violent action, we are seeing a debate about the relationship between pornography and abuse. See, for example, Rosie Dimanno’s response in the Toronto Star, TheStar.com – The abomination of Briere’s excuses.
The difficulty is in how to respond, and respond we must if there is evidence that child porn encourages violence against children. If one legislates representations then there is the risk that artistic representations with nude children will be deemed pornography. The alternative is to legislate intent, but how do you tell intent? Can one look at systems of production and distribution to distinguish art from porn? Is it any less porn if displayed in an art gallery?
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LMNL and exploratory markup

XML for Overlapping Structures (XfOS) using a non XML Data Model by Alexander Czmiel was an interesting paper at the 2004 ALLC/ACH on implementing systems with overlapping hierarchies.
While overlapping hierarchies would seem to be an obscure or advanced issue in markup, I think it is important to opening up markup practices to match existing intellectual practices, especially exploratory practices.
LMNL (Layered Markup anNotation Language) is what Alexander ended up using and his paper provided me an introduction to this fascinating language developed by Wendell Piez. LMNL looks like it could be used for exploratory markup and then built up into sophisticated interpretations of text.
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ALLC/ACH 2004, Nerbonne Plenary

The last day of the ALLC_ACH-2004 in Gothenberg and there is too much to blog.
The Opening Plenary was by John Nerbonne on “The Data Deluge: Developments and Delights”. He argued that “The challenge of Humanities Computing is to futher Humanities scholarship by confronting lots of data scientifically.” He gave examples of questions in linguistics (dialectology) that his team had been able to “answer” through computing methods and large data sets.
I wonder if that approach from questions will work in other fields in the humanities.

An advantage of the focus on large data sets is the renewed engagement it enables with traditional humanities questions. We are even *now* answering older questions with new methods.
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StreetPrint at COCH-COSH

Two weekends ago I went to Winipeg for the COCH-COSH 2004 conference. One of the most interesting presentations was delivered by an ex-student of mine, Erika Smith and it was about some of the projects of Streetprint.org. The leads of the project, Gary Kelly and Patricia Demers asked Erika and others to create a presentation where they didn’t speak – it played.
This created a strange situation where we were watching a sophisticated PowerPoint (actually KeyNote) presentation with two people at the front staring at their screen and making sure the audio was right. As Ray Siemens pointed out, it was a bit disconcerting at first, but well enough done to work.
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Light Messaging

From the Silicon Valley Biz Ink and the Globe and Mail comes a story about the new Nokia 3220 Camera Phone: Light Fever, a phone that has LEDs that you can use to write on the air by waving the phone back and forth. You can also tilt the phone to get a joystick effect for certain games.
Is Light Messaging a gimmick or could it become a way of displaying information without large screens? Could this technique be used for other situations?